Three days of in-depth study, from June 9th to 11th, on the key dynamics involving the Vatican and ecclesiastical leaders in the two centuries from 1815 to 2015. This is the program of the initiative "The Church between Restoration and Modernity," with a series of presentations by academics who will hold lectures in the Aula Magna of the Ancient Monastery of Santa Chiara, in the historic center of San Marino, organized by the Department of History, Culture, and History of San Marino at the University of the Republic of San Marino. The conference will be opened by the Rector of the University, Corrado Petrocelli, and the Secretary of State for Education of the Republic of San Marino, Giuseppe Morganti, who will speak at 4:30 PM on Thursday, June 9th to introduce the conference. Starting at 5:00 p.m., together with the director of the Department, Luciano Canfora, there will be speeches by Giovanni Vian of Ca' Foscari University of Venice, with a seminar entitled "Updating the Catholic Church: John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council," and Andrea Riccardi of the Community of Sant'Egidio in Rome, with "Pope Francis: From Minority to People."
On the morning of Friday, June 10, together with Franco Cardini of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Carla Meneguzzi of the University of Padua will discuss "The International Role of the Holy See from the Congress of Vienna to the Paris Peace Conference." Fulvio Conti of the University of Florence will deliver a presentation entitled "The New Enemies," and Maria Jolanda Palazzolo of the University of Pisa will lead the seminar "From Preventive Censorship to Editorial Censorship: Strategies of Ecclesiastical Control." In the afternoon, Stefano Zamagni of the University of Bologna will offer new insights from Francesco Margiotta Broglio of the University of Florence with "Against All, the Syllabus of Pius IX," and two professors from the University of Rome La Sapienza: Maurilio Guasco, who will discuss "Modernism," and Paolo Naso, with "Jews and Evangelicals." Finally, on Saturday, June 11, journalist Giorgio Fabre will speak alongside Giuseppe Galasso of the Federico II University of Naples, discussing "The Vatican and the USSR after the First World War," and Daniele Menozzi of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa will discuss "War, Fascism, Nazism." This will be followed by a final roundtable discussion featuring several professors and members of the scientific council of the Department of History, Culture, and San Marino History, who served as moderators during the seminars: Canfora, Cardini, Galasso, Zamagni, and Margiotta Broglio.
"On the bicentenary of the Congress of Vienna," Canfora notes, "Professor Francesco Margiotta Broglio, a distinguished jurist, emeritus of the University of Florence and a professor in Paris, launched the proposal for a conference that would draw inspiration from a little-known historical situation: the extreme difficulty facing the Holy See in relation to the great powers that had won and dominated the Congress of Vienna, divided not only for political and military reasons but also by their different religious confessions. At the heart of the initiative was the problem of the ambiguity of the concept of Restoration. No restoration, in fact, is ever truly a restoration, since modernity, that is, the flow of history, is irresistible. This was the problem that the leadership of the Catholic Church had to grapple with, with undoubtedly contradictory results, at the beginning of a new era: that which had begun with the Congress of Vienna. At the conference, part of the seminars of the Advanced School of Historical Studies of the University of the Republic of San Marino, Expert scholars in the history of Catholicism and its enduring confrontation with the various currents that marked the 19th century and a large part of the 20th will participate."