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    [title] => The doctrine that looked to the Middle Ages generated works and subsidiarity
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Economic Soul/5 - The impact of “Rerum Novarum” and “Quadragesimo Anno” exceeded initial expectations. Leo XIII and Pius XI proposed a “third way” between capitalism and socialism as a form of restoration, giving rise to cooperatives, schools, rural credit unions, and mutual aid societies.
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on February 8, 2026
The history of the impact of the first season of the Church's Social Doctrine is a long and important episode of heterogenesis of ends, that is, of effects very different from those intended by those who had wanted and guided it. Leo XIII and Pius XI, in fact, wrote about the ‘social question’ because they were concerned about the growth of the socialist movement and its promises to eliminate private property. They thus proposed to Catholics a ‘third way’ between capitalism and socialism, understood as a return to and restoration of the medieval social order and its ‘guilds (Gremi) of arts and crafts’. Those were the intentions of the writers; what happened, however, was the explosion of a great movement of social change that contributed decisively to preparing modern Italy and Europe, reducing inequalities, and overcoming the old regime. Reality surpassed the idea. The years between Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931) saw the birth of thousands of social, economic, and political initiatives by Catholics, who did not seek the promised land by looking back: they achieved it by looking ahead to the horizon. Instead, it was fascism that took up the invitation to reconstitute the ancient medieval guilds, an effect that was not intended by either the popes or the fascists. 

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In reality, there were profound differences between Catholic and fascist corporatism. For example, fascist corporatism arose from revolutionary syndicalism and Hegelian thought, and was radically statist and anti-subsidiary. But the similarities and concordances were also significant and equally real. The fascist guild was an ideological vision built on forced concord and imposed harmony between the interests of capitalists and those of workers. This harmony began in the workplace: “Finally, a new sense of human dignity was needed, one that would establish the moral and social premise of a legal system that places work at the center of the economy and, while recognizing individual interests, coordinates them in accordance with other, increasingly general interests” (F.M. Pacces, Introduzione agli studi di aziendaria, 1935). Corporatism therefore presented itself as a defense of work, wages, and workers—a theme very dear to the Church.
Giuseppe Bottai, one of its main architects, saw the corporation as “the institution through which the collaboration of different classes and categories is realized. Employers and workers and professionals, artists and craftsmen, and even public employees can march together in unity and harmony without lingering in the treacherous shadow of democratic tradition” (La Carta del lavoro, 1927). Years earlier, Giuseppe Toniolo had proposed “a corporate ideal, in which both elements currently in conflict, capitalist owners on the one hand and workers with no assets on the other, would be represented, and in which the interests of employers and workers would find harmonious agreement” (Indirizzi e concetti sociali, 1900). Throughout his life, Toniolo never tired of praising medieval guilds with a view to proposing their restoration: “Here we see the establishment of intermediate bodies between individuals and the universal, that is, between individuals and the state, whose development, defense, and growth were a singular merit of the Church... Intermediate forces that prevented the clash between the two extremes” (1893). The guilds, therefore, would have brought about the harmonious cooperation of all classes for the common good, the longed-for social order, clearly pyramidal and perfect - these were the years in which the Church once again defined itself as ‘societas perfecta’ (Leo XIII, Immortale Dei).
If we carefully study the call for a return to the medieval guild launched by Catholic social doctrine, we realize that it is an expression of something much deeper than just economics. It is part of the Catholic Church's complicated relationship with the modern world, and therefore of the restoration of medieval Christianity. The ‘reconstruction of the social order’ is also the subtitle of Quadragesimo Anno, but it had been advocated decades earlier by Toniolo: ‘The program of 'restoration’ of the social order remains designated as the therapy for the diagnosis' of modern disease. Therefore, “it is urgent today to restore the Christian social order that the Church had admirably developed and matured over the centuries through titanic struggles: a social origin that the Reformation has transfigured and broken down step by step to the point of today's atomism.” And so, as the best way forward, “it is advisable to reconnect with the traditions of the Middle Ages, which have been obscured, opposed, and severed since the day of the Reformation” (1893). The return to the Middle Ages was the means, the end was restoration. For Toniolo and his school (Fanfani), the root of the decline of the social order predates the Reformation: “Luther's heresy demonstrates its filiation from Humanism” because, quoting Erasmus, Luther opened “the egg that had already been laid long ago”: the egg of the centrality of man and his “free will,” where the origin of all the evils of modernity, which led to Liberalism and Socialism, would be found.
