No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
The World of Ideas of Don Luigi Sturzo
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2024
Extract
Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.
In the space of a single article a survey of Don Sturzo’s world of ideas can be merely indicative, a throwing into relief of certain fundamental conceptions which give his thought so particular an originality and potency. Even so, selection is not easy; his mind embraces so many planes. Behind the political thinker is the sociologist, seeking the constant laws of human relationships; behind the sociologist is the metaphysician, the theologian, whose contribution to the shaping of Catholic thought is gaining increasing recognition; behind the theologian the mystic, for whom all human fellowship receives its true meaning in the fellowship of man with God, and Christianity is seen as a cosmic fact, irradiating the whole of human existence, throughout history and throughout the world. Such higher reaches, however, were best left to more competent pens than mine. I propose here to deal mainly with certain aspects of his sociology where it converges on political philosophy, the philosophy that at once inspired his active life and drew from it confirmation and vital elements.
Did space allow, it would be illuminating to illustrate this marriage of thought and action : how, as a young priest, intending to devote himself to university teaching and music, he was swept into active public life under the inspiration of Rerum Novarum, on the crest of the Christian Democratic movement of the nineties, to become the organiser of trade unions and peasant co-operatives, a leader in municipal activities and reforms, then founder of national institutions, and finally, in 1919, the founder and leader of a great political party in which his ideals found practical embodiment.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © 1943 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 See, for instance, an article by Mgr. Kruno de Solages, Rector of the Catholic Institute of Toulouse, in his Bulletin de I.ittérature F.cclésiastique (Oct.‐Dec., 1940), where, dealing with the theology of the just war, he speaks of Don Stur/n as ‘the man who has certainly done most to make contemporary theology concern itself with adapting the theory of the just war to the contemporary world,’ and, after quoting Professor Le Four of the Sorbonne to the effect that Don Sturzo's book, ‘The International Community and the Right of War,’ contains ‘some of the most suggestive pages that have been written on this formidable problem,’ he concludes: ‘With him, the theology of the just war has finally put the stress on the duty of international organisation.’
2 Compare the inaugural appeal of the Italian Popular Party in 1919: ‘For a centralising State, seeking to restrict all organizing powers and all civic and individual activities, we would substitute a State truly popular, respectful of the natural centres and organisms–the family, classes, Communes–respectful of individual personality and encouraging private initiative.’
3 The theses condensed or quoted in the above article have been gleaned here and there in Don Sturzo's works. These are, in chronological order: Italy and Fascismo (1926), The International Community and the Right of War (1030), Essai de Sociologie (Paris, 1935), Politics and Morality (1937), Church and State (1939), Les Guerres Modernes el la Pensée Catholique (Montreal, 1941) His doctrine on authority and liberty is set forth in a notable chapter in the People and Freedom Group's symposium For Democracy. Mention should also he made of his latest book, The True Lift–Sociology of the Supernatural, now in the press in the United States, in which the theological and mystical basis of his thought finds explicit affirmation–as it does, indeed, in symbolic form, in his dramatic poem II Ciclo della Creazione.
You have
Access