TAMBURINI, TOMMASO. – Jesuit and moral theologian, born at Caltanissetta on 6 March 1591, died at Palermo on 10 October 1675.
He initially taught rhetoric, philosophy, and dogmatic theology; thereafter, for 17 years, moral theology in the colleges of Messina and Palermo. He was also rector on several occasions and was among the consultors and censors of the Inquisition of Sicily.
The excellent success of his first three works, reproduced in various editions: Methodus expeditae Confessionis (Rome 1647), Methodus expeditae Communionis (there 1648), De sacrificio Missae expedita celebrando (Palermo 1649), in which he resolved almost all the cases that may arise in the practice of these Sacraments, with clarity, brevity, and moderation, induced the superior general V. Carafa to propose that he write a complete Summa of casuistry. There consequently appeared: Expeditae Decalogi explicationes (2 vols., Venice 1654); Expedita iuris divini, naturalis et ecclesiastici moralis explicatio (3 vols., Palermo 1661); Tractatus de Bulla Cruciatae (there 1663). While the numerous editions earned him a great and, moreover, well-deserved reputation for learning and erudition, they also aroused against him the recriminations and vehement anger of theologians of other schools, who denounced him as a laxist, pernicious, and a destroyer of Christian morality. He himself, under the pseudonym of don Luigi Sanmario, defended himself against Fr. V. Baronio: Germana doctrina r. p. Thomae Tamburini perspicue repellens impugnationes r. p. Vincentis Baronii adversus illum allatus (there 1666). Tamburini may nevertheless be regarded as a probabilist theologian, while noting that some excessively broad solutions cannot entirely exempt him from the reproach of a laxist tendency. The judgment of St. Alfonso de' Liguori is now generally accepted: «Negari non potest quod auctor iste multum facilis fuerit ad tribuendum probabilitatis pondus opinionibus, quae probabiles dici non merebantur, unde cum cautela legendus est» (Theol. moralis, lib. IV, n. 645). Moreover,
if some of his solutions were subsequently condemned by the Church, this demonstrates only that he erred, not that he was deliberately a laxist. Posthumously, about twenty years after his death, there appeared: Tractatus quinque in quinque Ecclesiae praecapta (Palermo 1694), edited by Filippo Sidonetti; but these are the lectures to which Tamburini had been unable to give his final revision.