New
scenarios in the Coronavirus era.
Is
Coronavirus a divine punishment?
Political,
historical and theological considerations
March
12, 2020
The theme of my conversation is: The new scenarios in Italy and in Europe
during and after the Coronavirus crisis. I will not speak about this theme
from a medical or scientific point of view as I do not have this competence. I
will instead consider the argument from three other points of view: the point
of view of a scholar of the political and social sciences; the point of view of
a historian; and the point of view of a philosopher of history.
As a
scholar of the social sciences
The political and social sciences study human behavior in its social,
political and geopolitical context. From this point of view I am not inquiring
into the origins of the Coronavirus and its nature, but rather the social
consequences that are happening and will happen.
An epidemic is the diffusion on the national or world scale (in this case
it is called a pandemic) of an infective illness that afflicts a large number
of individuals of a determined population in a very brief span of time.
The Coronavirus, which has been renamed Covid-19, is an infective illness
that began to spread through the world from China. Italy is the Western nation
that is now apparently the most afflicted by it.
Why is Italy under quarantine today? Because, as the most
attentive observers have understood from the very beginning, the problem of the
Coronavirus is not its fatality rate but the rapidity with which the contagion
spreads among the population. Everyone agrees that the illness in itself is not
terribly lethal. A sick person who contracts the Coronavirus and is assisted by
specialized health care personnel in well-equipped health care facilities can
heal.
But if, because of the rapid spread of the contagion, which
can potentially strike millions of people simultaneously, the number of sick
people rapidly increases, there will not be enough health care facilities and
personnel: the sick will die because they are deprived of the necessary care.
In order to cure grave cases it is necessary to have the support of intensive
care in order to ventilate the lungs. If this support is lacking, the patients
die. If the number of those who are sick increases, health care structures are
not capable of offering intensive care to everyone and an ever greater number
of patients will succumb to the disease.
Epidemiological projections are inexorable and they justify
the precautions being taken. “If uncontrolled,
the Coronavirus could strike the entire Italian
population, but let’s say that in the end only 30% become infected, that would
be about 20 million people. Let’s say that out of these – reducing the rate –
10% go into crisis, meaning that without intensive care they will succumb to
the disease. This would mean that 2 million people die directly, plus all of
those who will die indirectly as a result of the collapse of the health care
system and the social and economic order.”[1]
The collapse of the
health care system in turn would have other consequences. The first is the
collapse of the nation’s productive system.
The central banks
would not be capable of saving such a situation: “The crisis after the Coronavirus
does not have a monetary solution” writes Maurizio Ricci in La Repubblica on February 28. Stefano Feltri in turn observes: “The typical
Keynesian recipes – creating jobs and artificial demand with public money – are
not practical when the workers do not leave their homes, trucks do not
circulate, stadiums are closed and people do not schedule vacations or work
trips because they are sick at home or afraid of the contagion. Aside from
avoiding liquidity crises for businesses by suspending tax payments and
interest payments to banks, the political system is powerless. A government
decree is not enough to reorganize the supply chain.”[2]
The
expression “perfect storm” was coined several years ago by the economist Nouriel Roubini to indicate a mix of financial conditions that are such
that it leads to a collapse of the market. “There will be a global recession due to Coronavirus”, Roubini
declares, adding: “This crisis will
spill over and result in a disaster.”[3]
Roubinis’s forecasts have been confirmed by
the drop in the price of oil after the failure of OPEC to agree with Saudi
Arabia, which has decided to increase its production and cut prices in defiance
of Russia, and are probably destined to be further confirmed as events unfold.
The weak point of
globalization is interconnection, the talisman word of our time, from the
economy to religion. Pope Francis’ Querida
Amazonia is a hymn to interconnection. But today the global system is
fragile precisely because it is so interconnected. And the system of
distribution of products is one of the chains of this economic interconnection.
It is not a problem
of the markets but of real economy. Not only finance but also industry,
commerce, and agriculture, that is to say the pillars of the economy of a
nation, can all collapse if the system of production and distribution enters
into a crisis.
But there is
another point that begins to be glimpsed: there is not only the collapse of the
health system; there is not only a possible crack in the economy; but there can
also be a collapse of the state and public authority – in a word, social
anarchy. The riots in Italian prisons
indicate a trend in this direction.
