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An essay on 17th-century nuns reignites the debate on how the present interprets the spirituality of the past, navigating sarcasm, memory, and the risk of anachronism
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on May 21, 2026
Imagine that, following an environmental catastrophe, a thousand years from now an alien arrives on a deserted Earth, now devoid of human beings, who have long since gone extinct. After wandering among many ruins, the alien stumbles upon a book. Opening it, the alien reads: “And the sun plunged into the lake.” It was a book of poetry. The alien, however, was unfamiliar with the literary genre of “poetry”; he knew nothing of Dante, Leopardi, or Pascoli. And he began to ask himself questions: Was this vanished civilization so primitive that it didn’t know the Earth revolves around the sun? Or: Had they built small artificial suns that, during certain special festivals, were cast into the lake? And yet more bizarre hypotheses. They would have understood everything if they had known what a poem was, for humans.

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This parable by my late Old Testament professor, Albert Dreston, came to mind as I was reading the book by Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita, The Wisdom of the Convent (Mondadori, 268 pages, €19.50). These two brilliant young Spanish women have attempted to describe life in women’s monasteries during the Baroque era in the same way that hypothetical alien might have explained the meaning of those verses without knowing the literary genre of “poetry.”
In their university studies of comparative literature, they discovered a distant civilization now long vanished; sifting through the papers of those nuns, they found texts, letters, and diaries they did not understand; and knowing nothing of the spiritual and mystical mystery of that ancient civilization—its history, theology, the faith, or the real lives of those ancient women, they attempted often haphazard exegetical exercises that prevented them from understanding what that “sun plunging into the lake” was, distorting its meaning—all seasoned with a healthy dose of sarcasm they could have spared us, despite claiming here and there to have “appreciated” those ancient nuns. We can even grant a certain degree of good faith and good intentions to the two authors, but the result, unfortunately, is not only disappointing but also very dangerous.
The book’s literary genre is a weaving together of metaphors and the words of today’s youth with those of the nuns of yesterday—“The 17th-century nuns knew full well that no one can survive by filling the ruthless cells of an Excel spreadsheet for forty hours a week”; “Your publisher? Your marketing director? His spiritual director? It doesn’t matter”—makes the book at times impossible to read, so much so that getting to the last chapter is a truly arduous task.
Much becomes clear about the nature of this essay—which Mondadori, for some mysterious reason, chose to publish in Italian—if we look at the project’s origins during the 2020 pandemic: “Launching a podcast about 16th- and 17th-century nuns in which we wove together personal anecdotes, pop culture, and generational angst... Something irreverent yet meticulous, a great melting pot of different things.”
One of the long “irreverent yet meticulous” stories concerns Saint Veronica Giuliani, who, in 1677, arrived at the age of seventeen at the Poor Clares convent in Città di Castello (which I recently visited for a conference). The very young Veronica is ridiculed, humiliated, and mocked by these two young women who prove themselves not only unfit for complex analysis but devoid of any sense of female solidarity or compassion, yet driven by a taste for the extravagant in their quest to appear original in their virtual world of views and likes: “Veronica often received portions miraculously topped with cat vomit, dismembered mice, hairballs, cockroaches, worms, and leeches that blackened the broth with their purulent blood,” and then they continued with their modern-day take: “Picky as we are, we inevitably felt a knot in our stomachs reading the accounts of the Capuchin Poor Clares who described Veronica’s eating habits in detail,” but, they continue, “somehow we couldn’t help but empathize with her.” What is the reason for their self-proclaimed empathy? Here it is revealed: “Anyone who has ever succumbed to the dietary charm of starting the day with a shot of turmeric and ginger or a turnip juice, and anyone who has cultivated their own symbiotic colony of smelly bacteria and yeasts to purify the body with homemade kombucha, should not judge Sister Veronica’s diet too harshly.” And so, “from the very first episode, we’ve always opened the podcast by asking each other a very simple question: What did you eat today?” No comment is needed; the text, sadly, speaks for itself in its banality.
The book continues with accounts of certain “unusual friendships” among those women, immediately and simplistically interpreted as erotic love. And so we read sentences like these: “We’d be lying if we said we hadn’t fantasized a thousand times about the encounters between the nun and the countess, imagining them as charged with erotic tension, much like the scenes in the Netflix series Juana Inés. Unfortunately, the cruel limitations of the archive do not allow us to outline that hypothetical idyll with rigor and detail, but this certainly did not prevent us from spending entire evenings eating pizza, analyzing every tiny clue capable of fueling our hope that the much-vaunted close friendship between her and the countess actually concealed an intense love story.” It’s best to stop here; I’ve probably already transcribed too many words from this “book.” Just one final mention: their comment on the “gift of tears”—to which they add “crocodile tears”—regarding the Dominican nun Sister Maria de Santo Domingo (known as the Blessed de Piedrahíta, c. 1485–c. 1524). After quoting a very intimate passage from the nun, they comment: “After all, what is that little cry you enjoy curled up under the covers during yet another rewatch of *Titanic* if not a ‘sweetest anointing’?” And so they unveil their theological-psychological theory: “It doesn’t matter in which century you read these lines; every girl knows that when the spirit is tormented and afflicted, nothing can soothe it like a couple of hours spent whimpering.”
What, then, are we to make of texts like this?
Anyone who has studied the lives of cloistered nuns and sisters during the Counter-Reformation era is well acquainted with their extreme penances, hair shirts, and devotional practices—accounts that today cause us a certain, if not considerable, ethical and theological embarrassment. But to try to say something sensible, respectful, humane, and non-humiliating, one would need to start with the theology of expiation dominant in the Catholic Church of the time, with the books of confessors for nuns, with the theology of hell and purgatory and “vicarious suffering,” and thus with that Baroque church’s strange conception of God. Only by beginning with a serious and in-depth study of that church, that theology, and that society (nb: in families, women were not granted a very different life, especially if they were poor) is it possible to understand something true about those “poems,” about the sorrows and even the love of those women of old. For the most part, those nuns and sisters were victims—of society and of the church—manipulated by a mistaken, non-biblical, and non-evangelical idea of God, used by powerful men to manage and control hundreds of thousands of women, sometimes perhaps in good faith. Those women, especially the poor ones (less so the noblewomen), were the cast-offs of the system of their time. Those diaries should be read through this social and theological lens. Without forgetting, however, that some of those women were nonetheless capable of reaching heights of humanity, spirituality, and freedom, even while confined and secluded in environments that were cramped in every sense. It is therefore not only embarrassing but ethically grave that two middle-class women of today, who study in Spain and the United States and are thus part of the intellectual elite of their generation, use the writings of other women from the past for their blogs and books without compassion.
But, ultimately, by reading these books and others like them, we should begin a profound reflection, as a church, as Christians, and especially as Christian women. More books like this one will be published—probably many—because a small, prurient trend is emerging in the new media regarding that world. Books and podcasts that will harm the Church’s memory and present, as it sees its tradition, its saints, and its holy women ridiculed. The charismatic feminine tradition is also, despite its shadows, a heritage of humanity, as well as of the Church. In those monasteries, for many centuries, far more took place than what is recounted by the uncertain pen of these two young women. Some were outstanding—not only in recipes, which many still understand—but in the arts, in literature, in music: one need only think of the nun-composers of the seventeenth century, such as Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, Caterina Assandra, Barbara Strozzi, Maria Xaveria Peruchona, Francesca Caccini, and Isabella Leonarda; just as they excelled in spirituality, embroidery, work, and the education of girls, when they were not allowed to attend school.
But to prevent a trivial “chuckle” from erasing an immense heritage—which is currently facing a particularly difficult, fraught and painful, a profound and serious process of re-examining the centuries of the Counter-Reformation, its theologies and spirituality, would be necessary—in order to purify memory, to understand what is to be saved and what is instead to be forgotten after bidding it farewell with piety and respect, if only for the oceans of pain endured by those women. We must therefore acknowledge that many of those practices, those traditions, those ways of understanding God, Jesus, and holiness, were the fruit of dark and un-evangelical centuries in the life of the Church.
Without falling into the error of anachronism, we must nevertheless distinguish between those practices that were acceptable yesterday but not today, and those that were unacceptable—because they were abusive—both yesterday and today.
Those centuries are now past, thanks above all to the Second Vatican Council, and thanks above all to the tenacious fidelity of the women of yesterday. But to “redeem” complex and error-filled times past, the passage of time is not enough. For the pain has passed, but the experience of having suffered remains and is inscribed in the heart of today’s women’s monasteries and convents, and thus in the body of the entire Church. An explicit process of purification is therefore needed, following true discernment, at the end of which we, as a Church, should ask for forgiveness from those women of the past—vicarious apologies on behalf of theologians, bishops, and priests who, more or less in good faith, transmitted and imposed an idea of God far removed from the Bible and the Gospel.
Having worked on these issues for years now, I am increasingly convinced that only this long and serious process of reconciliation with that past (and with part of the present, which here and there continues to resemble the Church of the Counter-Reformation all too closely) can foster a proper preservation of the Church’s memory and tradition, of its charisms, and of women, and perhaps pave the way for a new springtime of monastic life, both similar to and distinct from that of the past. And only then, perhaps, will we also be able to understand some of the beautiful verses of the poems written—with their lives, their pain, and their love—by those women of the past.
Photo Credit: © Tommaso Reggiani
 