And here we should open a serious reflection on this bizarre Catholic reading of history and Humanism. In this regard, on June 8, 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to his friend Eberhard from the Berlin prison of Tegel, a few months before being hanged by the Nazis: "I consider the attacks of Christian apologetics on the adult world: first, absurd; second, poor; third, unchristian. Absurd: because they seem to me to be an attempt to bring an individual who has now become a man back to puberty, that is, to bring him back to dependence on things from which he has in fact become independent, to drive him back to problems that, in fact, are no longer problems for him" (Resistance and Surrender, edited by I. Mancini). And on July 17, in another letter, he continued the dialogue: “God as a moral, political, and scientific working hypothesis has been eliminated and superseded; but also as a philosophical and religious working hypothesis... And where, at this point, is the space for God? ask timid spirits; and not knowing how to find an answer, they condemn en masse the evolution that has put them in this calamitous situation.” So they seek “possible emergency exits from this space that has become too cramped,” among them “a death-defying leap backward into the Middle Ages.” But "returning to it can only be a gesture of desperation, accomplished only at the price of intellectual honesty. It is a pipe dream: ‘oh, if only I knew where the road back was, the long road to the land of children’. This road does not exist - in any case, it does not pass through the arbitrary renunciation of inner honesty." These attempts are therefore absurd, poor, and above all unchristian, at least not consistent with the spirit of the Gospel (Christianity has never been only the Gospel).
The Catholic Church, in its institutions, failed, at least until Vatican II (and beyond), to read the process of adulthood in men and women that began at the end of the Middle Ages as a process intrinsic to the very logic of the Gospel, like a tree growing from the very seed of Revelation. It was very afraid of that child who had become a man, and for many centuries did everything it could to bring him back to the infantile stage, within that hierarchical order where everything was simpler, not least because at the top there were bishops, monks, and popes, almost always an essential and integral part of that hierarchical and unequal order. So, instead of looking at the growth of a child as the happiest event in all of existence, the post-medieval Church did not recognize in that adult face the same face of the beloved child. And so it perpetrated a sort of incest, trying to prevent that child from growing up, becoming autonomous and free. For at least half a millennium, it dreamed of a world that no longer existed. Dreams that, from time to time, became nightmares.
But—and here is the really good news—the Church is not only that which is marked and defined by documents, books, and magisterial directives. The Kingdom of Heaven is vaster, deeper, and higher than that of temples and palaces. And so, while Leo XIII and Pius XI wrote that inequality was unavoidable in society (“It is impossible to remove social inequalities from the world”: Rerum Novarum, §14), thousands of Catholics, lay people, religious, nuns, and parish priests gave life to cooperatives, rural credit unions, and mutual aid societies. The cooperative movement between the 19th and 20th centuries was a great tool for reducing inequalities, a true and serious ‘third way’, because it questioned property rights and profits. And when property rights change in a company, we are already beyond capitalism. What followed Rerum Novarum was truly a season of authentic economic prophecy, which, in the Catholic sphere, remains unsurpassed.
But there is more. Countless ‘works’ generated by the founders and foundresses of religious congregations invented the education of poor boys and girls and created the most beautiful ‘playground’ for poor children: the school. This was an extraordinary and wonderful achievement in Italy, Europe, and the missions, because the countries that today have the lowest levels of inequality are those that yesterday invested most in public and universal education (Thomas Piketty).
The economic and social miracle of the 20th century was also the result of poor children who, thanks to charisma, were able to study, also thanks to the impetus given by the first social encyclicals. Perhaps those popes wanted something else, but, without meaning to, they gave rise to something fantastic, for the Church, for the poor, for everyone. The heterogenesis of ends is also another name for Providence.
