Gavazzi, Alessandro

GAVAZZI, ALESSANDRO. - Founder of the Free Christian Church in Italy (or Evangelical Church of Italy), now extinct, b. in Bologna on 22 March 1809, d. in Rome on 9 Jan. 1889. Having entered the Barnabites very young (1826), he left them in 1848, only to abandon the Church as well barely a year later, not so much as a result of a revision of his old beliefs (which, if anything, came only later), but rather because of the error common to many Italians of his time, namely that of mixing and confusing the values of the Christian spirit and of the Church's magisterium with personal passions and political preferences.

After teaching rhetoric in Naples, Arpino and Livorno, from 1833 he preached, gaining fame as an orator, in various cities, yet often stirring uneasiness and provoking reprimands for his intemperances as a "Savonarola of the piazza," as Carducci described him, with evident exaggeration (Opere, XVI, Bologna 1937, p. 179). Summoned from Sanseverino to Rome by Pius IX (1837), he was among the most ardent preachers of the "crusade" of the volunteers sent to the Veneto under the command of Ferrari, and he accompanied them as chaplain. From these years date his most enthusiastic poetic and oratorical effusions to the great Pontiff. But following the well-known events and the recall of the papal troops, G. set himself against the Pope and was in Rome in the defense of '49. Once the Republic fell, he went into exile in London (1849-59) where, rejected by the Italian Plymouth Brethren church headed by Camillo Mapei and encouraged instead, from his exile in Malta, by the former Roman parish priest Luigi Desanctis, he established a Protestant church of his own. He preached, besides in England, in Scotland and Ireland, in the United States and in Canada: but the bloody reactions to the violence of his anti-papal "lectures" led him back to London, whence, 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 of the Agro romano (1867). The Church that he failed to establish in Florence during the long years he dwelt there from 1860 was instead constituted in July 1870 in Milan, when 23 independent evangelical Churches united under the name of the Free Church of Italy, and G. was elected its president. With the capture of Rome the central seat was transferred there, in Via del Seminario, then to the Palazzo del Governo Vecchio and finally to premises purchased by his Church for worship and for the Theological College at the head of Ponte S. Angelo. Here G., tireless to the end in his anti-papal propaganda abroad and in Italy, but without succeeding in merging his free Church with the Waldensian Church, died suddenly. His bust is on the Janiculum, among the Garibaldians, and in the Protestant cemetery at Tessaccio, where he is buried.

G. Boffito (Scrittori barnabiti, II, Florence 1933, pp. 148-54; ibid. 1937, pp. 399-401) gives the list of G.'s writings up to the year of his departure from the Order (1848), for the most part oratorical and patriotic poetic compositions, but there are also two valuable ascetical opuscules: the Detti notabili del ven. Antonio M. Zaccaria [Parma 1843], and L'amico dei carcerati [ibid. 1844]). Among the works of the following period, very numerous both in Italian and in English, we recall: 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 (Florence 1868); Che sia il plimuttismo (ibid. 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.

Virginio M. Colciago