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An essay on 17th-century nuns reignites the debate on how the present interprets the spirituality of the past, navigating sarcasm, memory, and the risk of anachronism
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on May 21, 2026
Imagine that, following an environmental catastrophe, a thousand years from now an alien arrives on a deserted Earth, now devoid of human beings, who have long since gone extinct. After wandering among many ruins, the alien stumbles upon a book. Opening it, the alien reads: “And the sun plunged into the lake.” It was a book of poetry. The alien, however, was unfamiliar with the literary genre of “poetry”; he knew nothing of Dante, Leopardi, or Pascoli. And he began to ask himself questions: Was this vanished civilization so primitive that it didn’t know the Earth revolves around the sun? Or: Had they built small artificial suns that, during certain special festivals, were cast into the lake? And yet more bizarre hypotheses. They would have understood everything if they had known what a poem was, for humans.

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    [title] => Lebret and Vatican II in the Global Church
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The reflections of the French Dominican Louis-Joseph Lebret, an expert at the Council and an authority on the Global South, marked a turning point regarding the economy, the common good, and poverty
by Luigino Bruni

published in Agorà by Avvenire on 04/08/2026
The Second Vatican Council represents a beacon of light in the history of the modern Church, a light that has not yet gone out, even though it is gradually receding from our horizon. The world has changed greatly over these sixty years, and the Church along with it; social and ethical priorities have shifted (think of the environment), and the spiritual language and narrative codes of the individual and collective soul have changed. In this great global flux, we find it increasingly difficult to understand what happened in the Catholic Church between John XXIII and Paul VI, partly because, having lost the habit of reading and studying history, we have forgotten the dire condition from which the Church emerged—and thus the extraordinary and astonishing significance of the Council. An event prepared by the actions and thoughts of many, in a prophetic season that remains unsurpassed in the modern era: “We live in a new world. The Christian, who lives in this new world, cannot turn a blind eye to it and abandon it to its fate” (B. Häring, Christian Witness in a New World, 1960).