 
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Economic Soul/5 - The impact of “Rerum Novarum” and “Quadragesimo Anno” exceeded initial expectations. Leo XIII and Pius XI proposed a “third way” between capitalism and socialism as a form of restoration, giving rise to cooperatives, schools, rural credit unions, and mutual aid societies.
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on February 8, 2026
The history of the impact of the first season of the Church's Social Doctrine is a long and important episode of heterogenesis of ends, that is, of effects very different from those intended by those who had wanted and guided it. Leo XIII and Pius XI, in fact, wrote about the ‘social question’ because they were concerned about the growth of the socialist movement and its promises to eliminate private property. They thus proposed to Catholics a ‘third way’ between capitalism and socialism, understood as a return to and restoration of the medieval social order and its ‘guilds (Gremi) of arts and crafts’. Those were the intentions of the writers; what happened, however, was the explosion of a great movement of social change that contributed decisively to preparing modern Italy and Europe, reducing inequalities, and overcoming the old regime. Reality surpassed the idea. The years between Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931) saw the birth of thousands of social, economic, and political initiatives by Catholics, who did not seek the promised land by looking back: they achieved it by looking ahead to the horizon. Instead, it was fascism that took up the invitation to reconstitute the ancient medieval guilds, an effect that was not intended by either the popes or the fascists. 

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    [title] => Humanism for “new things” must overcome nostalgia and fear
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Economic Soul/3 - The lesson of the magisterial document establishing the principle of subsidiarity: accept the challenges of your time without fearing it
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on January 25, 2026
Rerum Novarum (RN, 1891), the first encyclical entirely devoted to socio-economic issues, had a symbolic value far greater than its content. Its spirit was much more important than its letter. It stated that economic life and work were an integral part of the thinking and action of the Catholic Church: they were not on the periphery of evangelical humanism, they were at its center. Thousands upon thousands of Catholics finally felt seen, understood, and recognized by the Church in their civil and economic commitment. They already knew this, but after RN they knew it even more, and there were no more doubts. The historical judgment on the content of Rerum Novarum is, however, a different matter, requiring study and a certain amount of courage. 

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With the restoration of the ancient regime in Europe desired by the Congress of Vienna after the Napoleonic era (1814), the papacy had also hoped for a return to the world before the French Revolution, deluding itself that the Enlightenment, liberalism, and modern thought could be erased, thus returning to medieval Christianitas, feudalism, and the important political role that popes and bishops had played in past centuries. But the Church was mistaken. The European world had changed forever, and with it, the era of the Church's temporal power had come to an end, as had the era of the submission of states to religious authority. It was a long and painful process that the Catholic Church, the papacy in particular, experienced as a ‘cultural battle’ with modern Europe. At that stage, neither the liberal Catholicism of Alessandro Manzoni, nor the theology of Rosmini, nor the Christianity open to new ideas of the great bishop of Cremona, Geremia Bonomelli, prevailed in the Roman Church.
RN is a document that presents some lights, along with some shadows. The lights are real, important, and highly emphasized in Catholic social tradition. As the full title of the document itself says - De opificium conditione (on the condition of workers) - the condition of workers is a focus of the document. In fact, the most illuminating pages of the encyclical are devoted to work and wages, where the dignity of every worker is reaffirmed, a not too long working day is required (especially for children and women), and it is declared that the game of supply and demand cannot be the only criterion for setting wages: “The worker and the employer should therefore agree on the terms of the contract and the amount of the wage; however, there is always an element of natural justice that precedes and is superior to the free will of the contracting parties” (RN #34). The paragraphs of the Encyclical that establish what will later be called the principle of subsidiarity are also very important: “It is not right that the citizen and the family should be absorbed by the State: it is right, on the contrary, that both should be allowed as much independence as possible, without prejudice to the common good and the rights of others” (RN #28). Subsidiarity is expressed as the right of association, particularly of workers' associations (#37-39). Even the Church of Leo XIII could not renounce community and communities; it wanted to save the community dimension of the Church and with it the ecclesiastical, economic, and civil hierarchy.
