RICCI, SCIPIONE de'. - Bishop of Pistoia and the most distinguished representative of Italian Jansenism; b. in Florence on 9 Jan. 1741, d. in confinement
(by courtesy of the name, d. P. Pistoia)
RICCI, MATTEO
The Chinese emperor Wanli, protector of R. during his stay in China.
ecclesiastic and politician at Rignana near Florence on 27 Dec. 1809.
His Jansenist formation derives in part from the environment in which he spent his youth: first in Rome, where in the hospitable house of Msgr. Giovanni Bottari he formed a relationship and friendship with the leading Italian Jansenists, Enlightenment thinkers and scholars; then in Pisa, where the philosophical-scientific orientation was influenced by Cartesianism and naturalism, and the theological one, wholly permeated by the doctrine of the famous Augustinians Norsi and Berti (teachers at that University), was, together with the teaching of law and ecclesiastical history, open to the novelties of Enlightenment historicism and of the Gallicanism of the French appellants; in Florence, finally, where de' R., in 1772 canonical coadjutor at S. Maria del Fiore and later vicar general of the archdiocese, completed his education through spiritual and epistolary contact not only with the French abbot Count Dupac de Bellegarde, a member of the schismatic Church of Utrecht, but with the Enlightenment thinker Giovanni Lami, whose Le nouvelle letterarie he read, and with the Tuscan rigorists and the anti-curialists of the Florentine grand-ducal Court. When in 1780, on 15 Aug., he made his solemn entry as bishop of the united dioceses of Pistoia and Prato, he had already prepared, on a plan devised by his French appellant friends and the schismatic bishops of Utrecht, his program of reform. Some professors of the Theological Portico of Pavia helped him in this work, among them Pietro Tamburini, whom he had known in Rome at Bottari's house, and Vincenzo Palmieri. But it can be said that all the Italian Jansenists and the sympathizers with Jansenism, or simply all the restless spirits desirous of novelty outside Roman obedience, put themselves in personal and epistolary contact with the bishop of Pistoia, making themselves his collaborators. A friend of Leopold, ambitious and pressed by insistent solicitations in Italy and abroad, he set his hand to a radical reform of discipline and of studies. An incredible reform, which embraces at once the administration of ecclesiastical movable and immovable property and the liturgical revision of the Breviary and the Missal; the institution of an ecclesiastical academy dedicated to St. Leopold in homage to the sovereign, and translations of religious works and pamphlets, written mostly by French appellants often anonymous; and finally an innovation of catechetical texts together with the institution of reviews, periodical publications and the founding of publishing houses.
All this reforming activity that he carried out and sought to carry out in his dioceses is found again in the 57 points of ecclesiastical reform, which constituted the basis of the Synod that he celebrated at Pistoia (v.). But for some time the people with their good sense, together with the clergy of the two dioceses of Pistoia and Prato and of the other Tuscan dioceses (the Tuscan bishops Sciarelli and Pannilini supported more or less openly the work of de' R.), had begun an opposition so strong and violent to the reforms that the bishop of Pistoia had, after a series of memorable riots in the city and the countryside, to flee from Pistoia by night (1790) and finally to resign (1791). Leopold's departure from Tuscany for Austria worsened the bishop's situation and gave the Counter-Reformation the opportunity to prepare a plan of condemnation. That condemnation came on 28 Aug. 1794 with the bull Auctorem Fidei drafted by Card. Gerdil, with the help of illustrious and prudent theologians and jurists of the Roman Curia. This bull constitutes the tombstone of Italian and European Jansenism. But times have already changed; the French Revolution makes a clean sweep of all controversies, including those of a religious character, and Jansenism remains barely latent in the souls of certain restless and dissatisfied spirits. Even that provisional trust that de' R. placed in the French constitutional clergy, almost as a moral revenge for his ecclesiastical reforms, soon failed. Grégoire, Mouton, Clement, constitutional priests and his personal friends and admirers, succeeded only in granting him a welcome during the invasion of the French armies in Italy. In a popular riot of 1799 he suffered imprisonment: relegated first to the monastery of Passignano, then to the convent of S. Marco where he liked to liken his fate to that of Savonarola, in 1801 he is, finally, confined at Rignana in Chianti. Here he spent the last years of his life in the study of the Fathers, gathering together his voluminous correspondence, composing some little books of devotion and his Memoirs. He felt himself a survivor of the « ruines du Port-Royal », an exiled confessor, a martyr; and he went back in thought to Quesnel, to Saint-Cyran, to Arnauld, to the great figures of French Jansenism, almost to conform himself to them even in death. One after another his friends had vanished in death or been overwhelmed by the violence of political events. Pressed by the loving urgings of the Florentine archbishop, of his relatives, of his friends, and of the grand-ducal court itself, on 9 May 1805 he met with Pius VII in Florence, into whose hands he placed a submission. Had he not in those years written the Memoirs, one might perhaps have believed in the sincerity of such a submission; instead one must recognize that the ambition, the hypocrisy and the duplicity of the Roman student and of the Florentine canon accompanied him to the very edge of the tomb. He signed the abjuration but « puramente e semplicemente », as he wrote in the Memoirs. He would say that he had not wished « to declare himself guilty of a fault he had not committed », that he had « condemned only errors and heresies such as the propositions were according to the qualifications ». It was therefore a hypothetical submission, a « grammatical sacrifice ». For this reason, after his death, he enjoyed sympathies among the epigones of the Italian Risorgimento as a « seer » and thus a martyr of the Roman « intrigues », and antipathies, even excessively biting ones, among ecclesiastical historians. He therefore had a varied and debatable bibliography. Certainly his moral figure does not rise above an honest mediocrity.
Lacking a solid theological formation, he gave himself over more to liturgical, disciplinary and ecclesiastical reforms than to theological novelties, poisoning with a schismatic and heretical spirit even reforms which were then premature, but which in time were later to be justified and favored and carried out by the Church, such as the return to a liturgical piety through translations of the Missal and of prayers concerning particular functions, a greater simplicity of worship in times when there was a threat of reducing churches to theaters, a sense of enlightened piety that was to direct all the actions of life toward a more adequate fulfillment of ecclesiastical and religious duties. Thus the common desire for reform of the Breviary and for revision of sacred hagiography, the wish for a worship purified of superstitious elements and for a more prudent and critical sense of history, the favor granted to the culture and intellectual education of the young, an adequate and just distribution of ecclesiastical goods and stipends, the living sense of parochiality, of Communion « infra Missam », etc., constitute today the aspiration and the fruitful work of the Church. But de' R., placing himself before the Pope, sinned by episcopalism. By giving his parish priests rights of divine jurisdiction, he sinned by parochialism. He then gave to Caesar what he had taken from God and torn away from the Church, and withered all his beneficial activity.