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A leading figure in this prophetic phase was Father Louis-Joseph Lebret (1897–1966), a French Dominican. His education, spanning theology and economics, his frequent visits to and deep knowledge of Latin America and many “developing” peoples, his sensitivity, and his personal charisma were crucial to the anthropological shift of Vatican II, particularly in Gaudium et Spes (1965) and later in Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio (1967). His Christian vocation, which he pursued alongside his maritime career—“I could never have done the work that was mine had I not first been a naval officer” (Fr. Lebret, Economics at the Service of Man, Città Nuova, 1968)—is marked by three main stages: the Saint-Malo Movement (1930–1939), the Economie et Humanisme movement (1941), and finally the IRFED (International Institute for Research on Harmonized Development, 1958). Three interconnected phases that mark the harmonious growth of a spiritual and social vocation, supported by two pillars: mercy and the observation of reality. The starting point of his action research was, in fact, a deep-seated compassion for humanity’s suffering and injustices; his method was empirical and thus historical, given the importance he placed on real data—a preventive remedy against all ideologies.
A figure now almost forgotten, even by the Catholic Church, which struggles greatly to preserve the memory of its prophets. For this reason as well, we cannot help but welcome with intellectual enthusiasm and joy the book by Michele Dau—Louis Joseph Lebret. Human Economy: Social Progress as Ascent, Castelvecchi, 2025. Lebret was not an academic; on the contrary, he had a natural aversion to the world of abstract analysis, whether theological or philosophical, even though he was a professor of theology. After his experience in Saint-Malo, he founded the association “Economie et Humanisme,” which published a journal of the same name and became a reference point for development studies, offering new ideas on poverty, field surveys, and data, and providing new categories and narratives on poverty and development. He was a forerunner and prophet of lines of thought that fueled the cultural debate within the Church and society in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Among these were the theory of degrowth, the vision of Christianity as the liberation of peoples, A. Sen’s theory of development as freedom, and the concept of integral human development—the “whole person”—an expression he borrowed from Perroux. Development, therefore, understood as a “problem of civilization,” where “affective, intellectual, aesthetic, ethical, and spiritual values” are central—one of the first insights into what we now call spiritual capital.
His idea of the common good is very important, one of the pillars of the Church’s tradition, which was particularly dear to him, a Dominican and thus a Thomist. For Lebret, the common good was not an abstract and often vague philosophical concept (as one continues to read in many texts). It was not the sum of individual goods (economic utilitarianism), nor was it what economics calls the ‘common good’ or common goods (commons). It was something else, referring to the “community of destiny”: Lebret felt the need for a level of political and social action that looked directly and intentionally toward the good of all, in those matters that truly concerned everyone. He therefore had a vision of society that was not conflictual but harmonious, not because he denied class conflict or the imperialism of rich countries (he knew Marx well and appreciated certain aspects of his thought). Rather, he wanted to emphasize that there are certain dimensions of shared human life where we are truly all in the same boat, where we genuinely and truly become a community of destiny—with COVID, with the environment, and now with the danger of world wars, we realize how timely and essential it is that this idea of the common good be taken into account at all levels.
Lebret was one of the Council’s “experts,” but in reality he was one of its spiritual “fathers.” He joined only in March 1964, because he was not universally esteemed—generally, those with prophetic visions are divisive; only false prophets are liked by everyone. His participation, however, proved decisive, given the role Lebret played in the final drafting of Gaudium et Spes, and thus for the metanoia the Church underwent in relation to the world. When Schema XIII (the text that would ultimately be approved under the beautiful title Gaudium et Spes) was presented to the Council’s plenary session, there were some twenty thousand notes, criticisms, and motions. Lebret was tasked with working in Ariccia, alongside 29 other council fathers, 38 experts, and some twenty laypeople, on the vast amount of material that had emerged from the plenary session. He commented on that work as follows: “What a joy to encounter the living Church in search of communion with humanity,” he wrote in his diary on February 4, 1965. From June to July 1965, while he was in the hospital for the illness that would soon lead to his death, he never stopped working. Despite the revolutionary scope of *Gaudium et Spes*, the Church’s most prophetic social document of the modern era, Lebret believed even more could have been done in opening up to the world: “With regard to what is valid in modern and contemporary thought—often non-Christian—which many people today are steeped in, insufficient account is taken of the various lines of inquiry.” Prophets are constant inhabitants of the land of the “not yet,” and thus always dissatisfied with the “already.” Cardinal Poupard would write in 1986: “For Pope Paul VI, Father Lebret was a man who came from the future to help his contemporaries bid farewell to outdated visions that could not enter the future by looking back.” Finally, the search for the promised land in the memory of yesterday’s world came to an end. Lebret was strongly convinced that “charity” was not enough because “we had to work to change the structures.”
The pre-conciliar Church’s concept of social justice, in fact, led to viewing poverty without seriously questioning the economic and social structures of the world that systematically generated that poverty, partly because the ecclesiastical hierarchies (kings, princes, and counts) were on the wrong side of those structures. For Lebret, and thus for the Council, the time had come to question the root causes of inequality—a time we are still waiting for: “Watchman, how much of the night remains?”
Lebret was a man of action; he did not define himself as an intellectual. Yet he wrote, with a pen of the soul trained by friendship and love for the poor, some beautiful pages. Like this one from 1942, where, in describing the “true scholars,” without knowing or intending to, he was speaking to us of his own vocation: “Their narrow field of research does not constitute a limit for them. It places them in communion with the universe, inasmuch as they have the desire to serve man and humanity. Every day brings them new light. Men of science, they seek contact with men of action and, in turn, work in a laboratory that is reality itself, so as not to waste their lives on solving false problems or chimerical abstractions. Those who can be both men of action and men of science will become the wise ones that these turbulent times need.” How much our even more turbulent times would need these men and women of action and science.

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    [text] => 
The reflections of the French Dominican Louis-Joseph Lebret, an expert at the Council and an authority on the Global South, marked a turning point regarding the economy, the common good, and poverty
by Luigino Bruni

published in Agorà by Avvenire on 04/08/2026
The Second Vatican Council represents a beacon of light in the history of the modern Church, a light that has not yet gone out, even though it is gradually receding from our horizon. The world has changed greatly over these sixty years, and the Church along with it; social and ethical priorities have shifted (think of the environment), and the spiritual language and narrative codes of the individual and collective soul have changed. In this great global flux, we find it increasingly difficult to understand what happened in the Catholic Church between John XXIII and Paul VI, partly because, having lost the habit of reading and studying history, we have forgotten the dire condition from which the Church emerged—and thus the extraordinary and astonishing significance of the Council. An event prepared by the actions and thoughts of many, in a prophetic season that remains unsurpassed in the modern era: “We live in a new world. The Christian, who lives in this new world, cannot turn a blind eye to it and abandon it to its fate” (B. Häring, Christian Witness in a New World, 1960).

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    [title] => The duty to immerse ourselves in our time
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Editorials - Christianity is the humanism of waiting, waiting for the unknown, for the One who promised he would return. We cannot afford to live in the memory of “better times.”
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 12/31/2025

"His was a different, particular conception of time, the kind that makes you say, ‘In my day!’. Isn't this our time? ... There is nothing worse than being the stepchildren of our own time. There is no worse fate than living in a time that is not our own. You recognize them immediately: in personnel offices, in party committees, in the political sections of the army, in newspaper offices, on the street. Time loves only those it has created; it loves its own children." 