The most obscure aspects of RN concern the theme of equality among men, and therefore his vision of wealth and poverty. To understand them, let us return to Matteo Liberatore's Principles of Political Economy (1889), published on the eve of Rerum Novarum. It deals with the great theme of private property and inequality, ideas that we find very similar in RN: “Two things, says St. Thomas, must be distinguished in property: possession and use. As for possession, it can be private, indeed it must be, for the sake of human life. But as for use, it must be common, inasmuch as the possessor shares with the needy what he has in excess” (Principles..., p. 342).
Leo XIII, already in his second encyclical, had affirmed very similar theses: “Socialists, Communists, and Nihilists ... never cease to babble that all men are by nature equal among themselves ... The Church, much more wisely and usefully, even in the possession of goods, recognizes inequality among men” (Quod Apostolici Muneris, 1878). From the defense of property, it is a short step to the defense of inequality (a thesis that we find in Liberatore's Principles of Political Economy (pp. 161-163): “Let us therefore establish first of all this principle, that we must bear the condition proper to humanity: it is impossible to remove social inequalities from the world.” He then continues: “Since the greatest variety exists by nature among men: not all possess the same ingenuity, the same diligence, the same health, or the same strength: and from these inevitable differences arise, of necessity, differences in social conditions” (RN #14).
The Thomism of Leo XIII and the editors he chose also emerges in the emphasis on the sociality of human beings and therefore on the ‘organicist’ view of society, which is the basis of the many paragraphs on associations and corporatism. In the Thomist system, the thesis that society is a body (St. Paul), and therefore all parts are interdependent, brought with it the necessity of hierarchy and the static nature of the places assigned to each (the finger is not the heart, and they cannot exchange functions). And so, RN decisively rejects class struggle and therefore the idea of conflict between bosses and proletarians (RN #15). From this harmonious view of social classes also arises Leo's invitation to revive the medieval Corporations of Arts and Crafts, which we already find in the encyclical Humanum Genus (1884). And then in RN we read: “To settle the labor question ... however, the guilds of arts and crafts hold the first place ... We are pleased to see associations of this kind forming everywhere, whether of workers alone or of workers and employers together” (#36). A thesis that seems bizarre today. As if, in the midst of the development of industrial capitalism and the working masses, it were possible to go back five centuries to an economy of a few commercial cities immersed in the feudal world; as if history and its ‘new things’ had nothing to teach the Church, which is part and daughter of that same history; as if those demands for equality were not also, at least in large part, the fruit of the Church's own gospel.
With his proposal for corporations, Leo XIII went beyond the thinking of the Italian drafters of RN and included some European thinkers, as highlighted in an essay by Alcide De Gasperi (signed with the pseudonym Mario Zanatta: I tempi e gli uomini che prepararono la RN, 1931). Above all, there were some Frenchmen, the Marquis La Tour du Pin-Chambly de la Charce (1834-1924), Count De Mun, and the entrepreneur Léon Harmel, promoters of Catholic corporatism, all of whom were aristocrats. In the revived guilds, class conflict would thus be overcome without upsetting the natural order of property and hierarchy: “There will always be that variety and disparity of condition without which human society cannot exist or even be conceived” (RN #27).
Concluding his discourse on proletarians and masters, Leo XIII writes: "In Christianity, there is a dogma on which the whole edifice of religion rests as its principal foundation: that the true life of man is that of the world to come. ... Whether you have an abundance of riches and other earthly goods or are deprived of them, it matters nothing to eternal happiness“ (RN #18). Therefore, ”it is understood that the true dignity and greatness of man is entirely moral, that is, rooted in virtue; equally attainable by the great and the small, the rich and the proletarians... Let us say more: it seems that God has a particular predilection for the unhappy, since Jesus Christ calls the poor blessed... Thus, the two classes, shaking hands, come to a friendly agreement" (#20).
