LIFE AND THOUGHT. - Monthly review founded in Nov. 1914 by Fr. Agostino Gemelli, O.F.M., by Dr. Vico Necchi and by Monsignor Francesco Olgiati.
The program set out in the first article by Fr. A. Gemelli, Il medioevalismo, took on a historical significance; and it meant: the need for a return, not to the 13th century, as if the past were to be relived, but to that conception of culture inspired by Christianity, which was then able to create the glorious century of Francis of Assisi and of Dominic of Guzmán and of the Universities founded by the Church, and in our own day must give rise to a cultural movement characterized by the method of organic wholeness and the harmonious synthesis of knowledge, and by a program of action and thought responding to present-day needs and to modern achievements; one can therefore say that V. e P. served to prepare the rise of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, inaugurated in 1921. To this ideal the review has always remained faithful. All the principal questions (religious, political, social, literary, artistic, etc.) are promptly addressed, in the service of the Christian idea, by the most eminent writers of the Italian Catholic world. Among the collaborators of former times were Cardinal Maffi, Fr. Semeria, Filippo Meda, Filippo Crispolti, Count Dalla Torre. Among those of today, besides Fr. Gemelli and Monsignor Olgiati, the academician Pietro Rondoni, Maria Sticco, Francesco Casnati. After a parenthesis of suspension, due to the Second World War, V. e P. resumed its life from 1947 with renewed ardor and with spring-like freshness.
Giovanni Rinaldi