DE SANCTIS, LUIGI. – Apostate, born in Rome on 31 December 1808 and died in Florence on 31 December 1869. Having entered, while still young, the Congregation of Clerics Regular Ministers of the Sick, he became a priest (1831) and parish priest of the Maddalena in Rome. Doubts of faith, political disappointments and, it seems, relations with the former apostate Dominican Giacinto Achilli induced him to flee in 1847 to Malta, where he officially apostatized before the Anglican bishop of Gibraltar and collaborated with Achilli on the Protestant periodical L'indicatore.
After returning there from a journey in Tuscany, he founded another Protestant periodical, Il cattolico cristiano, and in 1849 married. In 1850 he was in Geneva, having been summoned there by the Protestants, and two years later in Turin, at the invitation of the Waldensians. He soon broke with them, and in 1854, together with B. Mazzarella, founded the Independent Church or Christian Evangelical Church, obtaining recognition for it the following year at the Congress of the Evangelical Alliance convened in Paris. But opposed by the Darbists or Plymouth Brethren, led by Count Piero Guicciardini and Teodoro Pietricola Rosetti, toward whom many of his followers, including Mazzarella himself, showed themselves favorably inclined, D. abandoned his Church and in 1854 withdrew to Florence, once again drawing closer to the Waldensians, who selected him as professor of theology. About thirty pamphlets by D. remain, contributing in no small measure to fomenting the anti-Catholic spirit in Italy during the second half of the last century.