GAVAZZI, ALESSANDRO. — Founder of the Free Christian Church in Italy (or Evangelical Church of Italy), now extinct; born in Bologna on 22 March 1809, died in Rome on 9 January 1889. He entered the Barnabites at a very young age (1826), left them in 1848, and just one year later abandoned the Church as well—not so much as a result of revising his former beliefs (which, if anything, he undertook only later), but rather because of the error common to many Italians of his time, namely, mixing and confusing the values of the Christian spirit and the teaching authority of the Church with personal political passions and preferences.
After teaching rhetoric in Naples, Arpino, and Livorno, from 1833 he preached in various cities and gained a reputation as an orator, though he often aroused concern and received reprimands for his excesses as a “Savonarola of the square,” as Carducci described him, with evident exaggeration (Opere, XVI, Bologna 1937, p. 179). Called from Sanseverino to Rome by Pius IX (1837), he was among the most ardent preachers of the “crusade” of volunteers sent to the Veneto under Ferrari’s command, and accompanied them as chaplain. His most enthusiastic poetic and oratorical effusions to the great Pontiff date from these years. But following the well-known events and the recall of the papal troops, G. turned against the Pope and was in Rome during the defence of 1849. After the fall of the Republic, he went into exile in London (1849–59), where, rejected by the Italian Plymouthist Church headed by Camillo Mapei and instead encouraged from his exile in Malta by the former Roman parish priest Luigi Desanctis, he founded his own Protestant church. He preached not only in England, but also in Scotland and Ireland, the United States, and Canada; however, the violent reactions to the vehemence of his anti-papal “lectures” brought him back to London, from where, in 1859, he was able to return to Italy and follow Garibaldi as a volunteer chaplain, the Crucifix on his red shirt, in the Expedition of the Thousand (1861) and in the Roman Campagna (1867). The church that he had been unable to establish in Florence during the long years he lived there from 1860 was instead founded in Milan in July 1870, when twenty-three independent evangelical churches united under the name Free Church of Italy, and G. was elected its president. With the capture of Rome, the central seat was transferred there, first to Via del Seminario, then to the Palazzo del Governo Vecchio, and finally to premises acquired by his church for worship and for the Theological College at the head of Ponte S. Angelo. There G., indefatigable to the end in his constant anti-papal propaganda abroad and in Italy, but without succeeding in merging his Free Church with the Waldensian Church, died suddenly. His bust stands on the Janiculum among the Garibaldians, and at the Protestant cemetery at the Testaccio, where he is buried.
G. Boffito (Scrittori barnabiti, II, Firenze 1933, pp. 148–54; there 1937, pp. 399–401) gives a list of G.’s writings up to the year of his departure from the Order (1848), consisting for the most part of patriotic oratorical and poetic compositions; there are also two valuable ascetical works: i Detti notabili del ven. Antonio M. Zaccaria [Parma 1843], and L'amico dei carcerati [there 1844]). Among the works of the subsequent period, very numerous in both Italian and English, we mention: My recollections of the last Popes (London 1858); Il Papato e l'Italia (1862); Della Chiesa in Italia senza sèite (1864); A scheme for Church and union in Italy (London 1865); La Bibbia regola di fede degli evangelici (1868); I Concili acumenici (1869); La favola di s. Pietro a Roma (Firenze 1868); Che sia il plimuttismo (there 1876); Maria al cuore dell'Italiano (1880). In them G. denies, among other things, the primacy of the Roman Pontiff, the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, and the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin.