A Vindication of Catholic Morality

The occasion was Sismondi’s Histoire des républiques italiennes, which argued that the moral teaching of the Catholic Church — the confessional, the doctrine of penance, the treatment of sin — had eroded the Italian conscience and helped produce the political decay of the peninsula.

Manzoni’s answer is methodological before it is doctrinal: Sismondi, he argues, has taken the conduct of people who disregarded the church’s teaching as evidence about the teaching itself. He then works through the specific charges — the doctrine of penance is the central one — insisting on what the Council of Trent actually says against what Sismondi’s sources assume it says.

The book’s tone is unusually cool for polemic, which is characteristic of him, and it belongs to the same years as his religious hymns. It is the least-read of Manzoni’s major works and the most directly apologetic.

The 1836 English translation is free at Archive.org; the Italian original, Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica, is free at Wikisource and Archive.org. Our edition is a corrected typesetting of the English.

This edition follows the English translation of Alessandro Manzoni’s Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica, published at London by Keating and Brown in 1836. The Italian original appeared in 1819.

It answers a particular charge. Sismondi, in the 127th chapter of his History of the Italian Republics in the Middle Ages, had argued that Catholic moral teaching — its casuistry, its confessional, its distinction between mortal and venial sin — was itself a cause of Italian corruption. Manzoni takes the argument apart article by article, and each chapter opens with the sentence of Sismondi’s that it answers.

The scan is hard going, and the only other scan of this printing is damaged in many of the same places. We read the two against each other, word by word and then passage by passage: about 1,300 readings in this text come from the second copy, and 637 semicolons and colons that the first scan dropped are restored from it. Every change is recorded with the words it replaced.

The book’s 66 footnotes had been run into the text wherever a page broke, often in the middle of a sentence. They are set apart again and linked, and every paragraph that crossed a page is whole. Two passages missing from the first scan, the opening of the author’s preface and two pages of the last chapter, are restored from the second. Where a few words are lost in both copies, the plain sense is supplied and recorded.

What has otherwise been repaired is damage done by the scanner, not by Manzoni or his translator. Running heads, page numbers and catchwords have been removed, and words broken at a line ending have been rejoined.