Luigi F. L. Desanctis

Luigi Francesco Leonardo Desanctis [often referred to in English publications as "De Sanctis"] was born in Rome (Ss. Silvestro and Martino dei Monti) on 31 December 1808, the eldest of the twenty-four children (across four wives) born to Biagio Desanctis, and his first wife Camilla Forzi. Moved by the Christian charity he observed among the Clerics Regular, Ministers to the Sick (or Camillians) he joined the order at the age of sixteen, and progressed to a novitiate spent in the house of the Order annexed to the church of S. Maria in Trivio. After two years, having become professed, he began the three years of the second novitiate, which, in addition to rhetoric, philosophy and scholastic theology, included optional studies in biblical exegesis and ecclesiastical history. He was admitted to the priesthood in 1831. Identified as a bright student, he was then sent to the Archiginnasio in Rome to study theology (baccalaureate, 1834; graduated 1836). In 1834, aged just twenty-five, he was appointed leading lecturer of philosophy and theology in the diocese of Viterbo, and interim superior of his order’s house there. Shortly afterwards, he was sent as ‘reader’ to the order’s house of Genoa, where he worked among the victims of a cholera epidemic. In the summer of 1837 he was transferred to the hospital of Ss. Salvatore in S. Giovanni in Laterano, to help deal with the cholera crisis in Rome.

As early as 1835, De Sanctis had been elected a member of the Accademia di Scienze e Lettere, and the Accademia di Religione Cattolica due to the "doctrine and ingenuity shown in defending Catholic doctrines" (Vinay, p. 32). On 9 June 1837 he was appointed by the Holy Office as "qualifier" (with the task of examining the writings of the accused); as an examiner in the Roman College; finally, from 1838 to 1842, the task of discussing numerous theological theses at the faculty of the Archiginnasio (where he acquired the rank of censor emeritus). Many of his interests lay in apologetics, including papers on Enlightenment criticism of the Bible, the themes of the Synod of Pistoia in 1786 and the theses of the Reformation. In 1837 he read a dissertation against Protestant missions. Many of his inner circle, such as G. Perrone, the well-known theologian, and J. P. Roothaan, were Jesuits,

In February 1840, Desanctis was appointed curate of the church of S. Maria Maddalena in Rome. While this was a position of some influence, it gave him an insight into the bureaucratic and police duties which fell to clergy in papal Rome. His study in sacred and patristic texts, his disappointing pastoral experiences and the deleterious picture of moral corruption widespread among the clergy themselves, caused significant cognitive dissonance. "Wanting to demonstrate to my pupils that the religious system of Rome was that of the Bible’, he wrote in a letter to Cardinal Patrizi: ‘I began to study this divine book carefully, and to my great surprise not only did I not find the usages [dommi] of Rome, but I found others quite contrary to them " (The Indicator III, Jan. 1, 1847, pp. 68)

In October 1841, with this crisis of conscience emerging, Desanctis applied to participate in a course of the Ignatian ‘spiritual exercises’. Two years later he was tried and condemned by the Holy Office for "having expressed feelings of little respect for the pope, not believing him to be vicar of Christ, and to have Italian [nationalist] tendencies". On 11 September 1847, assisted by Isaac Lowndes (who spent some time in Malta, and then worked in Greece with the LMS and the Church of Scotland auxiliary of the Bible Society) and the former Dominican Giacinto Achilli, Desanctis fled from Rome and reached Ancona from which he embarked for Corfu, then under British control. After several weeks there, he then relocated to Malta, which had become the base for interdenominational Protestant missions to Italy. Involving himself in evangelization to the Italian speaking community (with a break in March-April 1848, when he responded to an invitation from the Free Church of Scotland to preach in Tuscany), he then taught at a Church of England institute for former priests and began the career of public speaking and writing which would give him great stature in the Italian protestant world. In November 1848, he published the first issue of Il Cattolico Cristiano, producing articles - divided into four sections (dogmatics, controversy, history, variety) - intending to "give a course in Christian theology within everyone's reach". These became the basis for his extensive later writing.

On 12 March 1849, he published an open letter to Pius IX (then a refugee in the fortress of Gaeta), calling on him to renounce temporal power, and support evangelical and the patriotic cause. Other writings, with a vituperative tone, soon followed: La confessione (Malta 1849), La tradizione (in Il Cattolico cristiano, 1 June-15 Sept 1849), Il celibato de'preti (first edition 1850, and then repeatedly reprinted). Desanctis called for religious reform in Italy, to return to "the primitive purity of the Gospel", identifying with “papism” the root of all the evils confronting Italy. Following primitivist evangelicalism and the Franco-Swiss Reveil tradition, his dictum was "The generic formula of all our theological dogmatics: everything is in the Bible, nothing outside the Bible".

