TABARELLI, RICCARDO. — Stigmatine theologian, born at Cembra (Trentino) in 1859, died in Rome on 9 October 1909.
He taught philosophy and scholastic theology, first in the schools of his Congregation and then in Rome at the Apollinare and at the Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, of which he was an urban member. He took part in the neo-scholastic renewal, stimulated especially by the contacts he had in his youth with Fr. KLEUTGEN, JOSEPH (v.), from whom he drew the solidity of principles and the soundness of judgment needed to identify new errors and to employ positive theology, which was just beginning to take its first steps. His direct knowledge of the orientations of German philosophy and theology, his broad general culture, and a particular effectiveness in organizing problems gave his teaching such lively impetus that his surviving pupils, among them His Holiness Pius XII, still remember the sure and vigorous direction he imparted. And Fr. T.’s school not only passed unscathed through the modernist crisis, but, with its healthy spirit of modernity, contributed effectively to combating II. He also opposed Rosminianism (v. L'ottimismo del mondo, Parma 1887), positivism, rationalism, and Frohschammer’s anti-Thomism in a series of essays published in the Bollettino dell'Accademia di S. Tommaso. Of his theological courses, De Deo Uno (Rome 1906), comprising qq. 2–14 of the Sum. Theol., 1ª, and De Gratia
Christi (there 1908), an extensive commentary on qq. 109–11 of the 1ª-2ªe, have been published. Fr. T., although he exonerated Rosmini from the accusation of pantheism, saw in his conception of being a direct derivation from German philosophy, particularly from the pantheism of Krause (De Deo Uno, cited above, p. 125). In the controversy concerning the efficacy of Grace, especially impressed by the terminology of certain seventeenth-century Thomists, which seemed to him injurious to human freedom, he inclined toward a form of mitigated congruism (De Gratia, cited above, pp. 260 ff., 313 ff.) which, even if it cannot be persuasive from the standpoint of strict Thomism, testifies to a sincere effort at understanding (also recognized by the Dominican Revue d. sciences phil. et théol., 2 [1908], pp. 804 ff.) in order to preserve the intrinsic efficacy of Grace and to make divine foreknowledge independent of any extrinsic object.