Stoppani, Antonio

STOPPANI, ANTONIO. - Priest and scientist, b. at Lecco on 15 Aug. 1824, d. at Milan on 1 Jan. 1891.

A seminarian at the age of eleven, first at Lecco and then at Milan, he took part in the Five Days of 1848 — busying himself especially with the making of the small hot-air balloons by which the insurgents communicated with the neighboring cities — and then followed the Sardinian army, attached to the ambulances. Ordained a priest a few months later, he was entrusted with the teaching of Italian and Latin literature in the Milanese Seminary of St. Peter Martyr, but in 1853 the Austrian authorities had him relieved of the post because of his patriotic sentiments. He then became a tutor in the Porro household, and there he began to devote himself to geological studies, in which he was to achieve international fame: the publication of the Studi geologici e paleontologici sulla Lombardia (Milan 1857) and then of the four volumes of the Paleontologie lombarde in fact earned him the chair of geology at the University of Pavia (1861) and at the Istituto tecnico superiore of Milan (1862), where he then always taught, except for a five-year period (1878-1883) spent at the Istituto di Studi superiori of Florence. In Milan he also held, from 1882 until his death, the directorship of the Museo civico. In 1866 he was a military chaplain during the third war of independence, lending his service in the field hospitals. In 1874 he visited the Holy Land and the neighboring East: and during the long convalescence to which he was forced in Damascus because of a travel accident he wrote the fine book Da Milano a Damasco. To the scientist — undoubtedly the greatest Italian geologist of his age, and among the most esteemed in Europe — are owed, besides the aforementioned, numerous and important works, among which the three volumes of the Corso di geologia (Milan 1871-73) hold first place; but his fame is particularly entrusted to a book of popularization, Il bel Paese (1st ed., Milan 1875), which had countless reprints. In it S. not only popularizes the difficult subject, imagining that he is discoursing on it to a group of children, but, in a prose with a Manzonian flavor, makes himself a teacher, beyond science, of Christian piety and love of country. In the Bel Paese there is in fact the whole S. with his ardent religious faith and his sincere patriotism, which he — like other priests, especially Lombard ones, of his time — proposed to unite in the souls of Italians. It is therefore understandable how he was among the most fervent "transigents" (for the meaning of the term, cf. F. Fonzi, I cattolici e la società ital. dopo l'Unità, Rome 1953, ch. 3) and how ardently he wished for the end of the dissension between Church and State. Holding that the responsibility for the failed agreement between the two powers went back to certain circles of the Curia, he published a book, with the significant title Gl'intransigenti, alla stregua dei fatti nuovi e nuovissimi (Milan 1886) to maintain therein the necessity that the Pope should be left free to take the decisions deemed best for the good of the Church (that is, the Conciliation with the Italian State), without anyone being able to keep him anchored to political situations by then past. The volume was submitted to the Holy Office, to the great bitterness of S., who committed the error of addressing to Leo XIII an "open letter" in the columns of the Rassegna nazionale (1 March 1892), to weave therein the public defense of his work, while declaring himself ready for submission in the event of censure. Another initiative variously commented upon was that of beginning the publication of a periodical entitled Il Rosmini and of promoting the erection in Milan of a monument to the philosopher of Rovereto, precisely in the period in which 40 Rosminian propositions were subject to condemnation.

Very opportune, on the other hand, was the publication of another writing: Il Dogma e le scienze positive, much praised by the Pontiff, with which S. intended to demonstrate how scientific investigations do not in the least conflict with revealed truths: a work of sound doctrine and of the highest apologetic value. On the same subject, of the reconciliation between faith and science, S. returned in the last years of his life, with the two volumes of the Examereon, which appeared posthumously (Turin 1893-94). He also attempted the strictly literary field (for example, with the Asteroidi, a book of verse, Milan 1879), but with clearly inferior results.

To be remembered are his blameless life, his profound piety, his high sense of priestly dignity, his most abundant charity and the apostolate that he alternated with severe studies, so as to make of him one of the noblest figures of the Italian clergy of the second half of the nineteenth century.

Renzo U. Montini