MORONI, GAETANO. — Scholar, born in Rome on 17 October 1802, died there on 3 November 1883.
A barber and subsequently chamber servant to Cardinal Mauro Cappellari, prefect of the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda, who entrusted him with transcribing the register of the Congregation’s archival documents. He served as conclavist in the Conclave of Pius VIII and then in that of 1831, from which Cappellari emerged as pope under the name of Gregory XVI. M. then became the Pope’s first chamber assistant, and was entrusted by him with many confidential assignments, giving rise to allegations of M.’s undue interference in Vatican politics, which, however, proved entirely unfounded. He retained his position under Pius IX as well, although without actually exercising II.
M.’s fame rests on the 103 volumes of the Dizionario di erudizione storico-ecclesiastica, published in Venice between 1840 and 1861 (text) and in 1878–79 (indexes), which he, as a self-taught scholar and polymath, compiled over a period of more than half a century, assembling in it a priceless wealth of information, much of which remains genuinely useful today, on the history of the Church, the liturgy, the ceremonies and traditions of the Curia, hagiography, the biographies of popes, cardinals, and bishops, sacred art, etc. An inexhaustible researcher of published and manuscript sources, M. condensed into his Dizionario thousands of works he had consulted and drew upon the information of scholars and specialists, thus making the work—despite its abundance of inaccuracies, repetitions, and superfluities—an excellent working tool. Having risen to fame, M. was admitted to numerous Italian and foreign academies and received several decorations, as he himself recalls with ingenuous satisfaction in the prolix autobiography found on pp. 446–78 of vol. IV of the Indici.
Renzo U. Montini