Giacinto Achilli 

Giacinto Achilli was born in the village of Celleno, 18 miles from Viterbo (then part of the Papal States) c. 1803. Accuracy in dating his career is difficult, due to the conflict which followed him, and Achille's own contentious and shifting self-narrative. In 1819 it seems he joined the Dominican order, studying at the convent of the Minerva in Rome. In 1825 he was ordained a priest at Lucca, the next year being appointed to teach at the Dominican convent of Gradi in Viterbo and a professor in the local seminary. Almost immediately, he was deprived of the faculty to teach for an unnamed fault and spent a year at the convent of La Quercia, also in Viterbo. In 1827 he was teaching at the seminary in Viterbo, later being awarded the degree of Master of Sacred Theology at the Roman College of St. Thomas. His career was soon marked by accusations of dissolute lifestyle - starting in 1831. he was accused of the seduction of eighteen-year-old Elena Valente, followed by multiple others, including at Montefiascone (involving Vincenza Guerra) and at Capua, where he had been asked by Cardinal Serra to preach the Lenten sermons. These cases would follow him later and ruin his career. In 1839 he claimed that he 'made effective' papal permission for secularization out of the order.  In 1838, after having served as prior of the convent of San Pietro Martyro in Naples, Achilli was expelled from Naples, again surrounded by accusations of improper lifestyle.  In 1841 on 16 June, the Roman Inquisition permanently suspended him a divinis from his priestly faculties and sentenced him to a penance of three years in a remote Dominican house at Nazzaro. He later claimed that his conflict with the Inquisition arose over statements he made about the doctrine of transubstantiation. (Morning Chronicle 8 Mar 1850: 6) In 1842 he travelled as the servant of Signor Pietro Boccaciampi to Corfu, then a British protectorate, where he assumed the title of cavaliere (knight), declaring himself a political refugee and escapee from the fortress of Ancona. The papal consul asked for his extradition from Corfu, which was refused when it was discovered Achilli had become a Protestant. 

Achilli rapidly turned to controversy and anti-Catholic diatribe, a genre which was on the rise in the British world due to divisions in the Anglican church over Tractarianism and outrage at John Henry Newman's Tract 90. The first of Achilli's two public letters to Pope Gregory XVI attacking Catholicism was printed by the government press in Corfu. (They would be reprinted in English, in an expanded translation by Culling Eardly in 1850). In 1844 he founded an ‘Italian church’ in Corfu, which was presumably modelled on the Church of England, with the support of the Bible Society. The church remained active until he left the island. At the time the Church of England saw itself as a proper replacement for 'papalism', when Roman Catholicism would 'inevitably' collapse due to its inherent superstition, backwardness and failure to engage enlightened modernity. In 1845 the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, translated into Italian by a chaplain, Rev. Blackburn, was noted as “exciting both surprise and admiration for the constitution of our Church”. For his part, Achilli was involved in the publication of L'Indicatore, the first Protestant journal in the Italian language, which was published in Malta (from 1 May).  He would later move to Malta and open an Italian church at the centre of British naval power in the Mediterranean. At Achilli's request, the Rev. Lowndes, minister of the Church of Scotland in Malta, visited Luigi Desanctis. 

In 1847 Achilli travelled to London, and after returning to Malta was appointed a professor at the Malta Protestant College, which from 1846 to 1865 acted as an Anglican missionary training hub at Villa St. Ignatius in St. Julian's. The Institute of Missions, established to welcome former priests and friars, opened in April of 1846: Achilli would travel to Great Britain to collect funds for the institute. Lacking sources, he translated the Beneficio di Cristo back into Italian from an English translation he claimed to have discovered. In December 1847 he participated in the inauguration of an Italian church in Valletta, Malta.

His past, however, continued to dog his career - the next year (1848) he was dismissed from the Malta Protestant College due to charges of immoral behavior, returning to London. Later that year, it appeared that 'the Protestant dream' might receive a very significant fillip -- on 15 November 1848, as the 'bourgeois revolutions' spread throughout Europe, the Minister of Justice of the Papal government (Pellegrino Rossi) was assassinated. Public order broke down, Roman liberals took to the streets, and the Pope (Pius IX) fled to the Bourbon fortress of Gaeta. The Constitutional Assembly convened on 8 February and proclaimed the Roman Republic after midnight on 9 February. Liberals from the Italian diaspora, among them Garibaldi and Mazzini, flooded into Rome to protect what they saw as a democratic Republic which at the same time permitted the Pope to continue as a spiritual leader of Catholics. Supported by a group of evangelicals organized in 'The London Society for the Religious Improvement of Italy and the Italians', (The Times 27 Aug 1849: 3) Achilli left London in January, and was received into the new Roman Republic’s revolutionary club, the Circolo Popolare. There he circulated his writings La chiave di San Pietro and La sedia di San Pietro, and Giovanni Diodati's translation of the Bible. On 24 June, he married Josephine Hely, the youngest daughter of Captain James Hely and sister . Unfortunately for him, Pius IX called on French and other forces, and the Republic was crushed in July. Achilli was arrested and imprisoned. 

