Agostino Gemelli e la prima guerra mondiale

The article focuses on the role played by Father Agostino Gemelli during the first world war, when he was not only active as a medical officer and the director of a Psychophysical Laboratory annexed to the Military Headquarters, but was also engaged in an unorthodox form of patriotic and political propaganda. The study of the articles and pamphlets that he published in the war years points to a peculiar stance, not always in accordance with the opinions prevalent in the catholic world. This singularity is rooted in Gemelli’s biography and in his medical training in the University of Pavia; it also reflects his determination to participate in a renewal of Italian intellectual and moral habits in a direction only partially consistent with the Vatican’s official views. His activism caused worry and suspicion in high places, and his approach aroused fears of doctrinal deviation: this danger was not new to the man who had experienced a strong attraction to modernist opinions after his earlier conversion.