Epidemics have
psychological consequences because of the panic that they can provoke. Between
the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century
social psychology was born as a science. One of its first exponents was Gustave Le Bon, the author of a famous
book entitled Psychologie des foules [Psychology
of crowds] (1895).
Analyzing collective behavior, Le Bon explains how in a crowd the
individual undergoes a psychological change by which feelings and passions are
transmitted from one individual to another “by contagion” like that which happens
with infectious diseases. The modern theory
of contagion, which was inspired by Le Bon, explains how, protected by the
anonymity of a crowd, the most calm individual can become aggressive, acting at
the suggestion of others or in imitation of them. Panic is one of those
feelings that is spread by social contagion, as happened during the French
Revolution in the period that was called the “Great fear” [4].
If a health crisis is
compounded by an economic crisis, an uncontrolled wave of panic can trigger the
violent impulses of the crowd. The state is then replaced by tribes and gangs,
especially in the outskirts of large urban centers. The social war, has been
theorized by the São
Paulo Forum, a conference of Latin
American ultra-leftist organizations, is practiced in Latin America,
from Bolivia to Chile, from Venezuela to Ecuador, and may soon expand to Europe.
Someone
might observe that this process corresponds to the project of the globalist
lobbies, the “masters of chaos” as Professor Renato Cristin defines them in his
excellent book. But if this is true, it is also true that what emerges defeated
from this crisis is the utopia of globalization, presented as the great road
destined to lead to the unification of the human race. Globalization actually destroys
space and pulverizes distances: today the key to escaping the epidemic is
social distance, the isolation of the individual. The quarantine is
diametrically opposed to the “open society” hoped for by George Soros. The
conception of man as a relationship, typical of a certain school of
philosophical personalism, declines.
Pope Francis, after the
failure of Querida Amazonia, focused
heavily on the conference dedicated to the “global compact” schedules at the
Vatican for this coming May 14. This conference however has been rescheduled
and has become more distant, not only in time but in its ideological
presuppositions. The Coronavirus brings us back to reality. It is not the end
of borders that was announced after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Instead, it is
the end of the world without borders, the end of the “global village.” It is
not the triumph of the new world order: it is the triumph of the new world
disorder. The political and social scenario is that of a society that is
disintegrating and decomposing. Is it all organized? It’s possible. But history
is not a deterministic succession of events. The master of history is God, not
the masters of chaos. The killer of globalization is a global virus called the
Coronavirus.
As historian
At this point the historian will step in to replace the political
observer, seeking to see things from the perspective of a greater chronological
distance. Epidemics have accompanied the history of humanity from the very
beginning all the way to the twentieth century, and they are always intertwined
with two other scourges: wars and economic crises. The last great epidemic, the
Spanish influenza in the 1920s, was closely connected to the First World War
and the Great Depression that began in 1929, also known as “the Great Crash,”
an economic and financial crisis that convulsed the economic world at the end
of the Twenties, with grave repercussions that extended throughout the 1930s.
These events were followed by the Second World War.
Laura Spinnay is an
English scientific journalist who has written a book called Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It
Changed the World.[5] Her book
informs us that between 1918 and 1920 the virus which began in Spain infected
approximately 500 million people, including even inhabitants of remote islands
of the Pacific Ocean and of the glacial Arctic Sea, causing the deaths of
50-100 million individuals, ten times more than the First World War.
World War I
contributed to the flu’s virulence, helping the virus spread throughout the
globe. Spinnay writes: “It is difficult to imagine a mechanism of contagion
more effective than the mobilization of enormous quantities of troops in the
height of the autumn wave, who then reached the four corners of the planet
where they were greeted by festive crowds. In essence, what the Spanish flu
taught us is that another influenza pandemic is inevitable, but whether it will
cause ten million or one hundred million victims depends only on what the world
will be like in which it spreads.”[6]
In the interconnected world of globalization, the ease with
which contagion can spread is certainly greater than it was a century ago. Who
can deny it?
But the historian’s perspective goes even further back in
time. The twentieth century was the most terrible century of history, but there
was another terrible century, “The Calamitous Fourteenth Century,” as Barbara
Tuchman calls it in her book A Distant
Mirror.[7]
I would like to focus on this historical period that marked
the end of the Medieval era and the beginning of the Modern era. I do so basing
myself on historical works that are not Catholic but serious and objective in
their research.