His supporters appealed to British public feeling, In August, the Times of London carried a letter to the Editor, representing Achille as 'an eminent Italian theologian' and 'an avowed Protestant' known to 'thousands of British Christians of all parties'. Arrested 'by three men in plain clothes', he was 'now in one of the secret cells of the re-established Holy Office' on questionable legal grounds. 'Dr. Achilli has never meddled in politics', (The Times 17 Aug 1849: 3) reflecting their appeal to British rights of conscience and to the popular anti-Papalism which saw the secular Papal states as the very apogee of repression and backwardness.  Achilli saw his mission as religious, but his case interacted with faultlines in domestic British politics, and sparked representations (particularly by Lewis Tonna, the evangelical secretary to the secretary of the Royal United Services Institution) to 'the proper department of the French government' (The Standard 17 Aug 1849: 3). Petitions were raised by The London Committee, and (at its Glasgow conference in November) by the British Evangelical Alliance. (The Times 1 Dec 1849: 5)  The representations made by this more influential body (led by Sir Culling Eardley Eardley, also treasurer of the London Missionary Society) suggest that the Roman Holy Office also made a defence of their position, on the basis of 'criminal acts... apart from his religious faith.'(The Times 1 Dec 1849: 5) Fortunately for Achilli, the liberal statesman, Alexis de Toqueville, was then Foreign Minister during the Second Republic, and French opinion was divided over support for the Catholic regime. (The Times, 27 Aug 1849: 3; one of the Republic's officers, indeed, was Louis Napoleon's cousin, Carlo.)  His imprisonment became a cause celebre, covered in the press, and in publications such as Eardley's own Rome and the Papacy (1849).  The British Foreign Minister, Palmerston, became involved in both this case, and when Achilli's brother in law, Hely, was accused of bible circulation and proselytism. [Spini 1988: 230] It was later recorded that he escaped from prison through the complicity of the French authorities ('with a French uniform and plenty of money') (Daily News 8 Feb 1850: 5), returning to London via Paris. On 28 March 1850, the Evangelical Alliance held a meeting to formally welcome Achilli back to London (Daily News 29 Mar 1850: 6), as did others in the liberal Protestant elite. Lionized in L'Eco di Savanarola and other Italian reformist newspapers, and supported by former Roman Republicans in exile such as Cesare Agostini, he was the hero of the moment. 'Giacinto Achilli's adventure, [however], would end very quickly and very badly.' [Spini 1988: 246]

Supported by the Evangelical Alliance, Achilli opened a chapel in Dufour's Place, Soho, in London in May, and he remained active in lecturing against the Catholic Church under the auspices of the Evangelical Alliance. The Roman Republic and the Achilli case had radicalized Pius IX's attitudes towards British liberalism, however: Spini notes 

Speaking on January 8, 1850, with the English ambassador to Naples, Lord Temple, regarding the Achilli case, Pope Mastai did not hesitate to declare that he was "ready, with divine help, to give his life {for Catholic truth} and... prevent a propaganda that... aims... to overthrow it from its foundations. [Spini 1988: 230]

It was little wonder, then, that the pope's representative in London, Nicholas Wiseman (whose residence on Golden Square made him a neighbour of Achilli's temporary chapel) continued the propaganda war. He reviewed Eardley's pamphlet The imprisonment and deliverance of Dr. Giacinto Achilli (1850) for the Dublin Review in July, recycling the Holy Office's case that Achilli was guilty of numerous sexual offences and of lying about his own history. In the same year, Wiseman was appointed head of the restored Roman Catholic Hierarchy in Britain, as proclaimed by Pius IX in the bull Universalis Ecclesiae.  The popular Protestant response--in England and throughout the Empire--was visceral and in some cases violent. Achilli found himself both lionized and demonized by partisans on both sides. 