Reading these theses, we must pause, because we would find ourselves far from the spirit of the Gospel. Jesus healed the sick, raised the paralyzed from their beds, created a fraternal community that shared material goods, and did not console them by leaving them in their misery, waiting for paradise. He said ‘woe’ to the rich, gave us the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, and invited us to pass through the eye of the needle. His Kingdom was and is above all for this life, not for ‘the life to come’. What Leone wrote was an expression of the theology of the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic spirit of his time. After him came Vatican II, Don Mazzolari and Don Zeno, Francesca Cabrini and Pope Francis. Catholics have done little in the way of corporate ventures; those were done by the fascists. Instead, they gave life to trade unions, to many rural banks and cooperatives where they changed and questioned the property rights of capitalism, reduced the inequalities possible on this earth, and continue to do so. They went beyond the letter of Rerum Novarum, they listened to its spirit, which they also saw in the demands for equality of their time and of ours.
Today, we are going through similar times. Fear and nostalgia for the glorious days of the past can no longer be allowed to write the new Rerum Novarum.
 
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Economic Soul/3 - The lesson of the magisterial document establishing the principle of subsidiarity: accept the challenges of your time without fearing it
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on January 25, 2026
Rerum Novarum (RN, 1891), the first encyclical entirely devoted to socio-economic issues, had a symbolic value far greater than its content. Its spirit was much more important than its letter. It stated that economic life and work were an integral part of the thinking and action of the Catholic Church: they were not on the periphery of evangelical humanism, they were at its center. Thousands upon thousands of Catholics finally felt seen, understood, and recognized by the Church in their civil and economic commitment. They already knew this, but after RN they knew it even more, and there were no more doubts. The historical judgment on the content of Rerum Novarum is, however, a different matter, requiring study and a certain amount of courage. 

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Economic soul/1 - From the thinking of Antonio Genovesi in the 18th century, heir to the medieval tradition, to the long eclipse of the 19th century. Until the 20th century
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on January 11, 2026
“An important path to follow is that of a different reading of the history of economic thought, and in particular of the Italian tradition, as is already beginning to be done, reevaluating Genovesi and other civil economists. If we were able to identify an Italian tradition, different from the one that has become official [mainstream], which has its own genealogy, this would be an operation of primary importance.”
Giacomo Becattini, “Human well-being and ‘project’ enterprises,” 2002 
There have been periods in European civilization when the love, pain, experiences, and experiments of Christians have generated words of flesh that have then become papal encyclicals, documents, magazines, and books that have universalized and generalized that civil love and pain. We would not have had Rerum Novarum (1891) – or it would have been much poorer and less influential – without the cooperative movement, rural banks, the trade union movement, workers' leagues, mutual aid societies, the Opera dei Congressi (Congress Work)... Of course, the theological ideas of Father Matteo Liberatore and the socio-economic ideas of the young professor Giuseppe Toniolo were also important, but it was first the facts that sifted, discerned, selected, and valued the ideas of theologians, philosophers, economists, and then popes. In Christianity, it is not ideas that validate facts, but the opposite. ‘Reality is superior to the idea’ is not only a principle very dear to Pope Francis, but above all a synthesis of Christianity, of its humanism based on the Word made flesh - the Logos did not enter history by becoming an idea, an ideology or a book, but by becoming a child. Ideas are alive, life-giving and capable of transforming the world only when they are flesh.

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Therefore, the impact, quality, and transformative capacity of a Church document depend greatly, almost entirely, on the quality and generative capacity of entrepreneurs, cooperators, politicians, citizens, scholars, and above all, entire Christian communities, who live and experience new things in their individual and collective flesh. The ‘sympathetic’ ink of important Church documents is the blood of witnesses and martyrs. We are all awaiting Pope Leo's first social encyclical, and we are well aware that this document cannot create reality: it can see it, give it wings, amplify it, it can turn some small ‘already’ into ‘not yet’; but once again it will be the reality that the Church and humanity are already experiencing that will give quality and impact to Leo XIV's encyclicals, as was the case with Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum. Without this ‘flesh’ and this life, encyclicals are paper documents that do not improve the economic and social world.
The series of articles we are beginning today is an exploration of the intertwining of economics and Catholicism in contemporary Italy, particularly during that long century that took us from the mid-19th century to the end of the 20th century, passing through socialism, modernism, wars, and fascism with its ‘corporatist’ economic doctrine, which we will also deal with. Economics and the Catholic religion will therefore be the two axes of this reflection. In some articles, economics will prevail, in others religion, but in all there will be dialogue between the two.
