CHARVAZ, ANDRÉ. - Bishop, b. 25 December 1793 at Hautecour in Savoy, d. at Mont-Saint-Michel, near Moûtiers, on 18 October 1870. Charles Albert wanted him as tutor to his sons Victor Emmanuel and Ferdinand; in 1833 he was elected bishop of Pinerolo.
A member of the king's privy council and, later, of the new council of State, at the beginning of the Piedmontese reform movement (1847), he always showed himself equal to the office he held. He fought the legislative provisions on the press, which among other things undermined, even in strictly religious matters, the power of the bishops, and, after a vigorous protest to the sovereign, he resigned and left for Rome, where the Pontiff raised him to the titular archiepiscopal see of Sebaste.
In this particular situation C. was repeatedly called upon to serve as a direct and secret channel between Pius IX and Victor Emmanuel II, as the subalpine government, with ever more pronounced unilateralism, proceeded to legislate in a laicistic and radical manner in a less and less anticlerical vein. Thus, in the autumn of 1849, in the aftermath of the insidious Siccardi mission; in the winter and spring of 1850 for the abolition of the ecclesiastical forum; in the autumn of 1852 for the law on civil marriage; and finally, between the autumn of 1854 and the spring of 1855, for the subversive law on the regular clergy. In these painful negotiations, only rarely and partially crowned by some ephemeral formal success, C. lavished treasures of tact and zeal for the good of the Church and of the State, never failing to tell the king and even more so his ministers, not excluding Cavour himself, frank and plain truths, which earned him from Pius IX appointment as consultor of the S. Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, and, against his will, by the joint will of the pontiff and the king, the archbishopric of Genoa (1853).
There he devoted particular care to the formation of the clergy, protected the religious congregations, assisted with inexhaustible charity every kind of misery, always tolerant in the face of the intemperance, the impatience, the prejudices of innovators and of stubborn and intransigent reactionaries.
Author of formative and pastoral works, such as the Recherches historiques sur la véritable origine des Vaudois (Turin 1838); the Guide du catéchumène Vaudois (5 vols., Paris-Turin 1842-50); the Discours prononcé aux funérailles solennelles de la reine de Sardaigne Marie Adélaïde (Turin 1855); the Considérations sur le protestantisme; the Plan d'études des Princes de Savoie-Carignan (posthumous, Paris 1876), he was deservedly a member of the Academy of Sciences of Turin, of the Academy of Savoy and of the Roman Academy of the Quirites, as well as of the R. Subalpine Deputation of National History, and of the Ligurian Societies of National History and of Economics of Chiavari.
Bibliography6 works
Paolo Dalla Torre