«Vita e Pensiero» 1914-1921. Una rivista cattolica d’avanguardia alle origini dell’Università Cattolica.

The book reconstructs the story of the origins of the cultural magazine «Vita e Pensiero» from 1914, the year of its founding, until 1921, when it inaugurated the courses of the University of Sacred Heart, of which the magazine was the second "stone" (the first was the "Neo-scholastic philosophy magazine"). The monograph also broadly considers the years prior to this period, reconstructing the Italian cultural and journalistic framework of the early twentieth century and identifying in it non-episodic links with the editorial initiative of Father Agostino Gemelli. With the explicit mission to seek a battle against a multi-faceted modern-contemporary reality, to remedy at the exclusion of Catholics from it, even without deflecting the discipline of doctrinal orthodoxy of the neo-Thomist approach. The research surfaces the multiplicity of cultural contributions, both from Italians (like those of Father Semeria, Filippo Meda, Luigi Caissotti of Chiusano, Don Francesco Olgiati, Don Ernesto Vercesi and Monsignor Mario Sturzo), and foreigners (such as those of Vaussard, Goyau, Pesch , Klein), in the crucial years of the First World War, intertwining with the moral questions posed to Italian Catholics regarding the justice and the rightfulness of intervention, the dutiful obedience to the State, to the equally necessary consideration of the papal admonitions, all inclined to peace and in any case to the maintenance of Italian neutrality. Regarding the postwar period, "Life and Thought" followed the new social exigencies with a series of initiatives on work and the Economy, as well as encouraging the freedom in teaching and the affirmation of the Christian "soul" of the Popular Party, thus prefiguring the cultural commitment that was then the University.