On 7 June 1849 he married the Scottish-born Martha Sommerville (c. 1820-1884), daughter of James Sommerville, governor of Gozo. The changed political climate, the difficulties encountered in evangelization and the closing of his newspaper, however, soon forced them to leave the island. They accepted the invitation of the Geneva-based Comité Italien-Suisse to move to Geneva to preach to the Italian exiles. The Desanctis family arrived there on March 12, 1850, just in time to welcome the first of three children: they were to have three children together, Enrico (1850), Luigi (1851, died young) and Elisa (1852). For three years, Desanctis led Sunday worship, biblical expositions, and taught some former priests (on subjects such as the Confessio Helvetica posterior 1566). In the years 1851-52 he gave public lectures on Italian religious history, and wrote two major works: the autobiographical Popery and Jesuitism at Rome (trans. it. Roma papale, Florence 1865) to combat the pro-Catholic tendencies of English puseyism, and Il primato del papa (The Primacy of the Pope, 1851), a biblically-referenced dismissal of the papal dominance written in the context of the restoration of temporal power in Rome. Although Desanctis continued in the spiritual tradition of the Eglise évangélique libre, he was drawn to affiliate with the Waldensian Church, through his admiration for its witness, and his friendship with leading figures such as the pugliese exile Bonaventura Mazzarella (1818 – 1882), then studying in Geneva, but shortly to be sent to Genova; and with Paolo Geymonat and Giovanni Pietro Meille). On 31 August 1852 he was ordained pastor, and sent to assist Meille in the evangelization in Turin. Desanctis arrived there on 23 September. 1852. After a short and very constructive initial period, the ideological disputes to which Desanctis was prone contributed to divisions in the nascent Italian evangelical movement, leading in 1854 to a division between the Waldensians and the ‘liberi’ [‘free church’ Christians]. Desanctis temporarily withdrew from the Waldensian Church (5-15 September), adhering to the "free" protestants organized in the Italian Evangelical Society of Turin. His primitivism attracted him to models which avoided institutional conditioning in the work of evangelization, but works such as his Principii di fede e di disciplina ... (1855) [Principles of faith and discipline], written for the church in Turin, drew on the Eglise libre of Geneva and rejected radical Darbyite or Plymouth Brethen positions.

His Turin period saw a sea-change in De Sanctis’ writing - in 1858 he became editor of the periodical L'Amico di casa and edited translations of some of the classic texts of the Reformation. Two years later he re-edited the apologetic piece I valdesi and wrote Should you read the Bible? on the necessity of reading the sacred text "prohibited" by Catholicism. The polemical writings Il Purgatorio (Turin 1861) and La Messa (ibid. 1862) were of some success.

In 1860, after being sent on a short term mission to Lombardia, Desanctis moved his family to the evangelical community of Genoa to replace Mazzarella and devoted himself to the formation of a school for evangelists (1862). In 1864 he reacted decisively against the Darbyite tendencies advanced by Guicciardini and Rossetti, with a declaration in L'Eco della Verita (January 2) and with the tract I plimuttisti (Florence 1864). Finding himself in the minority in the community of Genoa, in May he resigned as a preacher of the Italian Evangelical Churches and rejoined the Waldensians, whose principles he had defended. The following summer he moved to Florence, worked with Alessandro Gavazzi on a project for the union of evangelical churches. There he took over the direction of two periodicals (L'Amico di casa and L'Eco della verità), and held courses in apologetics in the Waldensian faculty of theology, where from 1868 he became lecturer.

Desanctis died shortly after, on 31 December 1869 in Florence. He was buried in the Cimitero degli inglesi. The Evangelical Churches of Italy erected a monument to him in the Florentine cemetery of Porta Pinti. Though not a thinker of particular originality, Desanctis’ great contribution was as a controversialist in key period of contestation between the emerging Italian state and revanchist Catholicism. For that reason alone (as Spini notes, viz Vinay, p. 738), a prominent place in the genesis of Italian Risorgimento Protestantism, both for the impulse given to the spread of evangelical ideas, and for the clarification and definition of the fundamental doctrines of the Italian evangelicals. Many Protestant leaders - such as Paleario, Gavazzi, Chiesi amongst others - used his work as a stepping off point for their apologetics. Also interesting is his own personal story which in some respects expresses and anticipates some of the more serious crises internal to nineteenth-century Catholicism. Numbers of his works were translated into English by Maria Betts, and contributed to the Protestant anti-Catholicism so typical of the mid-19th century. In 1871 his library was acquired by the prominent Free Church italophile and missionary to Livorno, Rev. Robert Walter Stewart, and donated to the Waldensian Facoltà di Teologia in the Palazzo Ricasoli-Salviati, Florence.

