TONIOLO, GIUSEPPE. - One of the greatest masters of Catholic social thought, b. at Treviso on 7 March 1845, d. at Pisa on 7 Oct. 1918, in the reputation of a saint.
Enrolled in the Faculty of Jurisprudence at Padua, he distinguished himself there by intelligence and profit and was encouraged to "pursue his studies." In 1878 he obtained the appointment as extraordinary professor of political economy at the University of Modena. From there, in the same year, he was transferred with the same title to the University of Pisa, where in 1884 he obtained the full professorship and then spent his whole life. In 1878 T., having by then fulfilled his most serious obligations for the settling of his brothers, contracted marriage with Miss Maria Schiratti of Pieve di Soligo (Treviso), who was then his faithful companion and collaborator throughout his life and by whom he had seven children. His activity from Modena until obtaining the full professorship at Pisa was absorbed by study and teaching, as well as by the cares of the family. With regular and intense practices of piety he deepened at the same time his vocation as a Christian, strongly felt from his earliest years. Among his documents there was in fact found after his death a rule of life bearing the date 1882 with which he proposed to obtain his own sanctification, through a conscientious fulfillment of his duties as a Christian, as a father, as a teacher and as a scientist.
In the same years, which were in every sense decisive for his further career, T. reached his full scientific maturity, probing a theme that constitutes the soul of his entire activity as a thinker: the influence of ethics on economics. This theme had been suggested to him by the intellectual climate of the era in which he approached the study of economics, a climate characterized by the reaction of the first German historical school against the utilitarianism of the classics, which had found strong echoes at the University of Padua. But he dissected it with originality of results concretized in the complete demonstration that economics always implies a moral conception and is in fact subordinate to it. In his first Pisan years he also successfully cultivated historical studies of the doctrines and economic facts of Tuscany, and from the results of his research - which revealed to him the autonomous influence that the ethical and religious conceptions of economic actors exercise on the development of economic activity - he was led to substitute dualism for the materialist monism that was then in fashion. The most important of these studies of his remained in the state of an unfinished draft, because, distracted by other interests, T. did not have the time to polish them. Fortunately, however, he succeeded in imparting his historiographical method to the young Werner Sombart, who in those years was his pupil at Pisa, and Sombart later developed and applied it systematically in works universally known. T. had presumably been guided to the choice of the theme of his studies also by profound religious convictions. It is certain that his religiosity drew new comfort and support from their results. Therefore when, having mastered his subject and obtained with the full professorship a secure material base, he was able to undertake the broader social action of teaching, to which he was naturally inclined as a profound thinker, he sought the platform of such action in the Catholic organizations, which at that time in Italy were fighting a defensive battle against the militant anticlericalism of the governing classes. T. placed at the disposal of the chosen cause, with absolute disinterestedness, his work as a thinker, as a publicist, as an orator and as an organizer, seeking above all to transfor-
into the Catholic organizations the awareness, which he had gained in the scientific sphere, of the redemptive mission that fell to Catholicism in the social field, and to win them over to the program of Leo XIII, who in his stance before the social question had particularly emphasized the duties of justice trampled upon to the detriment of the working classes. He nevertheless employed the greatest delicacy so as to prevent, as far as possible, ruptures within the Catholic alignment. For this reason too, Bl. Pius X availed himself of his counsel for the reorganization of the Catholic forces, which had become necessary following the crisis provoked within them by the growing strength of these ideas, and appointed him first president of the new national organization of Catholics (Unione Popolare [v.]). Previously, in order to promote the ideas dear to him, in full agreement with the Holy See he had brought into being, as a complement to the general Catholic organization, the Unione cattolica per gli studi sociali ([v.] 1891), the Società cattolica italiana per gli studi scientifici ([v.] 1899), had revived the Union of Fribourg, had founded the Rivista internazionale di scienze sociali e ausiliarie ([v.] 1893), and had moreover constituted and assumed the presidency of the Italian Section of the Association internationale pour la protection légale des travailleurs (1901).
To promote this practical activity of his, T. composed a series of popular and original writings on the themes of the social crisis, of capitalism, of the strategy and tactics of the work of reconstruction, of which the following characteristics especially deserve to be remembered: faith in the future of democracy, lively insistence on the organic structure of society and on the primacy of social organization over political organization, on the necessity of public intervention in the economy for the protection of workers, on the religious-ethical patrimony of society as its unifying element, and on the necessity of international collaboration. By this activity he was also led to pass over to sociology, which he, in keeping with the intellectual fashion of the age, conceived as a science, rather than as a scientific discipline, indeed as the synthesis of all the sciences, while nevertheless contesting the monism of the sociological methods then in vogue.
Through his intense practical and scientific activity, through the purity of his character, he became the mentor of Italian Catholics and was regarded even abroad as one of the greatest masters of Catholic social thought.
The name of T. as a scientist commends itself especially in the "Introduction" of his Trattato di economia sociale and in his Storia dell'economia sociale toscana nel medioevo, only recently published in his Opera Omnia (during his lifetime he published only a small part of it!). T.'s fame as a social ideologue rests especially on the writings: La democrazia cristiana; Concetti e indirizzi sociali all'esordire del sec. XX, and Provvedimenti sociali popolari.
The cause of beatification was introduced by decree of 7 Jan. 1951.