Abstract

This essay investigates Matteo Liberatore from an historical point of view. As a representative of conventional and intransigent Catholicism, Liberatore tends to be overlooked in the history books. He was a Jesuit, editor of La Civiltà Cattolica, and in forty years he wrote almost 400 articles. He is an interesting figure above all because he recognized that the end of the Papal States presented an opportunity and not a disaster for the papacy. As editor of the review, Liberatore proposed the idea of a papacy that was free from the polemics associated with temporal power and consequently able to speak to the contemporary world. It is no accident that it was to him that Leo XIII turned to draw up the last draft of the encyclical Rerum novarum. This encyclical built on the insight that the church had to recommence speaking to the modern world and concentrated its reflection on the place where man was mainly found to live between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the factory and the world of employment