Giorgio La Piana and the Religious Crisis in Italy at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century

As an intellectual, Giorgio La Piana has not yet received adequate critical consideration, either in Italy or in the United States. The lack of scholarly attention paid to such a culturally and historically significant figure is quite surprising, considering that La Piana, a Sicilian priest, emerged as one of the most notable Catholic personalities in Modernism, the well-known current of thought headed by Ernesto Buonaiuti. Like many priests and laymen, La Piana owed an intellectual debt to Buonaiuti, with whom he shared a common interest in the early history of the Church, as well as in Gioacchino da Fiore. They also enjoyed a long-lasting friendship. He was one of the many representatives of a generation of Catholics who contributed to the elaboration of new ideas and new projects at the beginning of the twentieth century, giving rise to the so-called “Modernist crisis.” What distinguished La Piana in particular among the generation of scholars he belonged to was his choice to emigrate to the United States, where he acted as a bridge between American and Italian culture: in fact he was the author of an Italian translation of George Foot Moore’s works, as well as of a translation into English of essays by Buonaiuti published in the Harvard Theological Review. La Piana became a point of reference for some Italian scholars of the history of the Church and religions who had studied under Buonaiuti (Alberto Pincherle, Mario Niccoli, Ambrogio Donini, Giorgio Della Vida, Arturo Carlo Jemolo) and who had considerable problems with the Fascist régime. It was often thanks to La Piana that they managed to make contact with the intellectual and academic worlds in the United States.