In 1851 Achiili responded to Wiseman's attack with his autobiography, Dealings with the Inquisition, or, Papal Rome, her priests, and her Jesuits, with important disclosures, outlining an extensive account of his life but not (his opponents noted) addressing the accusations of immorality. He continued the debate in public appearances, including in Lectures in the Birmingham Town Hall. On 28 July, John Henry Newman repeated Wiseman’s charges against Achilli in the fifth of his Lectures in the Oratorio on 'The Present Position of Catholics in England', leveraging the moral failings noted in Wiseman's review (Achilli was a “profligate under a cowl”) to demonstrate the failings and 'Logical Inconsistency of the Protestant View'. Achilli had had enough -- he initiated a libel action against Newman in November. Newman took advice from his wide range of elite friends, and felt himself safe under the terms of the revision of the Libel Act ('Lord Campbell's Act'), which had been enacted in 1843, particularly after Campbell himself became Lord Chief Justice in 1850.  When Campbell permitted the action to proceed, however, Catholic proponents began to express less confidence -- a Defence Fund was set up, and the already reactive Catholic community went into overdrive in their support. Newman's team presented 'numerous witnesses from Italy (including two of the women that Achilli had seduced), Corfu, Zakynthos, and Malta. ... The other witnesses included the head of the Protestant College in Malta, Hadfield, and the Earl of Shaftesbury. Achilli denied every single accusation'. (Villani 2022: 125)  Newman's defence - that his statements were true -- failed, and at the end of January 1853, he was convicted and sentenced to pay a fine of £100. It was, as Mirow notes, not a proceeding which reflected well on any of the participants: 'The case demonstrates the construction and interpretation of Italy and Italians by the English. Achilli and the Italian witnesses were considered beings from outside the common under-standing of the English judge and jury, who imposed their own ideas about Italy on them, including deceitfulness and craftiness. Italians were simply not to be believed. Women as witnesses were not believed by the jury because they were women, and either foreign or servants.' (Mirow 1996). Some Protestants used the case to forward popular anti-Catholicism, Catholics to continue a scurrilous line in which all ex-priests who left the Church in favour of Protestants were de facto portrayed as morally corrupt. Both would eventually realize that they were assuming false, or at least temporary, friendships between Church and culture which would change radically over the next century. 

Over the longer term, despite his loss, Newman served no prison time, had his fee paid by his wealthy friends, and rose to become a star in the Catholic firmament - in 2019 he was canonized as a saint. Despite Achilli's win, the information which came out in the trial was so damaging that he decided to relocate to the United States. The trust of his Protestant friends proved, on investigation in the Italian judicial sources, to be misplaced. (Spini 1988: 368) Catholic opinion was global, moreover, and his reputation followed him, particularly when he arrived in the US with a party of Swedenborgians. The drive for the missionizing of Italy was not nearly so well developed as it would become (under Gavazzi and others), and the great flood of Italian migration had yet to impinge upon American consciousness. Even though American churches were wealthy and extensive, Achilli did not do as well here as he initially did in Britain. While the American Bible Union published his translation of the Greek New Testament into Italian, there were claims that his translation was in fact plagiarized. He sent his wife back to Italy to live with her family, while he attempted to reestablish himself. In 1859 Achilli appeared before a JP in Jersey City in December, accused of adultery with a Miss Bogue. The next year he left Miss Bogue and his eldest son to the care of John Humphrey Noyes' radical utopian, perfectionist Christian commune at Oneida, New York, with a note implying he would commit suicide and that spirits would carry him off to see the Lord. He was never seen again.

Unlike many who take more partisan lines, Spini (1988: 211) notes that Achilli's larger issue was his too rapid passage from Catholicism to what seemed to many to be a cognate structure, the Anglican Church. In his view, actors such as Achilli, Ciocci and di Menna failed where Salvatore Ferretti, founder of the "Free Church" model succeeded: here was a model with much greater institutional coherence and internal discipline, 'essentially reminiscent of that of Bourg-du-Four or a somewhat attenuated Plymouth [Brethren], with a strictly orthodox doctrinal scheme, but at the same time reduced and flexible enough to prevent splits from the outset on theological questions.'  (Spini 1988: 211) Personally, Achilli was (as one contemporary noted) a spiritual 'brigand', (Spini 1988: 224) an opportunist left too much to himself, and incapable of mobilizing an authentic spiritual reform movement. 

Sources

Eardly, Culling, Rome and the Papacy. A letter. Translated from the French, with introductory remarks, by Sir C. E. Eardley, Bart. [Reprinted from the “Christian Times.”] London 1849

Matsumoto-Best, Saho, Britain and the Papacy in the Age of Revolution, 1846–1851 (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell, 2003).

Mirow, Matthew C., 'Roman Catholicism on Trial in Victorian England: The Libel Case of John Henry Newman and Dr. Achilli', The Catholic Lawyer 36.4 (1996): 401-453.

Spini, Giorgio, Risorgimento e Protestanti (Torino: Claudiana 1988; 2nd ed)

Villani, Stefano, Making Italy Anglican: Why the Book of Common Prayer was translated into Italian (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2022)