PAGANUZZI, GIOVANNI BATTISTA. - A lawyer of the Venetian bar, Roman count, president of the Opera dei Congressi, born in Venice of a noble family in 1841, died there on 23 June 1923.
From his youth he was active in the works of Catholic Action, and above all in the Italian Catholic Society for the Defense of the Liberty of the Church in Italy, which dates back to 1865.
In 1868 he was elected president of the Circle of Catholic Youth named after St. Francis de Sales. In agreement with other similar works, he was among the organizers of the first Catholic Congress, resolved upon in 1871 and convened in Venice from 12 to 16 June 1874, to commemorate the victory of Lepanto. As a lawyer he enjoyed wide and well-merited fame, especially after the strenuous defense of distinguished clients, and he acquired a notable reputation as a jurist with his memorandum on the Right of Appointment to the Patriarchal See of Venice. From the political point of view, P. was a disciplined soldier. He accepted the rule of abstention from political and parliamentary life, and championed with every effort intervention in administrative struggles in the communes and provinces, succeeding in being elected as early as 1881 to the municipal council of Venice and later forming part of the Catholic-moderate list of Count Grimani. But P.'s fame is linked principally to the Opera dei Congressi (v.) and Catholic committees, of which he was president from 22 Sept. 1889 to 1902, with exemplary industriousness and zeal. He adopted Luigi Windthorst's concept of general congresses: the great maneuvers of the army of Catholic Action, which serve to unite, order and orient. Taken by the excellence of the organization entrusted to him, P., a man of iron and totalitarian character, was almost always reluctant to admit innovations both of form and of substance, so that many initiatives, even opportune ones, sometimes did not find a benevolent reception from him. Add to this the mistaken tactics of some young men, eager for conquest, which increased his reluctance, and among these must be counted Fr. Romolo Murri (v.), who was systematically hostile to him. It was this hostility that forced him to give his definitive resignation as president of the Opera and to retire to private life, though he still gave his name to the Catholic organizational forms that came afterward, such as the Unione Popolare entrusted to Giuseppe Toniolo, and even to the Italian Popular Party, later founded by Fr. Luigi Sturzo, adhering moreover to a right-wing wing of the Party.