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Article contents
San Luigi Gonzaga: Princeling-Jesuit and Model for Catholic Youth
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
Luigi (Alvise) Gonzaga (1568–91), heir to the principality of Castiglione delle Stiviere, renounced his succession in 1585 to enter the Jesuit novitiate, in the course of which he died of plague, evidently contracted while ministering to the sick. He was beatified with extraordinary rapidity in 1605, four years before Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier. Admittedly the figure of the ‘angelic youth’ Luigi, as presented in the life written by the promoter of the cause for his canonization, Virgilio Cepari, and finally published in 1606, was more conventional and more calculated to seize the popular imagination than the uncharismatic Loyola, who enjoyed a very limited cult initially and was slow to deliver miracles. But, more significantly, the beatification was a matter of dynastic politics: it was promoted not only by the Jesuits but also, and more insistently, by the Gonzaga dynasty, supported by the Holy Roman Emperor and by allied dynasties. A phase of bureaucratization of canonization processes, already under way, was intensified shortly after Luigi’s beatification. Moreover, the criteria for sainthood would seem to have shifted somewhat in the first half of the seventeenth century. Luigi was not canonized until 1726, under Benedict XIII. In 1729 the same pope pronounced him the patron of students in Jesuit educational institutions and apparently also of students more generally. This provided the basis for the cult of Luigi in the nineteenth century as the patron of ‘Catholic youth’, that is both adolescents and young adults. This development was linked to a novel understanding of adolescence as a specific age group and also to the Church’s battle against secularism. Thus the cult acquired a new relevance long after the princely world that had pressured for Luigi’s canonization had passed away. The legal history of canonization processes substantially explains the delay in Luigi’s canonization, but this delay is also partly explicable by the very complexity and ambiguity of Luigi’s image as both child and man, which served in the long term to give ever new life to his cult.
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References
1 The first published life was Cepari, Virgilio, Vita del Beato Luigi Gonzaga della Compagnia di Gesù (Rome, 1606)Google Scholar. Subsequent editions appeared in Italian, Latin and other languages with varying titles, the Milan 1728 and Venice 1839 editions bearing the addition: Con la terza parte nuovamente composta da un altro religioso della medesima compagnia (the revised Part III contains expanded accounts of post mortem miracles). Citations here are from Vita di San Luigi Gonzaga DCDG, ed. Friedrich Schroeder (Einsiedeln, 1891), published on the tercentenary of Luigi’s death (there were also German, English, French and Spanish editions). Part III of this edition follows the original format; the Appendix includes some material from Part III of the 1728 edition and also contains documents extending to 1891. Scholarly notices on Luigi’s life include DSp, s.n. ‘S. Louis de Gonzague’, primarily on his writings; DBI, s.n. ‘Luigi (Aluigi) Gonzaga, santo’. On iconography, see two exhibition catalogues: Luigi Bosio, ed., Mostra iconografica aloisiana (Castiglione delle Stiviere, 1968); Gianluigi Arcari, L’immagine a stampa di San Luigi Gonzaga, 2 vols (Mantua, 1999–2000); the latter contains valuable historical notes.
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4 DBI, s.n. ‘Gonzaga, Ferrante’.
5 DBI, s.n. ‘Gonzaga, Francesco’.
6 Gotor, I beati, 127—202; idem, Chiesa e santità nell’Italia moderna (Rome, 2004), 34–53; Ditchfield, Simon, ‘Tridentine Worship and the Cult of Saints’, in Po-Chia Hsia, R., ed., CHC 6: Reform and Expansion 1500–1660 (Cambridge, 2007), 201–24 Google Scholar, at 207–10. The Congregatio Beatorum, founded in 1602, had the primary function of establishing central control over the early stages of cults before formal petitions for beatification were made to the papacy.
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13 DSp, s.n. ‘Cepari (Virgilio)’.
14 Schroeder, Appendix to Cepari, Vita, 267–72.
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22 For attempts to reactivate the process and for liturgical concessions: Schroeder, Appendix to Cepari, Vita, 295–302.
23 Ibid. 302. The prefect of the Congregation of Rites between 1712 and 1728 was Prospero Lambertini, the future Pope Benedict XIV, a very precise scholar aligned with the Bollandists and author of the standard text on canonizations, De servorum Dei beatificatione et beatorum canonizatione (Bologna, 1734–8): see Gotor, Chiesa e santità, 121–7.
24 Bull of 31 December 1726, in Bullarum Diplomatum et Privilegium Sanctorum Romanorum Pontificum, 24 vols (Turin 1857–72), 13: 483–7; for contemporaneous canonizations, see ibid. 464—9.
