L'Università Cattolica per l'Italia

[Autom. eng. transl.] Result of precise investigations that the author has carried out on the history of the Catholic University since its foundation, in 1921, to the seventies, the contribution gives an account of the national project developed by the university and of the contribution it gave to Italian history. Considering an extended time span, which goes from the planning of a Catholic university, in the second half of the nineteenth century, to the beginning of the eighties and therefore to the end of the rectorate by Giuseppe Lazzati, the essay reconstructs the distinctive elements of the recristianization design fed to the inside the University of the Sacred Heart, which identified in the myth of the "Christian civilization" derived from the Middle Ages not only an alternative model to that of modernity, but a sort of ideological compass to conquer the future in its ecclesial and civil versions. In the light of the most recent historiographical results, we consider the design of this project in the cultural horizon of early twentieth-century Catholicism and its first trials, in comparison with the Great War, the Fascist period and democratic reconstruction. Thus the contours of a sort of Catholic maximalism emerge, which pointed to the realization of a "new social order" in controversy with the old liberal state. The goal was to reshape the idea of citizenship and to strengthen the sense of civil responsibility of the Catholic world, to transform it from a place of anti-bourgeois protest to the source of a different way of being Italian. The comparison with the gentilian idealism, with the corporatism and the welfare state, the reflections aimed at the revival of Italian democracy, the significant contribution to the constituent debate, the advance support to the center-left and the contribution to the genesis of the student protest these are all steps that have marked the evolution of this project, engaging it in an attempt to influence the political culture of the country and the renewal of the social structures of united Italy.