VENTURA di RAULICA, GIOACCHINO. - Publicist, orator and Theatine philosopher, b. at Palermo on 8 Dec. 1792, d. at Versailles on 2 Aug. 1861. A pupil of the Jesuits, he entered the Theatines in 1818.
Having moved to Naples, he began his activity with an Apologia of the religious Orders (Naples 1820) and with the journal L'enciclopedia cattolica (5 vols., ibid. 1821-23). A follower of Lamennais and of the French ultramontanists, he disseminated their works in Italy with translations of the Essai sur l'indifférence (ibid. 1821), Du Pape and La législation primitive (ibid. 1823). In 1824 he moved to Rome, where he continued his many-sided activity. Appointed by Leo XII to the chair of public ecclesiastical law at the Sapienza, he published its lectures in the De iure publ. eccl. commentaria (Rome 1826), which together with the De methodo philosophandi (ibid. 1828) constitute an essay in "Christian philosophy." He was general of his Order (1830-33), examiner of the clergy, ecclesiastical censor, consultor of the Rites, and four times, between 1841 and '48, delivered the Lenten sermons in the Vatican Basilica (Il Tesoro nascosto [the Passion of J. C.], 2 vols. ibid. 1841; La scuola dei miracoli, 3 vols., ibid. 1843; Omelie sulle parabole evangeliche, 4 vols., ibid. 1862). In 1839 he published Le Bellezze della fede (3 vols., ibid. 1839-1842), followed by La Madre di Dio Madre degli uomini (ibid. 1841), which opens the modern mariological literature on the spiritual motherhood of Mary. His funeral oration for D. O'Connell (28-30 June
1847) enjoyed great success, but the one for those fallen in the siege of Vienna (27 Nov. 1848) was placed on the Index; his submission was edifying.
Ardent and generous, V. actively followed the events that, in Rome, prepared the tumultuous '48. He advised Pius IX to grant his States a constitution; he drafted a bill for an electoral law and for a chamber of peers and even drew up a plan for the construction of the pontifical railways. He defended with a series of pamphlets (La questione sicula nel 1848, ibid. 1848; Memoria pel riconoscimento della Sicilia come Stato sovrano; Menzogne diplomatiche, Palermo 1848, and others, for which v. Regnum Dei, 5 [1949], p. 138) the independence of Sicily, which had risen against Naples, and from that government he received the post of minister plenipotentiary in Rome. During the exile of Pius IX at Gaeta he remained in the City, deluding himself that he could better serve the Church and the Pontiff. Although he refused to take a seat in the Constituent Assembly, he forwarded to it a bill intended to safeguard the rights of the Pope; as commissioner for Sicily he recognized, as a de facto State, the Roman Republic and attended in St. Peter's, though without taking direct part in it, the Easter ceremony sponsored by the Triumvirate. Political errors that he would expiate with a voluntary exile. On the eve of the fall of the Roman Republic, after having labored in vain to prevent the attack of the French troops on the city of the popes, he took refuge at Montpellier (1849), then at Paris (1851), where he resumed his activity as orator and scholar. In his conferences at the Madeleine and at the Assumption (La raison philosophique et la raison catholique, 4 vols., Paris 1851-64) he expounded the dogmas of the Catholic faith, while in that at the Tuileries, in the presence of Napoleon III (Le pouvoir politique chrétien, ibid. 1858, followed by Essai sur le pouvoir public, ibid. 1859) he shed light, with bold freedom of spirit, on the relations between Church and State. The works: La Tradition et les liens de la philosophie (ibid. 1856), Essai sur l'origine des idées (ibid. 1853) and La philosophie chrétienne (3 vols. ibid. 1861, Ital. trans. in 5 vols., Genoa-Milan 1863) express the full maturity of his philosophical thought.
Of irreproachable private life, comforted in his last illness by the blessing of Pius IX, who even in exile always held him in esteem, he ended his days at Versailles with an edifying death. His body was transported by the Theatines to Rome and buried in S. Andrea della Valle, where a marble monument was erected to him.
