Jesuit Pulp Fiction: The Serial Novels of Antonio Bresciani in La Civilta Cattolica

The successful and highly authoritative Jesuit opinion-journal La Civiltà Cattolica was founded in 1850 to assert Catholic values in the face of ‘the Revolution’, an allegedly nefarious process that had begun with the Revolution of 1789 and was seen by the Jesuit writers as continuing with the 1848 revolution in Italy and the ongoing Risorgimento movement; this called the temporal power of the papacy into question and also entailed wider issues of secularization. For these writers, the periodical press was a dangerous new force and the only way to combat it effectively was on its own ground. The serial novels which ran in the fortnightly journal from 1850 until 1927 were evidendy written in the belief that the devil should not be left with all the most gripping yarns. The dangers to morality posed by romantic novels were constantly emphasized in the journal’s own fiction. The dominant tone of this fiction was polemical. The villains represented the forces of Jacobinism, the secret societies of the early Risorgimento, and Freemasonry. Conspiracy was a constant theme. Indeed, the leitmotifs of anti-Jesuit polemic depicting the Society of Jesus as an occult conspiratorial organization were in turn deployed by the Jesuit writers against Freemasonry. In the present study, however, the emphasis will be primarily on what the works of Antonio Bresciani (1798–1862), the pioneer Jesuit novelist between 1850 and 1861, had to say about Christian life and values. This, in fact, has most relevance to the genre of the romantic novel.