The Rogations are processions convoked by the Church in
order to implore the help of Heaven against calamities. The Rogations contain
the prayer “A fame, peste et bello libera
nos, Domine:” – from famine, plague, and war, deliver us, O Lord. As the
historian Robert Lopez writes, the liturgical invocation present in the
Rogation ceremonies “unfolded with all of its drama over the course of the
fourteenth century.”[8] “Between the tenth
and twelfth centuries,” Lopez observes, “none of the great scourges that mow
down humanity seem to have raged in any great measure; neither pestilence, of
which there is no mention during this period, nor famine, nor war, which had a
greatly reduced number of victims. Moreover, the expanse of agriculture was
widened by a slow softening of the climate. We have proof of this in the
retreat of the glaciers in the mountains and of the icebergs in the northern
seas, in the extension of wine growing into regions like England where today it
is no longer practical, and in the abundance of water in regions of the Sahara
that were later reconquered by the desert.”[9]
The picture of the fourteenth century was much, much
different, as natural catastrophes combined with serious religious and
political upheavals.
The fourteenth century was a century of deep religious
crisis: it opened in 1303 with the famous “slap” of Anagni against Boniface
VIII, one of the greatest humiliations of the papacy in history; it saw the
transference of the papacy for seventy years to the city of Avignon in France
(1308-1378); and it ended with forty years of the Western Schism from 1378 to
1417, in which Catholic Europe was divided between two and then three popes. A
century later, in 1517, the Protestant Revolution lacerated the unity of the
faith of Christianity.
If the thirteenth century was a period of peace in Europe,
the fourteenth century was an era of permanent war. We need only think of the
“Hundred Years’ War” between France and England (1339-1452) and of the assault
of the Turks against the Byzantine Empire with the conquest of Adrianople (1362).
In this century Europe experienced an economic crisis due to
climatic changes caused, not by man, but by glaciation. The climate of the
Middle Ages had been mild and sweet, like its customs. But the fourteenth
century experienced an abrupt harshening of climatic conditions.
The rains and floods of the spring of 1315 led to a general
famine that assailed all of Europe, above all the northern regions, causing the
death of millions of people. The famine spread everywhere. The elderly
voluntarily refused food in the hope of enabling the young to survive and
historians of the time write of many cases of cannibalism.
One of the principal consequences of the famines was
agricultural destructuring. In this period there were great movement of
agricultural depopulation characterized by flight from the land and the
abandonment of villages; the forest invaded fields and vineyards. As a result
of the abandonment of the fields there was a strong reduction of soil
productivity and a depletion of livestock.
If bad weather causes famine, the subsequent weakening of
the body of entire populations causes disease. The historians Ruggero Romano
and Alberto Tenenti show how in the fourteenth century the recurring cycle of
famines and epidemics intensified.[10] The last great
plague had erupted between 747 and 750; almost six hundred years later it
reappeared, striking four times in the space of a decade.
The plague came
from the Orient and arrived in Constantinople in the autumn of 1347. Over the
next three years it infected all of Europe, all the way to Scandinavia and
Poland. It was the black plague, of which Boccaccio speaks in the Decameron. Italy lost about half of its
inhabitants. Agnolo di Tura, the chronicler of Siena, lamented that no one
could be found to bury the dead, and that he had to bury his five sons with his
own hands. Giovanni Villani, the chronicler of Florence, was struck by the
plague in such a sudden way that his chronicle ends abruptly in the middle of a
sentence.
The European
population that had surpassed 70 million inhabitants at the beginning of the
1300s was reduced by a century of wars, epidemics, and famines to 40 million;
it shrank by more than one third.
The famines,
plague, and wars of the fourteenth century were interpreted by the Christian
people as signs of God’s chastisement.
Saint Bernardine of Siena (1380-1444) admonished: Tria sunt flagella quibus dominus castigat.[11] There are three scourges with which God chastises: war, plague, and
famine. Saint Bernardine belongs to a number of saints like Catherine of Siena,
Bridget of Sweden, Vincent Ferrer, Louis Marie Grignon de Montfort, who warned
how throughout history natural disasters have always accompanied the
infidelities and apostasy of nations. It happened at the end of the Christian
Middle Ages, and it seems to be happening today. Saints like Bernardine of
Siena did not attribute these events to the work of evil agents but to the sins
of men, which are even more grave if they are collective sins and still more
grave if tolerated or promoted by the rulers of the peoples and by those who
govern the Church.
