SERRAO, GIOVANNI ANDREA. - Bishop of Potenza, a Calabrian born at Castelmonado (now Filadelfia, province of Catanzaro) in 1731, died at Potenza on 24 February 1799, known as the leading representative of southern Jansenism. Until 1759 he lived in Rome, where his teachers were Foggini and Bottari (v.).
The fruit of this education was the De vita et scriptis Jani Vincentii Gravinae commentarius (1758), in which S. found occasion to mock the casuists and to take his stand in favor of Augustinianism and against probabilism. During his Roman stay he came to know Scipione de' Ricci, Pietro Tamburini and all the Jansenists who frequented the Archetto, with whom he kept up a correspondence, especially with the bishop of Pistoia. In 1759 he returned to Naples and became professor and then secretary of the Neapolitan Academy. He wrote during that period: De Sacris Scripturis liber, qui est locorum moralium primus (Naples 1763), in which he maintains the necessity of spreading the Bible and the obligation of reading it in the vernacular for the use of all the faithful; De claris catechistis ad Ferdinandum IV regem libri III (ibid., 1769), his most celebrated work, in which he praises the catechisms of Fleury and Colbert, expatiating on the fortunes of that of Mesenguy and revealing contempt for scholastic theology and sympathy for the reformist ideas of the Jansenists; the Apologeticus (Naples 1771). Against the De claris catechistis, P. Mamachi set a work, Del diritto libero della Chiesa di acquistare e possedere beni temporali, in which he pointed out twelve points of divergence, and this in his capacity as Master of the Sacred Palace. S. replied with as many Riflessioni adduced to justify his orthodoxy. This polemic flared up on the occasion of S.'s designation to the episcopate of Potenza (1782) by the court of Naples. Mamachi added against him twenty-four further articles which renewed and confirmed, broadening them, the earlier denunciations. Pius VI himself intervened, first requiring particular interrogations of the candidate for the nomination, then deputing a congregation of cardinals to decide the dispute which, owing to the reluctance of the ministers of the king of Naples, threatened to take on a public character in favor of regalism. S. submitted to the judgment of the Holy See, following the equivocal norm of Jansenist submission, and was thus able to obtain the nomination and canonical investiture. Besides the pastoral letters to his diocese he wrote, five years after his entry, a volume in defense of regalist principles: La prammatica sanazione di s. Luigi re di Francia proposta ai riformatori dell'ecclesiastica disciplina (Naples 1788), and another addressed to his confreres in the episcopate to induce them to make themselves independent of Rome even in consecration: Ragionamenti dell'autorità degli arcivescovi del Regno di Napoli di conoscere i vescovi (Naples 1788). Consistent with his education and his moral principles, he despised the work of St. Alphonsus, although S. should be considered rather a liberal reformer and a regalist than a Jansenist: reviving the Quesnellian ideas of Jansenism and the polemic of the appellants, and defending the theories of Gallicanism, and not disdaining to pass afterward from regalism to Jacobinism. He died in 1799, murdered in his bed by assassins and torn through the streets of the city by a revolutionary mob, a victim of the reaction against that monarchy which he had endorsed in its juridical pretensions.
Bibliography5 works
Benvenuto Matteucci