[comp. by M. P. Hutchinson]

v.1 8.11.2020

Sources for this entry:

Fantappiè, Carlo, 'DESANCTIS, Luigi', Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani - Volume 39 (1991), in https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/luigi-desanctis_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/

Pilone, Luca, 'Luigi Desanctis', Dizionario Biografico dei Protestanti in Italia, http://www.studivaldesi.org/dizionario/evan_det.php?evan_id=257

Other Sources:

Anon., Breve storia di un sacerdote romano il dottor Luigi Desanctis dedicata ai suoi concittadini, Firenze: Tipografia Claudiana, 1871.

Betts, Maria, The life of Luigi Desanctis, London 1905.

Chiesi, Tito, ‘Origine della propagazione del Vangelo in Toscana’, in A. Gambaro, Riforma religiosa nel carteggio ined. di R. Lambruschini, II, Torino 1924, pp. 326 s., 329, 332;

Chiesi, Tito, Biografia di Luigi Desanctis, Firenze: Claudiana, 1870

Chiminelli, Piero, Bibliografia della Riforma in Italia, Roma: Saca Ed. Bilynchnis, 1920

Di Silvestri Falconieri, F., ‘La conversione e la fuga di Luigi Desanctis’, in Profili, ricordi, aneddoti di protestanti illustri, Roma 1920, pp. 205-144

Gavazzi, Alessandro, Cenni biografici del dott. Luigi Desanctis, Firenze: Tipografia Nazionale di V. Sodi, 1870.

Hugon, Augusto Armand and Giovanni Gonnet, Bibliografia valdese, Torre Pellice 1953.

Maselli, Domenico, Tra risveglio e millennio, Torino 1974

Sanfilippo, Paolo, Il protestantesimo italiano nel Risorgimento, Roma 1961

Spini, Giorgio, L'Evangelo e il berretto frigio, Torino 1971,

Spini, Giorgio, Risorgimento e protestanti, Napoli 1956, pp. 217 s., 263 e passim

van den End, Th., P. Geymonat, Torino: Claudiana, 1969, pp. 111-20, 134, 136, 170 ss., 184 ss.

Vinay, Valdo, ‘La crisi spirituale di Luigi Desanctis’, in Protestantesimo, XIV (1959), pp. 145-62.

Vinay, Valdo, Evangelici italiani esuli a Londra durante il Risorgimento, Torino 1961

Vinay, Valdo, Facoltà valdese di teologia (1855-1955), Torre Pellice 1955, pp. 74 s., 84-88;

Vinay, Valdo, Luigi Desanctis e il movimento evangelico fra gli italiani durante il Risorgimento, Torino: Claudiana, 1965 (which includes a Bibliografia degli scritti di Luigi Desanctis (pp. 353 ss.).

Selected Works:

1840s:

A Pio IX., Vescovo di Roma. Lettera. (1849)

La confessione, Malta 1849

La tradizione (in Il Cattolico cristiano, 1 June 1849),

È necessaria all'Italia una riforma religiosa (in Il Cattolico cristiano, 2 April 1849)

1850s:

Popery, Puseyism and Jesuitism at Rome (London 1852; published first as a series of letters in English in the evangelical Anglican publication The Record, then in Italian as Roma Papale descritta in una serie di lettere con note …)

Il celibato de'preti (1 ed. 1850 s.l., other editions Malta 1851, Livorno 1861, Torino 1862, Firenze 1883).

Il primato del papa (s. n. t. 1851),

Principii di fede e di disciplina ... (1855)

I valdesi

Si può leggere la Bibbia?

1860s:

La Confessione, saggio dommatico-storico ... riveduto ed accresciuto dall'autore. (Torino, 1861).

La Religione degli avi, (Firenze, 1861)

Il Purgatorio (Torino 1861)

La messa (Torino. 1862)

I plimuttisti (Firenze 1864)

Il Papa: osservazioni dottrinali e storiche. (Firenze, 1864).

La Questione Italiana considerata sotto l'aspetto politico e religioso. (Firenze, 1866.)