page 48 note 2 The waning of Thomism in fact began earlier, probably with Aeterni Patris, the encyclical that made it an official doctrine of the Church. Monsignor Masnovo, the historian of Italian Neo-Thomism, who cannot be accused of either anti-Catholic or anti-Thomistic bias, testifies to this. Soon after 1880, he says, the Neo-Thomistic current that “gained in extension” began to “lose in profoundity”. Its newly gained popularity amounted to a vulgarization and fed into a superficiality in turn (Masnovo, “Il neotomismo”, loc. cit., p. 101). But one is tempted to ask, of course, if this is not the fate of every official doctrine? The waning of Neo-Thomism in Italy during the papacy of Pius X was shown by the fact that the Thomistic review Divus Thomas, published in Rome since 1880, folded up in 1905, apparently because the narrowing number of subscribers did not provide sufficient support for its survival. It was to be revived in 1909 under the personal guidance of Pius X in the form of the Rivista di filosofia neo-scolastica. But the new review, at least during the era of Pius X, was characterized by an almost total lack of interest in the application of Thomism to social and political problems. Yet in spite of its apparent waning at the turn of the century, Neo-Thomism as a social philosophy survived among some Catholics, as Spiazzi et al., Teologia e storia della carità testifies. The volume, written in the 1960's, still insists on the validity of Thomistic social ideas (passim, particularly pp. 178, 419–21). The writers who contributed to the volume still seem to assume that the “poor” are to remain forever on the social landscape. The solution of the social problems involving the “poor” is framed up in terms of assistenza. The most important form of this “assistance”, the writers maintain, is private charity. Public assistance, one of the essayists says, is only to supplement private and church charity. Disregarding apparently the Thomistic tradition of the social responsibility of the state, this writer, Carlo Messori, argues that the social activity of the state should be limited to those problems that private and church charity cannot resolve. Like social and political conservatives in other countries, these Italian Catholic authors seem to fear that the welfare state would sooner or later turn into a totalitarian state. And this leads them into arguments that characterize the laissez-faire arguments of yesteryear, used against socialists by conservative liberals. Considering that it was born as a counter-ideology to liberalism, Neo-Thomism seems to have run a full circle.
