After moving 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 the French ultramontanists, he disseminated their works in Italy through 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 multifaceted activity. Named by Leo XII to the chair of ecclesiastical public law at the Sapienza, he published his lectures in *De iure publ. ecc.* commentaria (Rome 1826), which, together with *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 delivered the Lenten sermons in St. Peter’s Basilica four times between 1841 and ’48 (*Il Tesoro nascosto [la Passione di G. 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 inaugurated modern Mariological literature on Mary’s spiritual motherhood. His funeral oration for D. O’Connell (28-30 June 1847) was highly successful, but that for the fallen in the siege of Vienna (27 Nov. 1848) was placed on the Index; his submission was edifying.
Fervent and generous, V. actively followed the events that, in Rome, prepared the turbulent ’48. He advised Pius IX to grant his States a constitution; he drafted a bill for electoral law and a chamber of peers and even drew up a plan for the establishment of the papal railways. He defended Sicilian independence in a series of pamphlets (*La questione sicula nel 1848*, ibid. 1848; *Memoria per riconoscimento della Sicilia come Stato sovrano*; *Menzogna diplomatiche*, Palermo 1848, and others; cf. *V. regnum Dei*, 5 [1949], p. 138) and from that government received the post of plenipotentiary minister in Rome. During Pius IX’s exile in Gaeta he remained in Rome, deluding himself that he could better serve the Church and the Pope. Although he refused to take a seat in the Constituent Assembly, he sent it a draft law intended to safeguard the Pope’s rights; as commissioner for Sicily he recognized, as a matter of fact, the Roman Republic and, as assistant at St. Peter’s, attended the Easter ceremony sponsored by the Triumvirate without, however, participating directly. Political errors that he expiated with voluntary exile. In the expectation of the fall of the Roman Republic, after vainly attempting to prevent the French troops’ attack on the city of the popes, he took refuge in Montpellier (1849), then in Paris (1851), where he resumed his oratorical and scholarly activity. In his lectures 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 boldly imagined, with audacious freedom of spirit, the relations between Church and State. His works: *La Tradition et les idées de la philosophie* (ibid. 1856), *Essai sur l'origine des idées* (ibid. 1853), and *La philosophie chrétienne* (3 vols., ibid. 1861; Italian trans. in 5 vols., Genoa-Milan 1863) express the full maturity of his philosophical thought.
Of irreproachable private life, comforted in his final illness by the blessing of Pius IX, who always held him in consideration even in exile, he ended his days in Versailles with an edifying death. His remains were conveyed by the Theatines to Rome and interred in S. Andrea della Valle, where a marble monument was erected to him.
His thought. — V. was a convinced advocate of traditionalism (v.), a system he continued to defend even after the defeat of Lamennais. Yet there is a certain evolution in his thought. 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 shore up its foundations by reconnecting them to Scholastic metaphysics (*Osservazioni sulle opinioni filosofiche dei sigg. De Bonald, De Maistre, De La Mennais...*, Rome 1829; *Schiarimenti sul fondamento della certezza*, ibid. 1929). He thus reverted to the positions of a mitigated traditionalism that limits the incapacity of human reason to discovering supernatural truths and natural truths of a religious and moral order, while affirming reason’s capacity to demonstrate, defend, and develop these 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 asked, as were his contemporaries Gauthier and Bonnetty (Denz. U., 1622-27, 1649-52), to subscribe to any propositions on this matter. Indeed, with his distinction between natural faith and theological faith, he decisively reacted to opponents who opposed him with the recent clarifications of ecclesiastical teaching, namely, that reason precedes faith; he likewise rejected the charge of fideism and abandoned, especially after Gregory XVI’s *Mirari vos* (1832), the much-lamented doctrine of common sense (v.). Nevertheless, the Vatican Council — always after the Theatine’s death — proscribed, as is well known, not only rigid traditionalism but also V.’s mitigated form (cf. H. Pinard, *Création*, in *DThC*, III, col. 2192). What nonetheless remains of V.’s philosophical activity is above all the merit of having championed and anticipated the restoration of Scholastic philosophy.
The political thought of the V., which moreover reflects his traditionalism, is inspired by his great ideals: Church, people, freedom. In his youth he had been favourable to monarchy and legitimism, and had fought the revolution in politics as he had rationalism in philosophy. In opposition to Hobbes and Rousseau (q.v.) he defended the historical-natural origin of power, tending towards a form of medieval theocracy; but in response to the changed conditions of the peoples, he abandoned authoritarian intransigence to adhere to democracy, and this “savage mutation” (D. O’Connell, Rome 1847, p. 104) which he hoped to regenerate through Christian faith. He therefore embraced the theory dear to many scholastics: power from God to the people and from the people to the prince. He declared himself in favour of a direct yet impartial participation of the clergy in political life (L’attitude politienne du clergé, letter to Mons. Sibour, ibid. 1847). He was in contact with Gioberti (q.v.) and Rosmini (q.v.), and although opposed to the neo-Guelph tendencies of the former and the unifying aims of Piedmont, he nevertheless reverently adhered to a confederation of Italian states under Pius IX; he advocated for Sicily independence and a republican regime. With a libertarian system that, while guaranteeing power, allowed greater autonomy to the various bodies dependent on the state, with a Chamber of Peers that restored the College of Cardinals to its traditional role of overseeing political administration, and with a Chamber of Deputies chosen on the basis of an electoral law founded not on census but on the natural right of fatherhood, he urged Pius IX to grant a constitutional model to which other states might look. A sincere advocate of the just claims of the peoples, he demonstrated in his powerful funeral oration for D. O’Connell that there can be no opposition between religion and freedom; but a year later, carried away by his generous indulgence, he took a further step: he attempted an alliance between Church and democracy, and in a moment of feverish lyrical exaltation he sang the praises of the fallen of Vienna.
Some have wished to see an opposition between the politics of the V. and his traditionalist philosophy. The opposition is only apparent. The V. saw in democracy the concrete realization of natural principles, a heritage of all peoples and guaranteed by the Gospel. In the reforms he advocated for the Papal States he aimed at the restoration of communal liberties that had once made the medieval republics flourish. Even the revolution itself sometimes seemed to him “the blind and desperate effort of a Christian nation to bring power back within the limits that Christianity had set for it” (Discorso pei morti di Vienna, Rome 1848, p. 11). The politics of the V. thus appear as the application of his philosophy to the historical contingencies of power and society. Without justifying the errors of the man and the thinker, it does not seem far from the truth to call the V. “the man of a single idea: the Christian idea; and the man of a single book: the Bible” (Rastoul [q.V. BIBLICA.], p. 181).