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These are the words of Vasily Grossman, in Life and Fate, one of the masterpiece novels of the 20th century. A meditation on time that is particularly appropriate on this December 31, when kronos time invites us to reflect on kairos time, on the meaning of a time that truly ends while another time continues, truly, as always. The temptation to be stepchildren of time is particularly strong and effective during difficult times, even more so for those who have known good times in the past, and so the attraction of the illusion of taking refuge in the country of yesterday, which no longer exists but still promises us some small consolation, becomes strong. Today, Catholics, but also those who believed in the great social and political narratives of the twentieth century, are particularly captivated by the temptation to say and live ‘in my day!’; and thus condemn themselves to living out of step, out of time, as veterans, as guests. They take refuge in the families of yesterday, in those crowded churches, in an environment reminiscent of ‘the best years of our lives’, and thus forget that the only ‘best years of our lives’ are those we have here and now, that the only best day is today: the rest is vanitas, wind, illusion, even though they are all human things.
Of this year 2025, many wars remain, some hope for peace, a land that suffers more and more, and we with it. What remains is the Jubilee, which was a special time for many Catholics. But, now that it has come to an end, we can also say that it was an opportunity only partially exploited, if we compare what we experienced with the biblical meaning of the jubilee, namely the liberation of slaves, the cancellation of debts, rest, and the restitution of land. We have seen few slaves freed, even fewer debts (public and private) forgiven, and the land on this December 31st is breathing less than it already did on January 1st. The biblical jubilee has economic, political, and social dimensions that are fundamental to the many crises of our time, collective dimensions that have remained very much in the background of our jubilee, which has focused more on worship and individual acts.
What remains of this year, then, are the last months of Pope Francis, his prophecy, his death, and the arrival of Pope Leo. What remains are the powerful final words prepared by Francis for Easter, which he was unable to read personally, and which thus became his testament: “No peace is possible without true disarmament! The need for every people to provide for its own defense cannot be transformed into a general arms race”; and then he continued: " I appeal to all those in the world who have political responsibility not to give in to the logic of fear that closes, but to use the resources available to help the needy, fight hunger, and promote initiatives that foster development. These are the ‘weapons’ of peace." Europe, the US, and much of the world have gone in the opposite direction (rearmament) to that desired by Francis (disarmament). Those same world leaders who gathered, perhaps sincerely, to honor the pope on the day of his funeral, then approved billions in new military spending, thus betraying his last will and testament. They have become “administrators of fear” rather than the “entrepreneurs of dreams” that Francis proposed to the young people of Lisbon in 2023. And when good dreams are lacking, the administrators of fears sooner or later turn into managers of collective nightmares.
In his 1940 novel The Desert of the Tartars, written during a time of war in Europe, Dino Buzzati tells the story of Second Lieutenant Giovanni Drogo, who spends his entire life in the “Bastiani Fortress” on the far reaches of the empire. A life spent with his soldiers waiting for an enemy that was supposed to arrive. Many years pass, but there is no sign of the enemy. The soldiers were fueled by the hope of seeing enemy troops appear on the desert horizon at any moment, thus restoring new splendor and political centrality to the Bastiani Fortress, which had a glorious past but had now fallen into decline due to a lack of enemies and wars.
It is not difficult to see in the Bastiani Fortress today's Europe, an ancient decayed castle, whose soldiers prepare and rearm themselves in anticipation of an enemy who, they hope, will arrive sooner or later. But in Buzzati's novel, one day a soldier (Giuseppe Lazzari), returning from patrol, fails to give the password and is killed by the sentry, who followed the rules of the fortress even though he recognized him. In that useless fortress, with nothing serious to do, a real neurosis had developed around the formal and complicated rules on the ‘password’, as is almost always the case in useless institutions. And so, waiting for a war that never came from outside, those frustrated soldiers began to kill each other. A literary prophecy that speaks to us today, and should speak to us a great deal. In the Roman world, the beginning of the new year was under the protection of Janus, the two-faced god, the Italic deity of beginnings and transitions (iauna: door), the father of all mornings. That distant world knew that the new is deeply inscribed in the old, hence the two-faced character of the deity. What begins is the continuation of what has just been. Yet men and women in every beginning hope for something better, that what has not yet happened will finally happen. These wishes are a mixture of illusion and hope, like life itself—a good mixture. Christianity made January 1 a feast day of Mary, the ianua coeli, to place the beginning of the new time under her benevolent gaze. Christianity is the humanism of waiting, waiting for the unknown, for the One who promised he would return. Happy 2026: best wishes for living it as sons and daughters of our time.
 
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    [text] => 
Editorials - Christianity is the humanism of waiting, waiting for the unknown, for the One who promised he would return. We cannot afford to live in the memory of “better times.”
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 12/31/2025

"His was a different, particular conception of time, the kind that makes you say, ‘In my day!’. Isn't this our time? ... There is nothing worse than being the stepchildren of our own time. There is no worse fate than living in a time that is not our own. You recognize them immediately: in personnel offices, in party committees, in the political sections of the army, in newspaper offices, on the street. Time loves only those it has created; it loves its own children." 


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Agorà - Between the 13th and 15th centuries, economics became a topic of theological debate and reached a wide audience: Luca Ughetti's essay Predicare l'economia (Preaching Economics), Carocci, 2025.
by Luigino Bruni
published in Agorà by Avvenire on November 8, 2025
Merchants have always known that the market was a form of reciprocity and civil friendship. Exchanging goods was no more or less civil than administering a municipality or a confraternity. Those who knew much less about this were theologians, bishops, and popes, who, based on the principle that the idea of reality was superior to reality, described and regulated markets, trade, contracts, and finance, demonstrating little knowledge of real markets and transactions, too little for the entire Middle Ages and even more so the modern Catholic era to know a true alliance for the common good between lay people and clergy, between the official documents of the Church and the accounting records of merchants and bankers. The moral treatises of theologians and pastors of the Church condemned interest-bearing loans and merchants' profits, as if there were anyone in real cities who lent money for free or transported cloth from Florence to Paris without making any profit. 

