TOMMASO TAMBURINI. — Jesuit, moral theologian; b. Caltanissetta, 6 March 1591; d. Palermo, 10 Oct. 1675.
He first taught rhetoric, philosophy and dogmatic theology; then for seventeen years moral theology in the colleges of Messina and Palermo; he was also several times rector and counted among the consultors and censors of the Sicilian Inquisition.
The excellent reception of his first three works, reprinted in various editions—Methodus expeditae Confessionis (Rome 1647), Methodus expeditae Communionis (ibid. 1648), De sacrificio Missae expedite celebrando (Palermo 1649), in which he resolved almost all the cases that might arise in the practice of these Sacraments with clarity, brevity and mildness—induced the General V. Carafa to commission a complete Summa of casuistry; hence there appeared: Expeditae Decalogi explicationes (2 vols., Venice 1654); Expeditae iuris divini, naturalis et ecclesiae sticorum moralis explicatio (3 vols., Palermo 1661); Tractatus de Bulla Cruciatae (ibid. 1663). While the numerous editions earned him great renown, and well deserved, for learning and erudition, they also provoked against him the recriminations and heated debates of theologians of other schools, who denounced him as a laxist, harmful, a destroyer of Christian morality. He himself, under the pseudonym of Don Luigi Sanmarino, defended himself against Fr. V. Baronio: Germana doctrina r. p. Thomae Tamburini perspicue repellens impugnationes r. p. Vincentii Baronii adversus illum allatas (ibid. 1666). One may nevertheless regard T. as a probabilist theologian, noting, however, that some overly broad solutions cannot entirely excuse him from the reproach of a laxist tendency. The judgment of St. Alphonsus de’ Liguori is now common: 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 later condemned by the Church, this only shows that he erred and not that he was deliberately laxist. Posthumous works appeared about twenty years after his death: Tractatus quinque in quinque Ecclesiae praecepta (Palermo 1694), edited by Filippo Sidonetti; but these are lectures which T. had not been able to put into final form.