To speak of Italian economic tradition means above all to speak of civil economy, which is the name that economic science took from its origins with Antonio Genovesi in the mid-18th century, when an economic-civil tradition that began in the Middle Ages with monasticism, merchants, the Franciscans and their doctrines on usury, their Monti di Pietà and Monti frumentari came to maturity. With the birth of the unified state, that ancient tradition of Italian (but also European) thought underwent a fracture and then a long eclipse. And that is where we start.
Until the early 19th century, the Italian tradition of civil economy was still alive and respected. Between 1802 and 1816, Pietro Custodi of Milan published the ‘Collezione degli Economisti Classici Italiani’ (Collection of Italian Classical Economists) in fifty volumes, a fundamental work for the dissemination of Italian economic thought in the new universities and among the new politicians. But when, in 1850, on the initiative of Francesco Ferrara, who was the most influential economist of his generation, the Biblioteca dell'Economista (Economist's Library) was created, only one of the 13 volumes (the third) was dedicated to Italian economists. The cultural climate was, in fact, changing rapidly and radically. In his introduction to that third volume, Ferrara has kind words for Genovesi, whom he, not surprisingly, places as the first author of the volume: ‘The oldest chair of economics in Italy, and one of the oldest in Europe, is that of Naples, established in 1754 by Genovesi’. He then provides some biographical notes on Genovesi: "Unpopular with the monks and priests of the schools, whose ignorance served as a dark backdrop to the splendid fame of this innovative priest, who, avoiding Latin as much as possible, relying on arguments that rebelled against the strict forms of syllogism, quoting English and French authors, pronouncing with equally impassive lips the truth of the Bible and the passage of the heretical writer, was nevertheless enthusiastically frequented by an eager youth... This was Genovesi" (Vol. 3, pp. V-VI). Genovesi, also on the explicit recommendation of Intieri, the financier of the chair, taught in Italian (not Latin), an innovative fact that did not escape Ferrara: “According to the custom of the time, Genovesi began the next day to dictate his lessons to the young people; and he himself recounts that it seemed a marvel to hear a professor speaking Italian from his chair for the first time,” and denounced “the fault of the Italians in holding their language in very low esteem” (pp. VII-VIII), a fault that continues and grows today. So much for the fine words about Genovesi and his Economia civile.
Despite his personal esteem for Genovesi, however, Ferrara believed that the true science of economics was now only that of the English and the French. Genovesi and the Italians were merely prehistory, the ancien régime: “The merits of the first foundation of economics belong to the Englishman Smith or the Frenchman Turgot, not to Genovesi” (p. XXXVI). The Italian tradition, in his opinion, had not been able to enter modernity because it was still imprisoned by moral and political concerns. Economics as a science independent of both morality and the ‘prince’ had instead been founded by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations (1776): “The ancient Italian school offers nothing that might recommend it to our preference... I will share the sentiment of national self-love, but I will continue to study Smith in order to learn economics” (p. XXXV). And so he concludes coherently: “If the Biblioteca dell'economista had been assigned a less ambitious purpose than it had, perhaps none of the Italian authors now included in this volume would have been included” (p. LXX). This was a very strong and clear thesis, which proved decisive.
Genovesi's non-modernity lay, therefore, in his choice to frame issues in a ‘broad and complex’ manner. His mistake was one of method: he failed to look at wealth from an ‘abstract and absolute point of view, but rather from that of general welfare’ or public happiness. For Ferrara, on the other hand, Smith was the true founder of modern economic science, precisely because he abandoned this ‘broad and complex approach’ to focus solely on economic variables - it is the birth of homo oeconomicus (more in Ferrara than in Smith): ‘Smith's merit lies in having felt the need to abandon ... broad and complex formulas before others did’. And this was ‘an immense step forward’, it was ‘the Cogito of economics’ (p. XL).
For Ferrara, the reference to 18th-century Italian economists was therefore an attempt to ‘cover up the nullity of the present with memories of the past’ (p. LXX). The nullity was obviously that of his present—the mid-19th century was certainly not a time of great theoretical talent for Italian economics—but the temptation to return to a noble past when the present is poor (as ours is) is always present. Therefore, Ferrara's warning is also important for us today, an invitation not to console ourselves by remembering the great fathers in the time of the little grandchildren.