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But while theologians and doctors wrote manuals on coins, merchants had to work. Everyone knew, including the authors of moral treatises, that economic and financial operators did not work for free, that using their services cost money, and that the price to pay for obtaining goods and money was called interest, which was accepted by all operators, especially if it was not excessive. Between the 14th and 15th centuries, Venice had more than a hundred banks, Christian and Jewish, Florence seventy, Naples forty, and Palermo fourteen. The Church was an expert in ambivalence, including economic ambivalence. It knew the names of the great bankers in the city, sat with them on government councils, and, above all, made use of their services. Everyone knew this, especially the citizens, but little was said about it, partly because those who write history, generally intellectuals, overestimate the importance of books and ideas and forget, or underestimate, that reality imposes itself with its needs and desires. From the height of their pulpits and their Latin, theologians imposed prohibitions and restrictions that made life very difficult for merchants and the people, including honest merchants, and especially those poor people whom they wanted to protect in good faith.
Ughetti's Predicare economia (Preaching Economics) is part of a line of studies, reopened by masters such as Amleto Spicciani and Giocomo Todeschini, which focuses on the mendicant orders between the 13th and second half of the 15th centuries in central Italy (especially Tuscany, Umbria, and Marche) in order to understand the birth of the market economy. The book is a collection of essays (and therefore, by its very nature, repetitions are almost inevitable), and offers much inspiration to those who want to learn more about the roots of the Italian and European economy, in particular the spirit of southern capitalism prior to the Reformation, and thus a narrative that differs from Max Weber's analysis of Protestant ethics.
The first protagonists of the book are two Dominican preachers in Florence between the 13th and 14th centuries, Remigio de' Girolami and Taddeo Dini. This is followed by an extensive analysis of some lesser-known works by Bernardino da Siena and some of his disciples of the Franciscan Observance, Giovanni da Capestrano and Giacomo della Marca (teacher of Marco di Montegallo, whom we have mentioned several times in these pages as the founder of the Monti di Pietà and Monti frumentari).
The Dominicans, as we know, were less open than the Franciscans (Olivi, Scoto) to the novelty of merchants and markets. Their criticism of profits and even more so of usury emerges strongly from the volume: “Every usurer sins, and every sinner is a usurer” (Remigio, p. 42). It is interesting to discover the wide range of animals and bestiaries used to describe the sins of merchants and usurers: eagles, whales, snakes, donkeys, dogs. Since Jerome, dogs had been the preferred name for Jews, who became the perfect image of the usurer - a strong and tenacious anti-Semitism accompanied the foundation of the market economy, an aspect that the book mentions but develops little.
The pages on Bernardino are important, as he is characterized by ambivalence, which is the same as that of his temple. In certain texts, the great Sienese preacher shows significant openness towards the market and merchants, provided that their activities satisfy the six conditions indicated by medieval theology and law: person, cause, time, place, consortium, and manner. Bernardino adds a seventh moral note to these six, referring (with a certain creativity) to Scotus: common harm, which is his negative version of the common good. In those sermons, we always find words of condemnation without exception for usury, but some good words about trade, such as when Bernardino even uses economic metaphors to speak of Salvation (“God the merchant”) and of “mercantia amoris” (p. 92). But too often Bernardino overlooked a fact that he and other preachers knew very well: that the great merchants and the great usurers were often the same families who were tolerated as bankers because of their philanthropy as merchants. Consider, on this point, one of the messages of Shakespeare's ‘The Merchant of Venice’: Antonio, a merchant, who played the part of the victim and boasted of lending money for free, while Shylock, a usurer, played the part of the executioner - a thesis that Shakespeare questions.
Ughetti devotes many pages to the analysis of this seventh condition of Bernardino, from which emerges the root of the substantial distrust of medieval preachers towards merchants. It is found in the theoretical hypothesis, implicit but clear and strong (even if Ughetti does not tell us so), that trade takes place in a constant condition of what we would today call ‘information asymmetry’, where the merchant is the most informed party and abuses his knowledge to defraud the simple people. This emerges clearly from the Bernardine Giacomo della Marca when, in the years 1440-1450, in a questio from his Quaresimale, he lists the fraudulent tricks of a merchant (Mastro Bartolomeo): “First is counting, of the one who counts and deceives; who, in counting so quickly, ends up astonishing the one who receives the money: because his counting is hurried (”to' to' to' to' one, two, three, five, seven, eight, ten, thirteen, fourteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty“) and the woman, who is not very intelligent, believes that it is what you say and receives it as you give it, and goes home and begins to count penny by penny and finds that she has been cheated out of three coins!” (p. 218). This hypothesis, which certainly occurs sometimes and often in certain markets, was extended by those friars to a general rule of transactions. Hence their conclusion that the junk dealer's work was not lawful because it was not useful to the common good (i.e., the good of the community, i.e., the city), because it was based on those deceptions.
Merchants were well aware that mutual advantage was often asymmetrical (+4, +1) due to the many power and information relationships, but even yesterday, those who accepted an exchange rarely did so by intentionally losing wealth and utility; this was also because exchanges were repeated, people returned, and there were important reputational effects. But when the contract ended up generating a minus sign somewhere in the contract (+1;-1, +4;-1...), the operators knew very well that they were leaving the economy and entering into theft, leaving physiology behind and entering into market pathology. And for these wrongful actions, they confessed, asked for forgiveness, and occasionally returned the ill-gotten gains, perhaps during jubilees or on their deathbeds, as Armando Sapori told us almost a century ago. In the financial sphere, asymmetry is very great, and for this reason it was followed by the laws with great attention, but even here there was a wide range of mutual advantage, which everyone knew very well – and protests by the people were not uncommon when the civil and religious authorities expelled Jews and their banks from medieval and modern cities. In some of Bernardino's writings, mutual benefit in the markets emerges, but in many others it is denied, fueling the idea of merchants (especially small ones) as thieves and swindlers to be viewed with suspicion.
And on the basis of this partial theory of value, Giacomo della Marca constructs a whole casuistry that would make today's stock exchanges pale in comparison, where the ‘manner’ of the contract must not be ‘Malignus, Falsus, Infedelis, Iniustus, Crudelis’ (p. 214), and then twenty types of these five kinds (from ‘inviluppare’ to ‘falso cambiare’) . Also in Quaresimale, we find another hypothetical dialogue with a merchant who claimed that his work was lawful because he ‘fed the city’, to which he replied: ‘The first reason is clearly false, for I have never seen anyone die of hunger except those who are in prison for debt or those who are stripped of their possessions, since God gives nourishment to men’ (p. 221).
Reading this book and others like it, we realize that the market economy in Italy and Europe managed to develop despite the actions of the preachers. Merchants and bankers did not listen to the preachers' case studies, but tried to continue working, partly because many other Franciscans, while their colleagues who were professors of theology wrote treatises in Latin, were friends with merchants, their confessors, met them in the Third Order, and encouraged them beyond the prohibitions and condemnations of the treatise writers and preachers. Above all, however, merchants and economic operators in Catholic countries developed a double standard that is still at the root of many Latin anomalies, from tax amnesties to widespread tax evasion. We have not been able to generate a true culture of trust between the market, religion, and the city, and it is also for these reasons that we do not find the words entrepreneur, market, or bank in our beautiful Republican Constitution.
 