His thought. - V. is a convinced upholder of traditionalism (v.); a system that he continued to defend even after the defeat of Lamennais. There is, however, in his thought a certain evolution. At first he seemed to adhere to the rigid form of De Bonald (v.) but, already in 1829, he noted the untenability of some principles of the system and attempted to strengthen its foundations by reconnecting it to scholastic metaphysics (Osservazioni sulle opinioni filosofiche dei sigg. De Bonald, De Maistre, De La Mennais..., Rome 1829; Schiarimenti sul fondamento della certezza, ibid. 1829). He fell back, therefore, on the positions of a mitigated traditionalism that limits the incapacity of human reason to the discovery of supernatural truths and of natural truths of a religious and moral order, while it affirms the capacity of reason to demonstrate, defend and develop those truths, once they have been acquired through Revelation or social teaching (La raison philos., cit., II, pref. p. XLVIII; La Tradition, cit., pp. 24-29, 117 ff.). V. was never invited, as were his contemporaries Bautain and Bonnetty (Denz U, 1622-27, 1649-52), to subscribe any proposition on the matter. On the contrary, with his distinction between natural faith and theological faith, he reacted decisively to the adversaries who opposed to him the recent clarifications of the ecclesiastical magisterium, namely, that reason precedes faith; just as he rejected the accusation of fideism and abandoned, especially after the Mirari vos of Gregory XVI (1832), the Lamennaisian doctrine of common sense (v.). Nevertheless the Vatican Council - always after the death of the Theatine - proscribed, as is known, not only rigid traditionalism, but also the mitigated traditionalism of V. (cf. H. Pinard, Création, in DThC, III, col. 2192). What, in any case, remains of V.'s philosophical activity is above all the merit of having championed and foreseen the restoration of scholastic philosophy.
The political thought of V., which, moreover, reflects his traditionalism, is inspired by his great ideals: Church, people, liberty. As a young man, he had been favorable to monarchy and to legitimism, and had fought revolution in politics as he had rationalism in philosophy. In opposition to Hobbes and Rousseau (v.) he had defended the historical-natural origin of power, with a tendency toward a form of medieval theocracy; but following the changed conditions of peoples, he abandoned authoritarian intransigence in order to adhere to democracy, «this wild matron» (D. O'Connell, Rome 1847, p. 104) which he hoped to regenerate with the Christian faith. He therefore accepted the theory dear to not a few Scholastics: power from God to the people and from the people to the prince. He declared himself in favor of a direct but impartial participation of the clergy in political life (L'attitude politique du clergé, letter to Msgr. Sibour, ibid. 1847). He was in contact with Gioberti (v.) and with Rosmini (v.) and, although opposed to the neo-Guelph tendencies of the former and to the unitary aims of Piedmont, he nonetheless adhered, in the manner of Rovero, to a confederation of the Italian States under Pius IX; he advocated, for Sicily, independence and a republican regime. With a libertarian regime which, while guaranteeing power, allows a broader autonomy to the various bodies dependent on the State, with a Chamber of Peers that restores the college of cardinals to its traditional task of overseeing political administration, and with a Chamber of Deputies chosen on the basis of an electoral law founded not on property qualification but on the natural right of paternity, he invoked from Pius IX a model constitution by which the other States might be inspired. A sincere advocate of the just claims of peoples, he demonstrated in the forceful funeral oration for D. O'Connell that there can be no opposition between religion and liberty; but a year later, carried away by his generous indulgence, he took a step forward: he attempted the alliance between Church and democracy, and in a moment of unhappy lyrical exaltation he sang the praises of the fallen of Vienna.
Some have sought to discern an opposition between V.'s politics and his traditionalist philosophy. The opposition is only apparent. V. saw in democracy the concrete realization of natural principles, the patrimony of all peoples and guaranteed by the Gospel. In the reforms he invoked for the Papal States he aimed at the restoration of the communal liberties that once made the Guelph Republics of the Middle Ages flourish. The revolution itself sometimes appeared to him as «the blind and desperate effort of a Christian nation to bring power back within the limits that Christianity had set for it» (Disc. pei morti di Vienna, Rome 1848, p. 11). V.'s politics thus presents itself as the application of his philosophy to the historical contingencies of power and society. Without justifying the errors of the man and of the thinker, he does not seem to have been far from the truth who defined V. as «the man of a single idea: the Christian idea; and the man of a single book: the Bible» (Rastoul [v. bibl.], p. 181).
Bibliography16 works
Francesco Andreu
