Critical editions
Conciliorum oecumenicorum generaliumque decreta
COGD is a series of the Corpus Christianorum published by Brepols of Turnhout in which the decisions of the ecumenical and general councils of the Eastern and Western churches are published in a critical edition. Since the first edition of the COD – the volume containing the decrees of the first ecumenical councils, donated in 1962 to Pope John XXIII on the occasion of the opening of Vatican II – new editions and new volumes have followed up to the current series, which consists in seven volumes including all the Latin councils until Vatican II, the synods of the Churches of the Reformation and the synodal tradition of the Eastern and Orthodox Churches. A volume of essays and indexes will conclude the series.
In addition, work has been started on digitizing all the councils of all the churches of all times in a database that, starting from the eighteenth-century edition of Gian Domenico Mansi, will integrate the enormous mass of data unknown to him.
Contributors: Davide Dainese, Federico Alpi, Gianmarco Braghi, Ephrem Aboud Ishac.
The opera omnia of Lorenzo Milani
After over thirty years of research on Don Milani and the collection of his papers carried out over the years, FSCIRE has been able to propose and set up the project for the critical edition of his texts. The worthiness of the project was recognized in November 2015 by the Ministry of Heritage and Culture and Tourism, which promoted the National Edition, directed by Alberto Melloni, and a scientific commission was established. The critical edition of Don Lorenzo Milani’s opera omnia was published in 2017 by Meridiani Mondadori (Don Lorenzo Milani. Tutte le opere, directed by A. Melloni, edited by F. Ruozzi, A. Cafora, V. Oldano, S. Tanzarella, 2 vols., Milan, Mondadori, 2017).
Don Lorenzo Milani’s archive was formally constituted at FSCIRE in June 1974, when his mother, Alice Weiss Milani Comparetti, wrote a circular letter on behalf of herself and her children, Adriano and Elena, addressed “To the friends of Don Lorenzo Milani”, in which she communicated the family’s decision: “So that the legacy of his word and his example may not be dispersed, a common good entrusted to all, a Lorenzo Milani Fund has been set up at the Istituto per le scienze religiose in Bologna, destined to collect and preserve writings, letters, and testimonies that may directly or even indirectly illuminate his figure and his work”. The seriousness and rigor of this institution seemed to be the right place to which her papers should be entrusted in order to promote the study of Don Lorenzo’s work. Since 1974, the fund has been enriched with further funds and donations of either original or copies of papers (Elena Milani fund, Pecorini fund, Pirelli Brambilla fund, Cartoni fund, Francuccio Gesualdi fund, and many others), and a project of digitalization of the deposited papers and of those kept in other archives was initiated in order to reunite, at least on a virtual level, a single, complete Milani archive.
The results of the critical edition were previewed at the conference Don Lorenzo Milani. «Al centro della Chiesa, non ai margini» on 31 October 2015 at the Gabinetto Vieusseux, in Florence, under the patronage of the Archdiocese of Florence.
Contributors: Federico Ruozzi, Alberto Melloni.
John XXIII’s Homilies
Since the 1960s, research on Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (John XXIII) has been a constant commitment for FSCIRE, which possesses copies of the Giovanni XXIII archives (held in Bergamo). The Homilies of John XXIII research project aims to edit the whole of Roncalli’s corpus of homilies, starting from the unpublished material of the early period. The meticulousness with which Roncalli kept all “his” papers – combined with the precious information from the Agendas and the Giornale dell’anima – now allows us to access manuscript homilies from the very first months after his ordination as a priest, which took place on 10 August 1904. The reconstruction and publication of these, largely unpublished, documents will offer new tools to enquire into the theology and the spirituality of a man who marked the history of both the Church and the world.
Contributor: Gabriella La Mendola.
Arturo Paoli’s Correspondence
An ample selection of letters written by the priest from Lucca and Little Brother of the Gospel, Arturo Paoli, during his first decade in Argentina (1960-1969) is currently the object of an editorial work that is part of a project for the publication of the sources and written texts of this Tuscan man of the church promoted by the Arturo Paoli Documentation Fund in Lucca. The edition will contain significant epistolary documentation, all unpublished and for the most part of a very personal nature, that seems to constitute a privileged key to accessing Paoli’s complex human and spiritual journey during the 1960s after his second departure from Italy at the end of 1959. Addressed, with varying frequency, to about twenty interlocutors, the letters from Argentina allow us to shed some light on an important and completely unexplored biographical period in the long life of the Little Brother from Lucca, marked by his search to sink vital, new roots in the Latin American continent, which in the course of a few years, and not without suffering, went from being a “land of exile” to becoming “the homeland of his heart”.
Contributor: Silvia Scatena.