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 Bottari (v.).
The fruit of this education was the De vita et scriptis Jani Vincentii Gravinae commentarius (1758), in which S. found an opportunity to ironize about the casuists and to take sides in favor of Augustinianism and against probabilism. During his stay in Rome he met Scipione de' Ricci, Pietro Tamburini, and all the Jansenists who frequented the Archetto, with whom he remained in contact, especially with the bishop of Pistoia. In 1759 he returned to Naples and became professor and subsequently secretary of the Neapolitan Academy. During that period he wrote: De Sacris Scripturis liber, qui est locorum moralium primus (Naples 1763), in which he maintained the necessity of disseminating 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 praised the catechisms of Fleury and Colbert, devoting considerable attention to describing the vicissitudes of that of Mesenguy and revealing contempt for scholastic theology and sympathy for the reformist ideas of the Jansenists; and the Apolageticus (Naples 1771). To the De claris catechistis, P. Mamachi opposed a work, Del diritto libero della Chiesa di acquistare e possedere beni temporali, in which, in his capacity as Master of the Sacred Palace, he pointed out twelve divergent points. S. replied with an equal number of Riflessioni intended to justify his orthodoxy. This controversy flared up on the occasion of S.’s designation to the episcopate of Potenza (1782) by the court of Naples. Mamachi added twenty-four further articles against him, renewing and confirming, while expanding, the preceding accusations. Pius VI himself intervened, first requesting particular questions to be put to the candidate before the appointment, and then appointing a congregation of cardinals to decide the dispute, which, because of the resistance of the ministers of the king of Naples, threatened to assume a public character in favor of regalism. S. submitted to the judgment of the Holy See, following the equivocal rule of Jansenist submission, and was thus able to obtain the appointment and canonical investiture. In addition to pastoral letters to the diocese, five years after taking possession he wrote 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 fellow bishops, urging 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). In keeping with his education and moral principles, he held s. Alfonso’s work in contempt, although S. should be considered less a Jansenist than a liberal reformer and a regalist: from Jansenism he revived the Quesnellian ideas and the controversy of the appellants, while from Gallicanism he defended its theories, and did not hesitate subsequently to pass from regalism to Jacobinism. He died in 1799, murdered in his bed by hired assassins and tortured through the streets of the city by a revolutionary mob, a victim of the reaction against that monarchy which had endorsed his juridical presumptions.