As a philosopher of
history
These considerations introduce us to the third point in which I will
consider the events not as a sociologist or historian but as a philosopher of
history.
Theology and the
philosophy of history are fields of intellectual speculation that apply the
principles of theology and philosophy to historical events. The theologian of
history is like an eagle that judges human affairs from the heights. Some of
great theologians of history were Saint Augustine (354-430), Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704), who was called the eagle of Meaux, from
the name of the diocese where he was bishop, Count Joseph de Maistre
(1753-1821), the marquis Juan Donoso Cortés (1809-1853), the abbot of Solesmes
Dom Guéranger (1805-1875), professor Plinio Correa de Oliveira (1908-1995), and
may others.
There is a Biblical
expression that says: Judicia Dei abyssus
multa (Ps 35:7): the judgments of
God are a great abyss. The theologian of history submits himself to these
judgments and seeks to understand the reason for them.
Saint Gregory the Great, inviting us to investigate the
reasons for divine action, affirms: “Whoever does not discover the reason for
which God does things in the very works themselves, will find in his own
meanness and baseness sufficient cause to explain why his investigations are in
vain.”[12]
Philosophy and modern
theology under the influence above all of Hegel, have replaced the judgments of
God with the judgments of history. The principle according to which the Church
judges history is reversed. It is not the Church that judges history but
history that judges the Church, because the Church, according to the Nouvelle théologie, does not transcend
history but is immanent, internal to itself.
When Cardinal Carlo Maria
Martini said in his final interview that “The Church is 200 years behind” with
respect to history, he assumed history as the criterion of judgment for the
Church. When Pope Francis, in his Christmas greetings to the Roman Curia on
December 21, 2019, made these words of Cardinal Martini his own, he is judging
the Church in the name of history, overturning what should be the criterion of
Catholic judgment.
History in reality is a
creature of God, like nature, like all that exists, because nothing of what
exists can exist apart from God. All that happens in history is foreseen,
regulated and ordered by God for all eternity.
Thus for the philosopher
of history every discussion can only begin with God and finish with God. God
does not only exist; God is concerned for his creatures, and he rewards or
chastises rational creatures according each one’s merits or faults. The
Catechism of Saint Pius X teaches: “God rewards the good and chastises the
wicked because he is infinite justice....”
Justice, theologians
explain, is one of the infinite perfections of God.[13] The infinite mercy
of God presupposed his infinite justice.
Among Catholics the concept of justice, like the concept of
divine justice, is often removed. And yet the doctrine of the Church teaches
the existence of a particular judgment that follows the death of every person,
with the immediate reward or punishment of the soul, and of a universal judgment
in which all angels and all human beings will be judged for their thoughts,
words, actions, and omissions.
The theology of
history tells us that God rewards and punishes not only men but also
collectivities and social groups: families, nations, civilizations. But while
men have their reward or chastisement, sometimes on earth but always in heaven,
nations, which do not have an eternal life, are punished or rewarded only on
earth.
God is righteous
and rewarding and gives to each what is his due: he not only chastises
individual persons but he also sends tribulations to families, cities, and
nations for the sins which they commit. Earthquakes, famines, epidemics, wars,
and revolutions have always been considered as divine chastisements. As Father Pedro de Ribadaneira (1527-1611)
writes: “wars and plagues, droughts and famines, fires and all other disastrous
calamities are chastisement for the sins of entire populations.”[14]
On March 5 the bishop of an important diocese, whom I will not name,
declared: “One thing is certain: this virus was not sent by God to punish
sinful humanity. It is effect of nature, treating us as a stepmother. But God
faces this phenomenon with us and probably will make us understand, in the end,
that humanity is one single village.”
The Italian bishop
does not renounce the myth of the “single village” nor the religion of nature
of the Pachamama and Greta Thurnberg, even if for him the “Great Mother” can
become “stepmother.” But the bishop above all forcefully rejects the idea that
the Coronavirus epidemic or any other collective disaster can be a punishment
for humanity. The virus, the bishop believes, is only the effect of nature. But
who is it that has created, ordered, and guided nature? God is the author of
nature with its forces and its laws, and he has the power to arrange the
mechanism of the forces and laws of nature in such a way as to produce a
phenomenon according to the needs of his justice or his mercy. God, who is the
first cause above all of all that exists, always makes use of secondary causes
in order to effect his plans. Whoever has a supernatural spirit does not stop
at the superficial level of things but seeks to understand the hidden design of
God that is at work beneath the apparently blind force of nature.