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Agorà - Between the 13th and 15th centuries, economics became a topic of theological debate and reached a wide audience: Luca Ughetti's essay Predicare l'economia (Preaching Economics), Carocci, 2025.
by Luigino Bruni
published in Agorà by Avvenire on November 8, 2025
Merchants have always known that the market was a form of reciprocity and civil friendship. Exchanging goods was no more or less civil than administering a municipality or a confraternity. Those who knew much less about this were theologians, bishops, and popes, who, based on the principle that the idea of reality was superior to reality, described and regulated markets, trade, contracts, and finance, demonstrating little knowledge of real markets and transactions, too little for the entire Middle Ages and even more so the modern Catholic era to know a true alliance for the common good between lay people and clergy, between the official documents of the Church and the accounting records of merchants and bankers. The moral treatises of theologians and pastors of the Church condemned interest-bearing loans and merchants' profits, as if there were anyone in real cities who lent money for free or transported cloth from Florence to Paris without making any profit. 

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Editorials - Looking at the world from under the table
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 11/16/2025
World Day of the Poor, established in 2017 by Pope Francis, does not coincide with the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty established by the UN in 1992, which is celebrated on October 17. They are similar and have much in common, but there is a big difference between the two days, represented by the first beatitude of the Gospel: ‘Blessed are the poor’. That is why, when in 1987 Father Joseph Wresinski, founder of the ATD Fourth World Movement, launched the initiative that the UN would adopt five years later, he evangelically called it the ‘World Day for the Eradication of Poverty’. Poverty is not just misery, and the poor are not just misery. Many poor people are also in misery, but not all of them, and not all poverty and not all poor people should be eliminated, because if we eliminated all those who freely choose poverty, the earth would become truly too miserable.

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This year, Pope Leo chose as his title: “You are my hope, my Lord” (Psalm 71:5). If we are honest, we must admit that we find it very difficult to celebrate the day of the poor and their hope, which is not in vain, because almost all of us, sitting on the comfortable sofas of our warm homes, have lost touch with the truly poor. In order to talk about and then celebrate a day of the poor, we should first get to know the poor in the flesh, be friends with some of them, enter their homes, shacks or non-homes, and perhaps stay there for a while. We should listen to them, let them speak, and recognize them—as the friends of ATD Fourth World do—with dignity of thought and words. All reports, studies, statistics, books, conferences, actions, and policies on poverty are produced by non-poor people, by experts who almost always talk about a continent they have never been to and know only from hearsay. We should supplement these reports and studies, which are often (though not always) useful, with different reports and studies, those that come from people who are inside the poverty that is described by those outside it. ‘Reality is superior to the idea’, a phrase very dear to Pope Francis, always applies, but especially when dealing with misery and unchosen poverty, where too often the idea of poverty prevails over the reality of poverty.
On this day, we should finally give the floor to the truly poor, listen to their point of view on their poverty, and let them tell us in their own words which aspects of their poverty they would like to eliminate and which they would not. If we did so, we would see something very different. It would be, for example, something Christian and prophetic if, at least in view of this day, we set up a commission composed exclusively or predominantly of poor people to prepare the first draft of Pope Leo's message and the introduction to the Caritas Report. We would learn to look at our world by standing with Lazarus under the table of the rich man, because the perspective of the poor on the world is essential even for those who are not poor or are no longer poor. The poor must not remain only the object of studies, words, actions, and prayers; they can become the subjects: we will see other studies, other actions, other prayers.
Perhaps we do not do this because, even in the Church, the truly poor frighten us; they remind us of a dark part of our lives that we do not want to see, and so instead of truly encountering them, we prefer to talk about the poor and give them alms. If, on the other hand, we really knew today's Lazaruses and sat down next to them, from that low vantage point we would see things that messages and reports cannot see by imagining poverty and looking at phenomena, data, and traces of poverty without seeing the poor, or seeing them only occasionally or at certain moments—for example, when they ask for help. But the “poor” (if we really want to call them that, which only says something about these people) do not just ask for help, they do many other things, some of them beautiful: they fall in love, sometimes they help others, they still know how to bring children into the world, they endure (like Job) our words and glances at them, and they often still know how to celebrate.
The big problem with ‘aid’ to the poor has to do with the issue of competence. Those who deal with it, almost always in perfect good faith, almost never have the necessary expertise on poverty. Because the most important expertise, in all areas (including the market), is that which arises from so-called tacit knowledge, i.e., that dimension of uncodified knowledge that cannot be learned in school or in master's programs. Tacit knowledge-competence is in fact that which is found only in the minds and souls of people who find themselves in that specific situation, and which only they possess. It is the expertise to be able to live on two dollars a day, to prepare a meal with almost nothing, to truly know what a companion (cum-panis) is, what trust (fides: corda) is, what charity is (that which is dear, and therefore valuable), how not to freeze to death without radiators and stoves, and even to intuit something of what the most scandalous and prophetic phrase in the Bible means: “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Luke 6:20).
We could also express all this with the term ‘subsidiarity’, a great principle at the heart of our democracy. Any help and any words about poverty must start from those who are inside the problem, from what they already know and are, from their savoir faire, and then act only as a second step. “Only you can do it, but you cannot do it alone,” Bishop Giancarlo Bregantini taught me many years ago, a perfect summary of this evangelical subsidiarity.
This day, then, should be the right day to get to know and appreciate more the truly poor, who need many things, we know, but who first need friendship and esteem, because it is the lack of esteem that is the real poverty of the poor, even within the Church that does so much for them. Especially today, when meritocratic religion is succeeding in convincing us that the poor are not only destitute but also guilty of their poverty. Happy Day of the Poor to everyone, but first and foremost to the poor.
 
