Novecento - Two volumes bring attention back to the modernist priest and allow for the relaunch of the appeal for the revision of the excommunication, starting from the reading of the dogma as the result of historical evolution
by Luigino Bruni
published in Agorà Avvenire on 08/06/2025
«Has Christianity as a great social force already run its course? Has the drama of its civil fruition in the tradition of Mediterranean spirituality already reached its conclusion?” (Ernesto Buonaiuti, History of Christianity, I, Preface). These few sentences would suffice to give us a true idea of the quality and relevance of Ernesto Buonaiuti's thought, although the relevance of an author is only one dimension, and not even the most important one, for assessing his value..
Buonaiuti wrote these words in the early 1940s. It was a time when churches were overflowing, Christianitas appeared to be at its peak, and everything gave the Catholic Church the distinct impression that it had a century of further conquests and successes ahead of it, in Italy, in Europe, and throughout the world (the missions). Yet, in that time of great Catholic hopes, Buonaiuti asked himself and the Church radical questions that even today's Catholics are unable to formulate with his same honesty and freedom of spirit.
That is why we cannot but welcome with joy and cultural and civic enthusiasm the publication of two impressive books on Ernesto Buonaiuti. The first, published by Gabrielli, is Ernesto Buonaiuti. Biografia e antologia (Ernesto Buonaiuti: Biography and Anthology), edited by Pietro Urciuoli (578 pages, US$40.00); the second, published by Marsilio, is Ernesto Buonaiuti. L'essenza del Cristianesimo (Ernesto Buonaiuti: The Essence of Christianity), edited by Enrico Cerasi (672 pages, US$55.00). Both consist of an extensive introduction and a much more voluminous anthological section with texts by Buonaiuti. In addition to reconstructing Buonaiuti's human and intellectual biography, the introductions also offer Urciuoli and Cerasi's interpretation of the figure and work of the Roman priest and professor. Different readings, different selections of texts, two extremely useful, well-edited books that are well worth reading. Cerasi's anthology consists of a few long texts from the first part of Buonaiuti's career (from Lettere di un prete modernista to Gioacchino da Fiore). This was no easy selection, given Buonaiuti's vast literary output. Urciuoli's book, on the other hand, takes a different approach: it contains over sixty passages, articles, or excerpts from books, in strict chronological order, from the first in 1901 to some posthumous texts from the late 1940s.
The Buonaiuti case, which has been with us for over a century now, is far from closed. Unfortunately, it is open like a wound, which therefore still hurts. A scholar, a priest, and a man of exceptional talent and absolute value, whose existence was turned upside down by his clash with the institutions of the Catholic Church of his time, a clash from which Don Ernesto emerged seriously wounded, amputated, but still capable of faith, hope, and agape, until the end, despite the Holy Office. As I have already written in these columns, the jubilee year – the time when debts were remitted and slaves were freed – could, should be the right time for Buonaiuti's rehabilitation and the lifting of his excommunication, or at least a post mortem transformation into a much less serious and defamatory disciplinary act. Buonaiuti's memory is still imprisoned by the condemnation of the Holy Office and cries out for liberation, which would be a true jubilee gesture of justice. And then extend it to the numerous ranks of modernist priests and laypeople whose lives, from Pius IX to Pius XII, were disrupted and ruined. Now would be the time to ask forgiveness for having used the Gospel, faith, theology, and doctrine as improper weapons to strike and mortally wound other Christians. Because this is a very serious matter, and it forces us to ask ourselves a real question: what is the good reason today for keeping the instrument of excommunication alive? It originated in distant times, when Christians killed each other over different interpretations of the Trinity and the nature of Christ. We cannot remain silent in the face of the remnants of a church of the three kingdoms, of the Holy Inquisition and the Holy Office, of the Syllabus and anathemas, of the gestatorial chair. Those popes of yesterday excommunicated kings and queens, politicians, and in 1949 all members of the Communist Party. And if a theologian recalled the communal and community nature of the Eucharist of the early Christians, he was expelled from the Christian community, excommunicated “expressly avoiding” (to be avoided by all), he could not enter any church, he was prevented from teaching at a state university (at La Sapienza, where Bonaiuti had become a full professor after winning a state competition), forced to sell the books in his library to live and support his elderly mother. This was the Church of the early 20th century, which, thanks to the Spirit that did not abandon it, has changed. It experienced a Council, prepared in part by Buonaiuti's suffering and death, and then it experienced different popes, up to Francis, up to Leo XIV.