Francesco Ferrara was a staunch liberal economist and a child of the century of Darwin, Marx, and positivism, a colleague, in method, of John S. Mill. For him, ‘true’ economic science could only arise by renouncing the ‘whole’ in order to study the ‘fragment,’ leaving aside ‘public happiness’ to focus on production costs and consumer utility. Ferrara was the bridge that Italian civil economics of the 18th century had to cross to reach the second half of the 19th century. It was a very narrow bridge, almost a needle's eye, which allowed very little of that great classical heritage to pass through, too little for any trace of it to remain.
After this passage, civil economy left academia, but - and here is a key point - it also left the thinking and action of the Catholic world, its economists and sociologists, cooperators, trade unionists, popes, and bishops. In fact, starting with the leader Toniolo, the Catholic tradition that would inspire Rerum Novarum and then Social Doctrine would not reconnect with Genovesi or Civil Economy, which were ignored or considered too modern and distant from the neo-Thomism that would guide many documents. We cannot understand the Social Doctrine of the Church between the 19th and 20th centuries unless we bear in mind that it developed during Pius IX's Non expedit and the modernist controversy of Pius X and his successors until Vatican II. This was a climate of closure to the modern world and its demands for a scientific study of the Bible, not least because these demands came mainly from Protestant countries. Added to this already complex picture was the birth and development of socialism and Marxism, which further complicated dialogue with the past and with the contemporary world, occupying much of the energy of Catholics, probably too much.
The disappearance of Italian civil tradition from the thinking of the Church is one of the reasons for the failure of Catholicism to engage with modernity and for its anti-modernism, which are still a serious problem for the Catholic world and its reflection on the economy and society. Genovesi, who, according to Ferrara, was too little modern because he was fascinated by ‘broad and complex formulas’, became instead too modern and with categories too broad and complex to fit into the Thomism that Leo XIII had placed at the center of the Church's thinking. Along with civil economy, Franciscans, monasticism, Tuscan merchants, pawnshops and grain banks, Bernardino da Feltre and Muratori, together with a serious biblical perspective, were also left out of Catholic social doctrine. All this was shrouded in a dark night that lasted almost two centuries, which we will discuss in these articles. During this long night, some angels slipped in along with many ghosts, which still populate the dreams of the Catholic world. Perhaps it is time to wake up.
 
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Economic soul/1 - From the thinking of Antonio Genovesi in the 18th century, heir to the medieval tradition, to the long eclipse of the 19th century. Until the 20th century
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on January 11, 2026
“An important path to follow is that of a different reading of the history of economic thought, and in particular of the Italian tradition, as is already beginning to be done, reevaluating Genovesi and other civil economists. If we were able to identify an Italian tradition, different from the one that has become official [mainstream], which has its own genealogy, this would be an operation of primary importance.”
Giacomo Becattini, “Human well-being and ‘project’ enterprises,” 2002 
There have been periods in European civilization when the love, pain, experiences, and experiments of Christians have generated words of flesh that have then become papal encyclicals, documents, magazines, and books that have universalized and generalized that civil love and pain. We would not have had Rerum Novarum (1891) – or it would have been much poorer and less influential – without the cooperative movement, rural banks, the trade union movement, workers' leagues, mutual aid societies, the Opera dei Congressi (Congress Work)... Of course, the theological ideas of Father Matteo Liberatore and the socio-economic ideas of the young professor Giuseppe Toniolo were also important, but it was first the facts that sifted, discerned, selected, and valued the ideas of theologians, philosophers, economists, and then popes. In Christianity, it is not ideas that validate facts, but the opposite. ‘Reality is superior to the idea’ is not only a principle very dear to Pope Francis, but above all a synthesis of Christianity, of its humanism based on the Word made flesh - the Logos did not enter history by becoming an idea, an ideology or a book, but by becoming a child. Ideas are alive, life-giving and capable of transforming the world only when they are flesh.

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