Ugo Janni

Ugo Janni was born in L'Aquila on 10 September, 1865, to Enrico Janni and Carilia nee Strina, part of a wealthy family strongly committed to the cause of the unification of Italy. His father was a risorgimento activist, and had been imprisoned for three years in the prison of Castel Sant'Elmo, in Naples, for his activities against the Bourbon government. In 1859-60 he had also enlisted as a volunteer with Garibaldi and in 1867 he participated in the battle of Mentana. When he had a son, he named him 'Ugo', after Fr Ugo Bassi, the garibaldino Barnabite priest sentenced to death by the Austrians for Italian nationalist activities in August 1849. Such liberal nationalist involvements were common among those who later saw Protestant modernism as a necessary future for Italian national resurrection.

With these familial civil commitments, and amidst this political turbulence, at the age of 15 Janni, although a Catholic, approached the then very active Methodist community of L'Aquila led by Vincenzo Caressa. As Giorgio Spini points out, the adherents of the Methodist Evangelical Church in Italy were above all "liberal Catholics, who had matured their detachment from papal Rome in the climate of the Risorgimento", and this Church was the most "Italian of the Protestant churches then operating in Italy" (p. 185).

Fascinated by military life, in November 1882 Janni went to Maddaloni, determined (against the advice of his family) to pursue a military career. A long convalescence at home (1887-88) led him to change his mind, and determine to finish (July 1888) his interrupted high school studies and subsequently to enrol in the law faculty of the Università di Roma. While attending high school, Janni had, through his professor of philosophy, Filippo Cicchitti Suriani, been attracted by Count Enrico Campello's proposals for the reform of Italian Catholicism. In 1882, Campello left the Roman Catholic Church and founded the Chiesa Cattolica Nazionale Italiana ('National Italian Catholic Church). Translated into English, Campello's autobiography and work also had not insignificant influence in the Anglophone world. Janni decided to abandon both his Roman Catholicism and his legal studies to join this Church and to devote himself to theology with a view to ordination in Campello's church. As such, Janni was caught up in the broad wave of reformism and protest then sweeping through the European Catholic world, inspired in part by new nation formation, modernism, and reaction against the authoritarian turn by Pius IX which reached it's height in the First Vatican Council. Core to its agenda was opposition to the growing centralization of the Curia and the pontiff's temporal claims, a democratizing push towards the creation of national Churches, and support of liberal nationalist governments.

Opposition to hardline anti-modernist doctrines - such as papal infallibility - converged on previous divisions in the Cathoic Church, particularly after the Catholic hierarchy was reestablished in the Netherlands in 1853, and the doctrinal assertions of Vatican I in 1870. After Vatican I, a number of churches broke from the Holy See and subsequently entered into union with the Old Catholic See of Utrecht, a movement which resulted (in 1854) in the formation of an Old Catholic seminary in Bern. Having made his choice, Janni left Italy and went to study theology there. He finished his studies in the Church and Waldensian faculties in Via Roma and on 22 December 1889 he was ordained priest by Bishop Eduard Herzog of the Christian Catholic Church of Switzerland, in the name of the Bishop of Salisbury.

His first pastoral charge was Sanremo, a congregation which had been founded in 1876: here his activity as a preacher and lecturer met with considerable favour. In this city, from 1890, amid many organizational and economic difficulties, he resumed publishing, as director-owner Il Labaro, the newspaper which had been founded by Campello in 1882. Under his direction, the periodical continued to be published until 1901, giving voice to Italian Catholic dissent but also signaling the progressive decline of Campello's Italian Catholic Church.

In May 1895, Janni married Felicita Alessandrina Long; from the marriage were born Elsie and Ethel Evangelina. Felicita was, for Janni, a faithful life companion and tireless collaborator. She coordinated the internal activities of the church (Sunday school, singing, music, youth club) and during the First World War set up a soldier's room in the church premises for the reception of soldiers and veterans. Until 1935 (when the authorities imposed its closure under pressure from the Vatican), she directed the Waldensian elementary school and after-school care, attended by Protestants and non-Protestants alike.

By the end of 1900, even before Campello's abjuration and his return to the Church of Rome in 1902, Janni had become convinced that the Italian Catholic Church lacked a future, and refused the offer of the bishop of Salisbury to take charge of an Italian-speaking church in London. Instead, he asked the Waldensian Church to welcome his entire Old Catholic community of Sanremo as individual members of the Waldensian Church. In April 1901 a new Church Council was elected and Janni replaced the pastor Giovanni Petraj (who had overseen the Waldensian Community in San Remo since 1888). In September 1902, the Synod recognized Janni's Italian Catholic Church ordination, and he became a member of the pastoral body of the Waldensian Church.

