TAZZOLI, ENRICO. — Priest, born at Canneto on 19 April 1812, died at Belfiore on 7 December 1852. Professor of philosophy at the Mantuan Seminary and a renowned preacher, he joined the Mazzinian Committee of Mantua, of which he soon became president.
The Committee’s purpose was to keep alive opposition to Austria and to collect weapons and funds for a possible insurrection, as well as to obtain information on Habsburg military preparations. Arrested for the first time in 1848 for a sermon that the Austrian authorities considered revolutionary, he was soon released after a severe admonition; urged by his own friends to go into exile, he refused, in order to devote himself with greater zeal to his conspiratorial activity, nor did he slacken his efforts when, toward the end of 1851, the arrests and capital sentences ordered by Marshal Radetzky to suppress every insurrectionary scheme began. On 13 December 1851 T. presided over a meeting at which it was proposed to attempt the life of Emperor Franz Joseph during his announced visit to Lombardy-Venetia, but he succeeded in having the insane project rejected. A few days later (1 January 1852), the police arrested a certain Luigi Pesci, found in possession of a certificate for the Mazzinian loan: Pesci confessed that he had received it from Fr. Ferdinando Bosio, who in turn identified T. as the distributor of the dangerous material. Although warned in time, T. once again refused to place himself beyond danger and was arrested on the following 27 January. He was thus implicated in the great Mantuan trial, conducted with stern energy by the auditor, Captain Kraus. The silence of the numerous defendants, the flight of many suspects who took steps to destroy most of the evidence of the conspiracy, widespread public unease, and the concern of the Vienna government to avoid excessive severity were about to render Kraus’s efforts fruitless when, unfortunately, Bosio—who later apostatized and converted to Protestantism—and Luigi Castellazzo began making disclosures. Castellazzo later became a member of Parliament and secretary-general of Freemasonry, despite the detailed accusations of one of the survivors of the trial, Giuseppe Finzi, who preferred to resign his parliamentary mandate rather than sit in the Chamber alongside the traitor, whom the sect shamelessly defended. To obtain the promised immunity, Castellazzo—who had been secretary of the Mazzinian Committee—revealed to the judges everything known to him, except the key to the cipher used by T., which was nevertheless discovered by the Viennese police. At this point T., with heroic altruism, assumed the entire responsibility for the conspiracy, in the hope of saving, at the price of his own life, that of his fellow defendants.
While the trial was pending, the governor of Mantua, Gen. Culoz, asked him what reasons led a large part of the Lombard clergy to oppose Austrian rule. He replied with two measured Memorie (edited by A. Luzio, Mantua 1886), in which he outlined a precise picture of Italy’s conditions under oppressive Habsburg government: writings of admirable political wisdom, which one would not imagine to have been composed in prison, without any assistance from sources. The bishop of Mantua, Msgr. Giovanni Corti—who had delegated Canon Martini to provide spiritual assistance to the prisoners—tried every means to save them from capital punishment, going so far as to request an audience with the emperor and to appeal for papal intervention. But the prelate’s generous efforts proved fruitless, and he also had the painful task of proceeding with T.’s degradation from the priesthood before the condemned man was to ascend the scaffold.
T.’s final hours, described in moving language by Msgr. Luigi Martini in his celebrated Confortatorio, were admirable in their Christian steadfastness: he consoled and blessed his fellow sufferers and, before surrendering himself to the executioner, said to Martini: “Tell all priests not to meddle in politics and to be fervent in church.” His remains, thrown down at the foot of the gallows, received honorable burial in Mantua after the city’s liberation.
Renzo U. Montini