Abstract:

The research objective of the Unit of Padua is focused on the relationship/conflict that the Great Church has developed down the centuries with those different entities which, one after another, contrasted its peculiar basically all-comprehensive universalism. Clearly enough, the issue can not be covered in all of its aspects and developments, despite the fact that the composition of the group and the multidisciplinary skills of its members make it possible to undertake investigations covering the whole history of Christianity and its various levels and areas of development. Nevertheless, it is possible to select a meaningful set of case studies that can be useful to draw a map of the high-frequency patterns of Christian behaviour in response to this specific type of tensions and conflicts. As for Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the goal of the research activity are to enquiry into: A) the intellectual production which flourished in Egypt in the 4th century in the Origenian monastic environments in connection to the Manichean presence, which in its turn was provided with its own structure, doctrine, and set of propositions about lifestyles, all of which directly competing with those developed within Catholicism. This is even clearer when considering the connections that the Manichean Church kept up with Christianity from the very beginning; B) the earliest outcomes of the confrontation with Islam, concerning which one aims to explore a central event, at the heart of the Abbasid era, which perfectly displays the apologetic and polemical strategies that the clergy and Scholastic elites of the Eastern Syriac Church developed in Baghdad against the Mohammadian religion; C) the tension and debate inside the early Franciscan movement opposing a universalistic attitude, bound to absolute poverty and unlimited opening to the society, to the adoption of ways of relating to the same society which, due to the integration into the Ecclesiastical institution and its pastoral requirements, seemed to contradict the said universalistic attitude.

A further set of contributions is dedicated to the confrontation of the Church with modernity. The confrontation was regarded, as an extreme outcome of the Lutheran heresy and, at the same time, the starting point of a new form of secular universalism, which was in stark contrast to the Christian dogma and the Ecclesiastical institution. One will follow some specific tracks of this contraposition throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, at the age of the Modernist Crisis, by offering only limited in-depth examinations of specific issues, effectively functional to those taken into account, within the more general process of reorganisation and standardisation of Catholicism which came into being in the 17th and 18th centuries. Indeed, it is only within this theoretical framework that one can grasp, for example, the policy of the Holy See towards the main Catholic intellectual circles at the beginning of the 20th century, or, in a more general way, its reaction to the debate that arose within the whole Christendom. Again, it is only within this context that one can correctly understand the process of sanctification of Pope Pius X, who is endorsed as an ideal prototypical defender of the faith in its healing power, to the benefit of the whole society, and whose figure was built up through the ultimate attribution of control over canonizations to his authority, or, finally, the strict censorship imposed in those years on the rising number of claims to ecstatic raptures and the increasing value given to mystical experiences.

In all these cases, the issue is always the same: the mission to people and the setting-up of a “Christian world”, which is strongly seduced by an attempt of standardisation, ceaselessly put forward in Ecclesia the problem of the relationship with the “Other”, whether he is part of the Christian community itself or not, and even more when he lays claim to universalism.