After Vatican II, excommunication essentially disappeared along with Christianitas, the Church of the Counter-Reformation, the Church of power and prince-bishops, which bound and loosed in every place, in the external and internal forums. The Church today has been something else for a long time. It is a symbol and sacrament of another world, of a kingdom of mercy, where people come before their ideas—this is the true meaning of the principle “reality is superior to ideas”—reminding us that no concrete person should come after their ideas. We have learned this with great difficulty, and we must never forget it. We all know that the Church moves slowly. But at certain moments, the passage of time is different, it accelerates, and we can no longer wait, lest we be left behind by the good breath (ruah) of history.
There is, then, another decisive element. Today, in light of biblical and historical studies, no one would condemn as heretical Buonaiuti's theses on Paul and the Eucharist, which were at the center of the charges brought by the Holy Office and Civiltà Cattolica. Buonaiuti had already expressed his historical ideas on the Eucharist in a book he wrote in his youth, Lettere di un prete modernista (Letters of a Modernist Priest), published in 1908: "Historically, the sacraments are the progressive solidification of the concept of grace applied to the main contingencies of life. The Eucharist, for example—and I mention it because its evolution is more visible—took the place of the banquet in which the early Christians symbolized the brotherhood that awaited them in the kingdom. Over time, the doctrine of the real presence was formed, and later that of transubstantiation. Through this transformation, the primitive ethical value of the rite was lost. We want to revive it.“ Buonaiuti repeated this thesis in several subsequent articles, particularly in his article ”The Fundamental Experiences of St. Paul" for the magazine Religio (1920), which cost him his definitive excommunication. There he wrote: “The Eucharistic rite, in the conception and practice of the apostle, was the supernatural sanction of harmony and brotherhood in the supportive life of the community.” From a historical point of view, it is undeniable that the doctrine of the “real presence” of Jesus in the Eucharist and of transubstantiation were developed after the time of the early Christians. Buonaiuti affirmed a true primitive dimension of the Eucharistic tradition, without denying the subsequent development of the doctrine on the Eucharist.
More generally, Buonaiuti was interested in rediscovering the “Essence of Christianity,” as the title of two of his lectures in 1921, also in that decisive year, states. For the Roman professor, this essence lies in the following: “The whole Gospel is contained in this word with which Christ's messianic preaching begins: ‘Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.’” And again: "Christianity is essentially a reversal and overturning of the values that are most appreciated in normal human life. The whole Gospel, from the first word to the last, is based on the hope of the Kingdom. The basileia, the Kingdom of God, is the most familiar motif in Jesus' preaching.“ And then he asked rhetorically: ”Has the essence of Christianity been preserved through the centuries, or have we definitively strayed from the Christian message? Have we perhaps overturned the overturning, and returned to the state prior to the Christian overturning?"
Strengthened by this certainty about the essence, Buonaiuti then criticized those who wanted to make asceticism the center or a pillar of that different Kingdom: “Christianity is not ascetic in the Hellenistic sense of the word... In Christianity there is no pedagogy, no training, no exercise, because complete renunciation takes place suddenly, in an instant, through metanoia, through the sudden passage into a sphere of higher experiences, in which it is almost impossible to feel the backlash of material life.” It is not difficult to imagine that those who interpreted monasticism and consecrated life in the Counter-Reformation as asceticism and “purgative ways” did not find his vision palatable.
I will conclude by quoting one of his most beautiful passages. We find it at the end of his monumental treatise on the History of Christianity, published in 1943, three years before his death, which has the flavor, solemnity, and power of a spiritual testament: "We invoke you, first of all, O Father. We are all beggars, without distinction. We therefore return to you. Hasten your triumph, for our life has been consumed in the desire for your justice. We know that you were waiting for us to return: the return of beggars. Gather us into the peace of your forgiveness and your grace, and may our eyes never forget the eternal law of your Gospel, which is all in the sign of the cross, projected onto all the boundless suffering and all the thirsty hope of the universe: o crux, ave spes unica!"
