Faith and Fascism by Jorge Dagnino

Author:Jorge Dagnino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

The Contribution of Emilio Guano

The Genoese priest was unquestionably one of the most original and influential voices in interwar Italy with regard to religious studies, particularly in the field of ecclesiology. We have already seen how in an influential article entitled ‘Verità e vita’ (‘Truth and Life’), the ecclesiastical assistant propounded a living religious culture, capable of offering answers to the most pressing needs of the day, and how he rescued some of the driving forces of modernism while rejecting its doctrinal deviations. Additionally, mention has been made of Guano’s effort to introduce, sometimes for the first time in the Italian context, the latest theological ideas from abroad, especially from France and Germany. 44 During those years, Germany was experiencing a lively and fecund renewal of Catholic life in general. This revival had its centres in the Benedictine abbey of Maria Laach led by Ildefons Herwegen, the Catholic Theology Faculty at the University of Tubingen, and the Akademiker Verband. Some of the principal intellectuals leading this revival were Romano Guardini, Fritz Tilmann, and Karl Adam. 45 All of these institutions and authors were well known by Guano, both through his reading and frequent visits to Germany. But his attention and theological interests were not limited to Catholic authors. He continually admonished the fucini to ‘open the horizons to men and movements that are not Catholic or Christian’. 46 He also displayed an interest in the most distinguished voices of liberal Protestantism such as Karl Barth and his movement of renewal that he praised as ‘embarked on an exquisitely supernatural path’. 47 Similarly, despite the dominant and often suffocating neo-Thomist intellectual climate of the time, perceived by many as the sole philosophy and theology that Catholics could derive inspiration from, Guano encouraged Italian Catholic intellectuals to go beyond the teachings of Thomas Aquinas in philosophy, in an effort to appreciate the latest philosophical currents of the day. In this sense, it was indicative of the ecclesiastical assistant’s attempt to reach out to modern men and women that he praised some aspects of some modern philosophers, such as Bergson and Heidegger, as examples of how ‘philosophy seems to want to become something more human’. 48 Equally remarkable for the times he lived in was his position when it came to the subject of the Jews. At a time when Catholic anti-Semitism remained strong in many circles, 49 the Genoese priest courageously and adamantly rejected any notion of anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism. In an article published in May 1937, Guano passionately called for ‘the need to come closer to this race to which we owe so much: we owe it Jesus. We need to cut off every kind of anti-Semitism from our hearts, even before than in public life.’ 50

Guano was firmly convinced that every age had its own spirituality, its own way of comprehending the relationship between the self and the absolute and transcendental. According to the ecclesiastical assistant, the dominant spirituality of his age was the vocation to sanctify everything that was human.

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