CARACCIOLO, ANTONIO. - Theatine historian, brother of St. Francis Caracciolo, of the princes of the Villa (of St. Mary) in the Abruzzo, died at almost eighty years of age in the house of the SS. Apostoli in Naples on 19 March 1642. In this same house he was admitted into the Order of the Theatines by St. Andrew Avellino; and he professed in 1586. Distinguished for erudition and holiness of life, he held the offices of definitor general and consultor of the Sacred Congregations of Rites and of the Index.
He enjoys fame as the proto-historian of the Theatines, and his Vita Cajetani Thiennei (in Acta SS. Augusti, II, Paris 1867, pp. 282-324) was published together with the Collectanea historica de vita Pauli IV and those of the other two co-founders Bonifacio de' Colli and Paolo Consiglieri (Cologne 1612). The great life of Paul IV (Vita e gesti di Giovanni Pietro Carafa, cioè di Paolo IV P. M.) has instead remained unpublished, though it nevertheless enjoyed wide manuscript circulation (cf. Pastor, VI, p. 667 ff.).
Published posthumously were the De Sacris Ecclesiae Neapolitanae monumentis (Naples 1645), the Nomenclator, and the Propylaea in quatuor chronologos (Eremperto Longobardo, Lupo Protospata, Anonimo Cassinese, Falco Beneventano) in L. A. Muratori, RIS, V, Milan 1724, p. 1 ff. He also edited the edition of the Vita s. Antonini abbatis, patron of Sorrento, with scholii. He likewise published theological, liturgical and ascetical works, among which: In Constitutiones Clericorum Regularium notae (Rome 1610), which Cardinal P. de Bérulle had reprinted for the edification of the French clergy under the title Synopsis veterum religiosorum rituum atque legum, that is, of the ancient ecclesiastical discipline (Paris 1628).
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Igino Cecchetti