The original Waldensian community in Sanremo met - collocated with it's school, on Via Umberto. Notwithstanding normal Waldensian regulations, Janni in Sanremo for the rest of his career. It was through a considerable bequest by a religious nun, Sister Laura (the German-born Carolina Elena Laura Heye, 1830-1906) that a large piece of land was made available on the corner of via Carli and via Roma. (It was originally the site where the Anglican church of San Giovanni Battista once stood, since destroyed in a fire and rebuilt elsewhere). The property was sold in late 1903, making it possible to build 'La Casa Valdese', with classrooms, rooms for youth activities, and a manse, but also and above all the Church designed by architect Giovenale Gastaldi Jr. with the technical consultancy of the engineer Liborio Coppola, a member of the Waldensian Evangelization Committee.

At the time he took it over, Janni's Waldensian congregation included 39 members and 9 catechumens, and met in via Principe Amedeo (today via G. Mameli). The new Waldensian 'temple' was inaugurated on Friday 22 November 1907. The following Sunday the first service was celebrated with the preaching of leading pastor and Geymonat disciple Teofilo Gay. Janni carried out an intense program of evangelization, both through the publication of important historical-religious and theological works and repeated public conferences. The Schools continued their work until 1935 when they were closed due to provisions of the Fascist regime.

Throughout his time as a Waldensian pastor, he attempted to influence the Synods (over which he presided as Moderator twice, in 1911 and in 1922) to discuss evangelization, eschatology, and liturgy. The organizing theme of this lay in Janni's Catholic reformist passions and -- from his conviction that a substantial Christian unity had survived the medieval fracture between East and West and that of the sixteenth century between Reformation and Counter-Reformation -- his deep commitment to ecumenism and Church reunion, which Zussini and others have named pancristianesimo ('pan-Christianity'). He was the editor of the journal Fede e Vita. Janni maintained close relations with the Italian Catholic modernists, such as Ernest Buonaiuti and Alessandro Favero, the latter with whom (along with Giovanni Luzzi and Wladimiro Levitsky) Janni was a cofounder of the League of prayer for the reunion of the churches. Later leaders included the Anglican pastor George Barber, Giuseppe Donati and Count Giuseppe Panciera di Zoppola. With the Waldensian Moderator, Giampiccoli, and Ernesto Comba, he defended Italian intervention in World War I in the pamphlet La Guerra e il protestantesimo (The War and Protestantism), 'proclaiming that the cause of the Entente was the same as Protestantism.' (Toscano) Janni envisioned a Church which brought together the historical branches of Christianity (Greek, Roman, Protestant), whose adherents were willing to accept that their own confession did not embody all aspects of the faith by itself. In his larger volume I valori cristiani e la cultura moderna (Christian values ​​and modern culture) accepted modernism's method of immanence, which he saw would result in "the penetration of Protestant culture into the Roman church", to the point of making it capable of "joining the other great Christian confessions". All the Christian Churches needed to be renewed for a "reform of a religious society". (Perin)

Janni died in Sanremo on 30 July 1938. In the Waldensian Church, and more generally in the world of Italian Protestantism, he had forged a reputation as a very lively and attentive presence, a tireless writer and participant in journals such as La Luce, Rivista Cristiana, Bilychnis and Conscientia. As Spini notes of his legacy among the Waldensians and Italian Protestantism in general:

The bulk of the Waldensians, and of Italian Evangelicals in general, remained anchored, as before and perhaps more than before, to the neo-pietism of the Awakening and to the theological orthodoxy of the Evangelical Alliance. However, with that entry, the Waldensian Church presented itself less and less as a sort of missionary offshoot of the people of the Valleys and more and more as an ideal Christian-liberal, ecumenical goal, open to all Italians in search of the evangelical Truth, rather than perched peevishly on past grievances... it is impressive how much Janni's arrival came at the right time to enable the Waldensian Church, and to a certain extent all of Evangelical Italy with her, to be able to face the dramatic hour of [the crisis of modernism] in a very decent way. (Spini, 258)

Sources:

Di Campello, Enrico; William Arthur (transl), Count Campello: an autobiography: giving his reasons for leaving the papal church, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1881

Milaneschi, C., Ugo Janni: pioniere dell’ecumenismo (Torino: Claudiana, 1979).

Perin, Raffaella, 'Italian Modernism and relations with Protestant Culture', in M. Hutchinson and P. Zanini (eds.), Brill Global History of Italian Protestantism, vol. 2. (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).

Ronchi De Michelis, Laura, ‘Janni, Ugo’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 62 (2004) (https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/ugo-janni_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/, accessed 25 November 2022).

Spini, Giorgio, Italia Liberale e Protestante (Torino: Claudiana, 2002)

Toscano, Mario, 'World War I, Fascism and the Religious context for Italian Protestantism', in M. Hutchinson and P. Zanini (eds.), Brill Global History of Italian Protestantism, vol. 2. (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming)

Zussini, Alessandro (ed.), ‘Ugo Janni e i modernisti’, Fonti e documenti 5-6 (1976-77), pp. 119-314.