The great sin of
our time is the loss of faith by the men of the Church: not of this or that man
of the Church but of the men of the Church in their collective whole, with few
exceptions, thanks to whom the Church does not lose her visibility. This sin
produces blindness of the min and hardening of the heart: indifference to the
violation of the divine order of the universe.
It is an
indifference that hides hatred toward God. How is it manifested? Not directly.
These men of the Church are too cowardly to directly challenge God; they prefer
to express their hatred towards those who dare to speak of God. Whoever dares
to speak of the chastisement of God gets stoned: a river of hatred flows
against him.
These men of the Church, while verbally professing to
believe in God, actually live immersed in practical atheism. They despoil God
of all his attributes, reducing him to pure “being” – that is, to nothing.
Everything that happens is for them the fruit of nature, emancipated from its
author, and only science, not the Church, is capable of deciphering nature’s
laws.
Yet not only sound theology but the sensus fidei itself teaches that all physical and material evils
that do not come from the will of man depend on the will of God. Saint
Alphonsus Liguori writes: “Everything that happens here against our will, know
that it does not occur except by the will of God, as Saint Augustine says.”[15]
On July 19 the Church’s liturgy recalls Saint Lupus (or
Saint Loup), bishop of Troyes
(383-478). He was the brother of Saint Vincent of Lerins and the brother-in-law
of Saint Hilary of Arles, belonging to a family of ancient senatorial nobility
but above all of great sanctity.
During his lengthy
episcopate (52 years), Gaul was invaded by the Huns. Attila, at the head of an
army of 400.000 men, crossed the Rhine, devastating
everything he found in his path. When he arrived before the city of Troyes, the
bishop Lupus, vested in pontificals and following his clergy in procession,
came to meet Attila and asked him, “Who are you that you threaten this city?”
And the response came: “Don’t you know who I am? I am Attila, king of the Huns,
called the scourge of God.” To which Lupus replied: “Well then, be the welcome
scourge of God, because we merit divine scourges because of our sins. But if it
is possible, let your blows fall only on my person and not on the entire city.”
The Huns entered the city
of Troyes, but by divine will they were blinded and crossed it without being
aware of it and without doing evil to anyone.
The bishops today not only
are not speaking about divine scourges, but they are not even inviting the
faithful to pray that God will liberate them from the epidemic. There is a
coherence in this. Whoever prays, in fact, asks God to intervene in his life,
and thus in the things of the world, in order to be protected from evil and to
obtain spiritual and material goods. But why should God listen to our prayers
if he is disinterested in the universe created by Him?
If, on the contrary, God
can, by means of miracles, change the laws of nature, avoiding the sufferings
and death of an individual man, or great loss of life throughout an entire
city, he can also decree the punishment of a city or a people, because their
collective sins call down collective chastisements. Saint Charles Borromeo
said, “Because of our sins, God permitted the fire of the plague to attack
every part of Milan.”[16] And Saint Thomas Aquinas explains: “When it is all the people who sin,
vengeance must be made on all the people, just as the Egyptians who persecuted
the children of Israel were submerged in the Red Sea, and as the inhabitants of
Sodom were struck down en masse, or a significant number of people must be
struck, such as happened in the chastisement inflicted for the adoration of the
golden calf.”[17]
On the eve of the second session of the First
Vatican Council, on January 6, 1870, Saint John Bosco had a vision in which it
was revealed to him that “war, plague, and famine are the scourges with which
the pride and malice of men will be struck down.” This is how the Lord
expressed himself: “You, O priests, why do you not run to weep between the vestibule
and the altar, begging for the end of the scourges? Why do you not take up the
shield of faith and go over the roofs, in the houses, in the streets, in the
piazzas, in every inaccessible place, to carry the seed of my word. Do you not
know that this is the terrible two-edged sword that strikes down my enemies and
that breaks the wrath of God and men?”[18]
The priests are silent, the bishops are
silent, the Pope is silent.
We are approaching Holy Week and Easter. And
yet for the first time in many centuries in Italy, the churches are closed,
Masses are suspended, and even Saint Peter’s Basilica is closed. The Holy Week
and Easter liturgies urbe et orbi will not be
drawing pilgrims from all over the world. God, also punishes by “subtraction”
as Saint Bernardine of Siena says, and today it seems like he has removed the
churches, the Mother of all churches from the supreme Pastor, while the
Catholic people are groping confused in the dark, deprived of the light of
truth that should illuminate the world from Saint Peter’s Basilica. How can we
not see in what the Coronavirus is producing a symbolic consequence of the
self-destruction of the Church?