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    [text] => 
Editorials - Looking at the world from under the table
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 11/16/2025
World Day of the Poor, established in 2017 by Pope Francis, does not coincide with the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty established by the UN in 1992, which is celebrated on October 17. They are similar and have much in common, but there is a big difference between the two days, represented by the first beatitude of the Gospel: ‘Blessed are the poor’. That is why, when in 1987 Father Joseph Wresinski, founder of the ATD Fourth World Movement, launched the initiative that the UN would adopt five years later, he evangelically called it the ‘World Day for the Eradication of Poverty’. Poverty is not just misery, and the poor are not just misery. Many poor people are also in misery, but not all of them, and not all poverty and not all poor people should be eliminated, because if we eliminated all those who freely choose poverty, the earth would become truly too miserable.

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    [title] => Let's teach children the logic of giving: Pinocchio is not the model to follow
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Financial education: with young children, even for household chores, money should be used as a reward and not as an incentive
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on October 3, 2025
"The Adventures of Pinocchio" is not only a classic of world literature, but also contains a great deal of economics. Classics never grow old, and neither has Pinocchio's economic ethic. In some passages, we find real lessons on the use of money for children and young people. From the beginning of his adventures, Pinocchio develops a terrible relationship with money, which is at the root of the unfortunate pages of his story. He ends up in Mangiafoco's theater selling his alphabet book, and then, for the five gold coins he is given, he ends up in the clutches of the cat and the fox and their economic abuse.

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Pinocchio's interpreters, including the few economists who have tried to study him, faced with Pinocchio's unpreparedness and naivety in handling money, have drawn the conclusion that seems most obvious to many: it is good for children to be educated from an early age about finance and the logic of money, otherwise when they grow up they will end up becoming victims of cats and foxes: “The story of Pinocchio offers food for thought about our money” (FEduF).
In reality, I am convinced that the message of Collodi's book is exactly the opposite, namely: keep your boys and girls away from money and its logic while you still can. Money and children live—or should live—in different worlds. Their mother tongue is gift-giving, and when they come into contact with money and economic logic, it must be done with infinite care because too often the power of economic language devours the delicate register of gift-giving—and that would be a real educational disaster.
When they need money, they ask their parents for it, and it is within this non-economic and gratuitous relationship that they also learn the basics of tomorrow's economy. Their economic dependence on their parents is excellent, because money known at the beginning as a gift creates the ethical conditions for assigning the right value to contracts and work tomorrow. There is now empirical evidence that children and pre-adolescents (in experiments conducted in controlled settings) engaged in activities governed by extrinsic incentives (monetary or otherwise) show a lower aptitude for performing activities with intrinsic rewards during their development (David Greene and Mark R. Lepper 1974).
The main issue at the heart of the use of money with minors is therefore the so-called motivational crowding-out (Frey 1997; Aknin, Van de Vonderwoort and Hamlin, 2018). The introduction of extrinsic motivation (money) to an activity in order to get a child to perform a given action gradually erodes the strength of the intrinsic motivation for that action in younger children, with the possible outcome of educating people who respond only to external incentives. If, for example, a family introduces an incentive system for their children's domestic activities (clearing the table: $3; dishes: 3; walking grandpa: 4; walking the dog: 2...), over time it will become very difficult to educate them in the ethics of virtue, according to which the table should be cleared for a reason internal to being a child and part of a family, grandpa should be accompanied because we love him and it is part of a grandchild's ‘duty’ to do so, the room should be kept tidy because it is good to do so, and so on. This does not mean never using money with young children; however, it should be used as a reward and not as an incentive, i.e., to reinforce good behavior and not as the “reason” for doing good—the reward reinforces virtue, it does not create it; the incentive creates the action, which would not happen without the incentive.
Incentives used with adults can serve their purpose if they are based on an intrinsic ethic that is capable of withstanding the manipulative impact of incentives – let us not forget that incentive derives from incentivus, the flute that tuned instruments, the magical charmer that takes us where we would not go spontaneously. If, on the other hand, the incentive is given to people who do not have a strong ethic of virtue, over time they will find themselves like donkeys that respond only to the stick and the carrot. It is freedom, and therefore the capacity for gratuitousness, that is at the heart of these tools and these arguments. Yesterday, it was easier for the incentive to be based on an intrinsic ethic of ‘a job well done’; today, it is much more difficult, especially if it is introduced too early at home or at school.
A similar, albeit different, argument applies to pocket money. Even in these cases, although pocket money is not the same as an incentive (they can coexist, or one can be activated without the other and vice versa), a contractual and economic framework is triggered. The pedagogy of pocket money also inevitably leads to the growth of the economic-financial register and leaves in the background that of gratuitousness and gift-giving, and of healthy dependence on parental mediation.
Today, young people are not developing a good relationship with the world of work, partly because economic logic enters the home too early, through the Trojan horse of responsibility. The dominant culture of the ‘empire’ is increasingly that of business, and as in every empire, its culture enters everywhere, almost always without our knowledge.
 
Photo credits: Photo by Splenetic Freeimages.com
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    [text] => 
Financial education: with young children, even for household chores, money should be used as a reward and not as an incentive
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on October 3, 2025
"The Adventures of Pinocchio" is not only a classic of world literature, but also contains a great deal of economics. Classics never grow old, and neither has Pinocchio's economic ethic. In some passages, we find real lessons on the use of money for children and young people. From the beginning of his adventures, Pinocchio develops a terrible relationship with money, which is at the root of the unfortunate pages of his story. He ends up in Mangiafoco's theater selling his alphabet book, and then, for the five gold coins he is given, he ends up in the clutches of the cat and the fox and their economic abuse.

