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 and was professor of dogmatic theology at the University of Genoa; he then became bishop of Noli on 1 June 1778.

Degola (v.), though it is not known exactly when, he became his friend, to the point of entertaining the idea of incardinating him in his own diocese, and was deeply influenced by him, although he never shared his bitter and factional spirit. Already judged unfavorably because of a publication of his on the Pauline privilege (1789), he caused a sensation by opposing—alone among the bishops of Italy—the publication of the apostolic constitution Auctorem Fidei, which condemned the Synod of Pistoia, and by sending the Senate of Genoa, on 8 October 1794, a letter in which he set out the reasons for this opposition. He consequently entered into controversy with Cardinal Gerdil and published in 1804 an Apologia, in three small volumes, in which he took up the customary arguments of Italian Jansenist polemics. Hostile to the consti-

Opposed to the civil constitution of the clergy, he was subsequently drawn by Degola toward revolutionary ideas and worked on the commission charged with drafting the constitution of the Ligurian Democratic Republic. But, soon becoming disgusted with the excesses of the innovators, he refused to consecrate, without the Pope’s approval, Calleri, whom Degola’s faction sought to impose as coadjutor upon the elderly archbishop of Genoa; later, he also refused 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 never attempted to impose Jansenist ideas upon his clergy, although these nevertheless emerged in some of his pastoral letters.