De Sanctis, Luigi

DE SANCTIS, LUIGI. - Apostate, b. in Rome on 31 Dec. 1808 and d. in Florence on 31 Dec. 1869. Having entered, while still young, the 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, as 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.

Having returned there after a journey in Tuscany, he founded another Protestant periodical, Il cattolico cristiano, and in 1849 took a wife. In 1850 he was in Geneva, having been called there by the Protestants, and two years later in Turin, at the invitation of the Waldensians. He soon broke with these, and in 1854 together with B. Mazzarella he founded the Independent Church or Evangelical Christian Church, obtaining for it the following year recognition at the Congress of the Evangelical Alliance assembled in Paris. But opposed by the Darbists or Plymouth Brethren, led by Count Piero Guicciardini and Teodoro Pietricola Rosetti, to whom many of his followers, among them Mazzarella himself, showed themselves inclined, De Sanctis abandoned his Church and in 1854 retired to Florence, drawing near again to the Waldensians, by whom he was chosen as professor of theology. About thirty pamphlets remain from De Sanctis, which contributed not a little to fomenting the anti-Catholic spirit in Italy during the second half of the last century.

Camillo Crivelli