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    [title] => Eugenio Borgna on the trail of joy: it is fleeting, but must be cherished
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The posthumous essay - The great psychiatrist offers texts taken from the classics on a reality that, unlike happiness, the market cannot sell us. Because it is consumed as it is generated
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 04/09/2025
Happiness is the new promise of the market economy. The day before yesterday it promised us bread, yesterday well-being, today happiness. It promises it to us in many ways, most recently with artificial intelligence, which, by finally doing better than us at everything we don't like and new things we don't yet do, will give us perfect happiness. A happiness that has to do with having, with comfort, with freedom of choice, with growth, with ‘more’, and often borders on fun and pleasure.

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What the market cannot sell us or give us is the Joy that Eugenio Borgna talks about in a beautiful essay (Einaudi, 144 pages, €13.00). It is not an academic essay, but resembles a notebook, a travel diary, a collection of scattered thoughts, united by the theme of joy. Joy is not happiness, because joy happens in the present, it is an experience, while happiness (or unhappiness) is a more stable condition. Nor is it gladness, even if Borgna does not tell us why, but we can guess by thinking of the perfect gladness of Francis, of the etymology of the word, which refers to manure (“laetus”).
Providence has placed joy among the essential resources for living. However, it has hidden it in small, tiny things, almost invisible if we rush too much. And perhaps for this reason, the poor and pure of heart are able to grasp it, perhaps only them. It is part of the landscape of that Kingdom of Heaven where all the poor and pure of heart dwell, sometimes without knowing it. Sometimes it comes after great pain, depression, and bereavement, and its arrival is the sentinel that announces the dawn. It is grace, only grace, all gift. We can buy some kinds of happiness, but not the joy of living. That is pure gratuity, and it is the most beautiful. Other times it comes during a different kind of prayer, accompanied by tears.
Let's say right away that it is not easy, even for a significant and excellent author such as Borgna (1930-2024), to write a book composed mainly of quotations from many of the greatest poets, writers, and philosophers of all time. Because it is difficult for anyone to alternate their own thoughts with the infinite thoughts of Rilke, Leopardi, Nietzsche, or Simone Weil. But perhaps Borgna's intention or animus was precisely to give us, at the end of his life (which once would have been considered long), the most beautiful words and texts on joy that he encountered in the course of his life and that of many others, especially in the practice of his profession as a psychiatrist. However, set among the words of the classics, some of Borgna's reflections on joy are also important and beautiful, touching on the beauty of his quotations, such as this one found at the beginning of the essay: “The time of hope is the future, as is that of waiting; the time of nostalgia and sadness is the past; the time of joy is the present, fragile and luminous.” Joy happens now, joy does not accumulate, we are no longer capable of joy tomorrow because we felt it today or yesterday; indeed, sometimes a long famine of joy prepares us for a sublime and unique joy. It is ‘consumed’ as it is generated. It is as ephemeral as a butterfly, but in that brief flight it releases all its infinite beauty. Again: “In joy, there are no longer the dimensions of the past and the future, worries and fears, nostalgia and anxieties; we live in the present, in the burning instant of a present that expands and restores meaning to life.”
But Borgna's most original and evocative pages are those related to his work, in particular his strong invitation to cherish the fragile joy in others (and in ourselves) also and because it is ephemeral and transitory: "Each of us has the task of tracing the traces of joy in the faces, eyes, gazes, and smiles of the people we meet, avoiding extinguishing it with our inattention and indifference. So when a few drops, a few sparks of joy are reborn in a patient, we cannot help but feel called to glimpse the dawn of hope." This is truly a beautiful passage. He adds: "As I come to the end of this book, I cannot help but say that when, in psychiatry, but also in medicine, we meet a person, young or old, immersed in joy, and in whom there are symptoms of illness, we should do everything we can not to hurt that joy by rigidly adhering to the slogan of telling the whole truth to the sick person. Joy is too precious a gift not to be held close to the heart and welcomed in its inner light and lightness, in its levity and fragility: in its silence and grace." These are words in which all his art and professional wisdom has blossomed into wisdom and poetry. From time to time, Borgna enters into dialogue with some Christian authors, from Teresa of Avila to Pope Francis (with whom he closes the book), as if to make us want to ask ourselves: but what is the typical mark of Christian joy? He does not answer, but invites us to seek it and perhaps find it in the joy of children, whom Jesus often points to in the Gospels as models of faith, and invites us to be like them in order to enter the Kingdom. There must therefore be something special about the joy of children in relation to that of the Gospel. It is truly all and only grace. Children experience life simply by living, no matter what they do. They rejoice even when they fall asleep anywhere—children's sleep is a heritage of humanity. Childhood is the age of perfect joy, because children have only the present, and in the present they encounter it. That is why contact with children is essential for everyone's joy.
Joy becomes more complicated as adults and then as old people, because we feel life slipping away and, in order not to lose it, we think we can stop it by capturing and devouring it—and joy does not come. Fun, aperitifs, restaurants, cruises, vacations pursued all year round. We eat up life, devour people and everything we encounter for a joy that does not come. But even in old age, joy is possible. However, it is very similar to the joy possible for Sisyphus who, having reached the top of yet another climb pushing his eternal boulder, in the brief pause between the end of the ascent and the beginning of the new descent, in that fleeting breath can experience a paradoxical but true joy: “We must imagine Sisyphus happy” (A. Camus). At other times, it is the boulder that generates an equally paradoxical joy, when life has taken away all the reasons for yesterday's joys and happiness and we go on only because life imposes its intrinsic discipline: preparing breakfast, going out for bread, carefully setting the table even if we are alone and there is no longer a companion. It is the boulder of life that drives us and, suddenly, can give us a delicate and true joy, which sneaks in between the dishes and the broom. I leave the last word to Borgna, thanking him: “We should never hurt the joy of a person who entrusts themselves to our care.”
Photo credits: Photo by Arina Krasnikova on Pexels 
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    [text] => 
The posthumous essay - The great psychiatrist offers texts taken from the classics on a reality that, unlike happiness, the market cannot sell us. Because it is consumed as it is generated
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 04/09/2025
Happiness is the new promise of the market economy. The day before yesterday it promised us bread, yesterday well-being, today happiness. It promises it to us in many ways, most recently with artificial intelligence, which, by finally doing better than us at everything we don't like and new things we don't yet do, will give us perfect happiness. A happiness that has to do with having, with comfort, with freedom of choice, with growth, with ‘more’, and often borders on fun and pleasure.

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