Judicia Dei abyssus multa. We ought to be
certain that what is happening does not prefigure the success of the sons of
darkness, but rather their defeat, because, as Father Carlo Ambrogio Cattaneo,
S.J., (1645-1705) explains, the number of sins, whether of a man or of a
people, is numbered.[19] Venit dies iniquitate praefinita says the prophet
Ezekiel (21:2) – God is merciful but there is a final sin that God does not
tolerate and that provokes his chastisement.
Furthermore,
according to a principle of the theology of Christian history, the center of
history is not the enemies of the Church but the saints. Omnia sustineo propter electos (2
Tim 2:10) says Saint Paul. History revolves around the elect of God. And
history depends on the impenetrable designs of Divine Providence.
Throughout history
there are those who oppose the law of God, whether men, groups, or organized
societies, both public and secret, who work to destroy all that has been
ordained by God. They are able to obtain apparent successes, but they will
always ultimately be defeated.
The scenario we have before us is apocalyptic, but Pius XII
recalls that in the Book of Revelation
(6:2) Saint John says, “did not behold only the ruins caused by sin, war,
famine, and death; he also saw in the first place the victory of Christ. And indeed
the path of the Church throughout the centuries is a via crucis, but it is also always a march of triumph. The Church of
Christ, the man of faith and Christian love, are always those who bring light,
redemption and peace to a humanity without hope. Iesus Christus heri et hodie, ipse et in saecula (Hebr.
13:8). Christ is your guide, from
victory to victory. Follow him.”[20]
At
Fatima the Blessed Mother has revealed to us the scenario of our time, and she
assured us of her triumph. With the humility of those who are aware that they
can do nothing by their own strength, but also with the confidence of those who
know that everything is possible with the help of God, we do not retreat, and
we entrust oursselves to Mary at the tragic hour of the events foretold by the
message of Fatima.
Roberto de Mattei
Translated by Giuseppe Pellegrino @pellegrino2020
[2] Stefano Feltri, Il
Fatto quotidiano, 4 March 2020.
[4] Pierre Gaxotte, La
Révolution française, Complexe, Paris 1988, pp. 93-128.
[5] Laura Spinney, 1918.
L’influenza spagnola. La pandemia che cambiò il mondo, Italian translation: Marsilio,
Venice 2018.
[7] Barbara Tuchman, A
Distant Mirror. The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Macmillan Publishers,
London 1995.
[8] Roberto S. Lopez, La
nascita dell’Europa. Secoli V-XIV, Einaudi, Turin 1966, p. 427.
[9] Ibid., p. 133.
[10] Ruggero Romano-Alberto Tenenti, Alle origini del mondo moderno 1350-1550, Feltrinelli, Milan 1967,
pp. 16-26.
[11] San Bernardino, Opera
omnia, Sermo 46, Feria quinta post
dominicam de Passione, vol. II, pp. 84-85.
[12] St. Gregory the great, Moralia, Lib. IX, cap. I.
[13] Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Dieu, son existence et sa nature,
Beauchesne, Paris 1950, pp. 440-463.
[14] Pietro Ribadaneira, La
tribolazione e i suoi conforti, Civiltà Cattolica, Rome 1914, p. 207.
[15] St. Alphonsus Maria de’ Liguori, Uniformità alla volontà di Dio, Francavilla, Paoline 1968, p. 33.
[16] St. Charles Borromeo, Memoriale
al suo diletto popolo della città di Milano, Stamperia Michele Tini, Rome
1579, p. 44.
[18] Cfr. Memorie biografiche del venerabile don
Giovanni Bosco. Raccolte del sac. Salesiano Giovanni Battista Lemoyne,
edizione extra commerciale, vol. IX, Tipografia S.A.I.D. “Buona Stampa”, Turin
1917, p. 782.
[19] Carlo Ambrogio Cattaneo s.j., L’esercizio della buona morte, in Opere, vol. II, Boniardi, Milan 1867, pp. 169-170.
[20] Pius XII, Speech 12 september 1948 in Discorsi e Radiomessaggi, X (1948-1949), p. 212.