25 Text of 22 November 1729, in Schroeder, Appendix to Cepari, Vita, 406 n.; not in Bullarum.
26 DSp, s.v. ‘Congrégations de la Sainte Vierge’.
27 Stella, Pietro, ‘Santi per giovani e santi giovani nell’Ottocento’, in Fattorini, Emma, ed., Santi, culti, simboli nell’età della secolarizzazione (1815–1915) (Turin, 1997), 563–86 (for Luigi, ibid. 563–8, 575)Google Scholar; Cervato, Dario, Diocesi di Verona (Padua, 1999), 674, 669Google Scholar; Rusconi, Roberto, ‘Una Chiesa a confronto con la società’, in Benevenuti, Annaet al., Storia della santità nel cristianesimo occidentale (Rome, 2005), 331–86 Google Scholar, at 340–1. On the nineteenth-century discovery of ‘adolescence’: Monica Turi, ‘Il “brutto peccato”. Adolescenza e controllo sessuale nel modello agiografico di Maria Goretti’, in Papi, Anna Benevenuti and Giannarelli, Elena, eds, Bambini santi. Rappresentazioni dell’infanzia e modelli agiografici (Turin, 1991), 119–46 Google Scholar. In the diocese of Brescia, 24 churches and chapels were dedicated to San Luigi, as against 150 to San Rocco, 58 to San Carlo Borromeo and 42 to St Francis of Assisi; see Fapanni, A., ‘Religiosità e pietà’, in Caprioli, A., Rimoldi, A. and Vaccaro, L., eds, Diocesi di Brescia (Brescia, 1992), 357–424 Google Scholar, at 388. Details of altars dedicated to San Luigi in the Veneto extant in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are to be found in the calendars of pastoral visitations in Thesaurus ecclesiarum Italiae (secoli XVIII—XX), sub-series Veneto, 19 vols (Rome, 1969–85). Particularly significant references in bishops’ pastorals of the ecclesiastical province of Milan are: P. M. Corna Pellegrini Sandre, Bishop of Brescia (1891), in Toscani, Xenio and Sangalli, Maurizio, eds, Lettere pastorali dei vescoui della Lombardia (Rome, 1998), 57Google Scholar; Ferrari, A. C., Bishop of Como (1893), ibid. 103Google Scholar; Benaglio, G., Bishop of Lodi (1858), ibid. 268Google Scholar; Rota, G. B., Bishop of Lodi (1891), ibid. 277Google Scholar; Sarto, G., Bishop of Mantua (later Pope Pius X; 1891), ibid. 319–20 Google Scholar; Riboldi, A. G., Bishop of Pavia (1891), ibid. 399Google Scholar; De Gaudenzi, P. G., Bishop of Vigevano (1891), ibid. 492Google Scholar. Among pastorals from the province of Venice, see Costa, E. Dalla, Bishop of Padua (1926), in Malpensa, Marcello, ed., Lettere pastorali dei vescovi del Veneto (Rome, 2002), 268Google Scholar. Albums of signatures presented at the tercentenary celebrations in Rome in 1891 reveal an enthusiasm for Luigi among Catholics in all areas of Europe; see n. 30 below.
28 Stella, , ‘Santi’, 565.Google Scholar
29 Rosa, Gabriele de, Il movimento cattolico in Italia. Dalla Restaurazione all’età giolittiana, 5th edn (Rome, 1979), 49–55 Google Scholar; Osbat, Luciano and Piva, Francesco, eds, Il movimento cattolico dopo l’Unità 1868–1968 (Rome, 1972).Google Scholar
30 ‘Cronaca 16–30 giugno 1890’, Civiltà Cattolica [hereafter CC] ser. 14, 7 (1890), 232–3; ‘Cronaca 16–30 settembre 1890’, CC ser. 14, 8 (1890), 231–2; Leo XIII, letter to the council of Gioventù Cattolica Italiana, 29 October 1890, in idem, Acta (Rome, 1885–1901; photographic reproduction, 23 vols in 8, Graz, 1971), 10: 272–3; ‘Cronaca 1–15 dicembre 1890’, CC ser. 14,9 (1891), 111–12; ‘Cronaca 16–30 giugno 1891’, CC ser. 14, 11 (1891), 223–37. CC (1850-) has been published fortnightly in four vols per year.
31 ‘Cronaca 16–31 giugno 1891’, 222–3, 225; ‘Dopo le feste centenarie di S. Luigi Gonzaga’, CC ser. 14, 11 (1891), 129–42.
32 ‘Cronaca 16–31 giugno 1891’, 232–3.
33 Stated with particular force by Elia Dalla Costa in his pastoral of 1926.
34 Canonized 26 June 1950: Osservatore Romano, 149–50 (26-7, 28 June); Turi, ‘Il “brutto peccato”’, 119–46.
35 Papàsogli, Giorgio, Ribelle di Dio. Il mondo e la giovinezza di Luigi Gonzaga (Milan 1968)Google Scholar, esp. Preface by Mondrone, Domenico, who was a leading writer on CC. See also Mondrone, Domenico, ‘Luigi Gonzaga ribelle che sceglie la libertà’, CC anno 119, 1 (1968), 437–62 Google Scholar. For a more conventional approach, see Scaduto, Mario, ‘L’azione di un mistico (In margine al centenario aloisiano)’, CC anno 119, 4 (1968), 540–66.Google Scholar
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