Solari, Benedetto

SOLARI, BENEDETTO. - Dominican bishop, b. at Chiavari on 9 March 1742, d. at Genoa on 13 April 1814. He entered the Dominican Order at a young age, was professor of dogmatic theology at the University of Genoa, then bishop of Noli on 1 June 1778.

Having come into contact, it is not known exactly when, with Degola (v.), he became his friend to the point of entertaining the idea of incardinating him in his own diocese, and he came deeply under his influence, without however ever sharing his bitter and factious spirit. Already viewed unfavorably for a publication of his on the psoline privilege (1789), he caused a stir by opposing — the only one among the bishops of Italy — the publication of the apostolic constitution Auctorem Fidei, which condemned the Synod of Pistoia, and by sending to the Senate of Genoa on 8 October 1794 a letter in which he set out the reasons for this opposition. Having thus entered into controversy with Cardinal Gerdil, he published in 1804 an Apologia, in three small volumes, in which he took up the customary themes of the controversy of our homegrown Jansenism. Hostile to the civil constitution of the clergy, he was later drawn by Degola to revolutionary ideas and worked on the commission charged with drafting the draft constitution of the Ligurian democratic Republic, but, soon disgusted by the exaggerations of the innovators, he refused to consecrate, without the Pope's approval, Calleri, whom Degola's faction sought to impose as coadjutor on the old archbishop of Genoa, and later he was unwilling to go to the national Council convened by Napoleon in Paris in 1811. In his small diocese he was an excellent pastor, full of zeal and charity, and he never attempted to impose Jansenist ideas on his clergy, though these nonetheless transpired from some of his pastoral letters.

Lorenzo Vivaldo