La fragile concordia: Stato e cattolici in centocinquantanni di storia italiana (Italian Edition)

I have a great admiration for him. He seems to me to be the only really big figure of our times. Here today, in the oldest capital of the world, we beg to express with the utmost solemnity our hope that those great men to whom the desti nies of the highly gifted Italian nation are entrusted, will be first in setting a model to the world by showing that energetic administration can make good the damage which has already been done to our culture, by arresting the fall in population and by preserving the best endowed. Quality as well as quantity! The urgency brooks no delay; the danger is imminent.

Undoubtedly, many fundamental components of fascist ideology were able to justify the elective affinity with eugenics: Not only did the Duce repeatedly consult Gini regarding the technical details of the speech, but the relationship also influenced the timing of the natalist policy launch. From , Mussolini had explicitly abandoned his youthful neo-Malthusian sympathies in favor of nationalist natalism. The turning point in was fuelled by his perception of change in the current Italian demography: Italy had also been hit with a slowdown in demographic growth.

Investigations on the population are always more convincing that the white race, or at least that part of the white race that gave rise to current occidental civilization, is at a decisive turning point in its history. After the marvelous development of the population seen in the previous century, we are now in a more or less stationary situation.

It is not true! The river is no longer in flood, and is rapidly returning to its bed. Healing, today, is not amputating, but preserving: The hostility of the American social demographers was deeply connected with their commitment in New Deal reforming policies and social eugenics, based on family planning and birth control. The Italian Committee did not recognize the legality of the decision of the Union and continued to organize the congress, which was held in Rome in September under the honorary presidency of Benito Mussolini.

From , the Italian eugenicists refused to pay the financing fee of the London Bureau of the organization, presided over by Cora B. Hodson was not only a formal and bureaucratic question. These were clearly denounced in a letter from Gini to Charles Davenport:. Pestalozza presented his relation on sterilization, Ms. Hodson did not speak, although I, as chairman, had invited all the congress participants to join in the discussion three times.

Hodson sent us in the minutes a long declaration that she never made. It was not completely regular. But more seriously was that in this declaration, she affirmed that the Federation, in the meeting in Rome, had voted in favor of sterilization, and it was in the name of the Federation that she made her declaration at the Congress! It could be that wanting to achieve qualitative perfection requires a series of successive sterilizations, which could lead to catastrophic consequences: Preserving the present and future health of the race is a duty, more, a fundamental duty of the State, this is the hinge of fascist doctrine; but our methods seem more suitable to the aim.

Italy had not in fact definitively abandoned the Union in We shall propagate the doctrine among people as contained in the encyclical Casti Connubii. First, Gini was a relevant figure in the international scientific context, as statistician, demographer and sociologist. Secondly, he assumed, almost simultaneously, the presidency of the three most important Italian institutions in the field of population policy and eugenics: Gini then remarked indifference of public opinion, in Italy and elsewhere, toward eugenic issues:.

Abroad, as here in Italy, while eugenics is alive and prospering as a discipline that interests the cultivators of biological and social disciplines, some political men, and several philanthropists, it is not however able—it would be in vain to deny it—to capture the conscience of the masses, who consider it with persistent skepticism, if not with evident mistrust. The intense exercise of a function must have not only a mechanical effect on the development of the organ, but also a more subtle effect, probably biochemical, modifying the entire composition of the organism, even if barely perceptible or imperceptible to our means of observation […].

The germs could in this way receive, due to the intense exercise of the functions, or of particular functions of the organism, biochemical modifications that render the products that derive from it predisposed to exercise the same functions. Abolishing illness in the present generations would mean exposing future generations, lacking immunization, to the risk of a serious crisis; eliminating sick people from reproduction would not have a vastly different effect, as reproduction would be left only to plasm that had not been recently immunized.

Germinal characteristics would evolve, at least for certain species, through internal forces, and the numbers of their population would evolve contemporarily, following a course which many compare to the course of individual development, with a period of gradual growth, a period of maximum development, and a period of decline which often finishes, sooner or later, in the extinction of the species.

Among families who in the past lived in the same environment, with an analogous amount of instruction, not yet elevated or elevated only recently from the lower classes, equally disposed to various diseases or immunized against these diseases, comparable from these various points of view, eugenics might yet exercise its selective action. What was, in fact, the best way to match marriages? Is it preferable to couple homozygotic individuals, and in this way separate the race into two categories, one of healthy homozygotes and the other of sick homozygotes, counting on the progressive decline and disappearance of the latter?

Or is it preferable to let people cross, so that the crossings attenuate the damage of the sick forms, and perhaps favor the reproduction of heterozygotic individuals? We must ask ourselves if, and to what point, an on-average inferior population, but with a high frequency of people with exceptionally favorable characteristics might not be preferable, from a point of view of social efficiency, to an on-average superior population, but with more uniformly distributed characteristics.

Eugenics implied a rationalization of births, which risked compromising the demographic power of the nation:. It is here that we find perhaps the most serious doubt that perplexes eugenicists on the advantages of passing, in the current state of awareness and conditions, to practical action. It is the doubt whether the population or the classes, overcoming instinct and practicing eugenics, will rationalize the quantity of their offspring, not only from a point of view of quality, but even from a view of advantage to the parents, and therefore reduce themselves to a number completely insufficient to maintain their place in the world.

The final resolution, unanimously approved, was very moderate indeed:. The First Italian Congress of Social Eugenics praises the scientific activities of the experts in genetics and eugenics and recognizes the importance of the resulting achievements. At the same time, we acknowledge that, in the face of the complex and delicate characteristics of the problems of applied eugenics, that which has been done is only little in the face of that which still needs to be done and, without excluding the possibility that from today we could draw useful results regarding the conduct of individuals and the action of public entities, we confirm that the greatest prudence will be imposed, and that in the meantime it is above all in the fields of research and observations that the eugenic specialists must focus their efforts.

During the Congress, Gemelli synthesized the Catholic position toward eugenics, reprising the discussion contained in the document published in by the Secretariat for Morality of the Naples Diocese. Chastity would combat the possibility of illegitimate children, the transmission of venereal diseases and the conception of overly numerous or defective offspring.

According to Gemelli, Catholic sexual ethics could lead to a progressive peaceful alliance between science and faith, in the name of eugenics: Modern progress has […] placed in doubt that the French revolution dogma of equality is based on incontrovertible circumstances as well as that men are born great or of no merit at random, independent of every law or organic relationship. We have been able to establish that there are families in reality formed by idiots, delinquents, perverts, idle people, and others instead with special attributes, composed of individuals who are eminent because of psychical, intellectual or artistic qualities, without being able to establish the diverse ways in which the conditions of the external world act on either of these.

Building the New Man - Chapter IV. Quality through quantity - Central European University Press

Eugenic practices can, together with the remedy of impeding the reproduction of criminals and degenerates, be of valid assistance in curing germinal illnesses, in the period in which it is possible. Above all, it is necessary to turn the attention of physicians to the detection of hereditary syphilis in defective parents and the opportunity to cure it specifically during pregnancy, to prevent otherwise irreparable damage to the foetus. For Roberto Michels, the high qualifications of Italians workers emigrating to France, accompanied by an increasing birth control as a consequence of the improvement of their economic situation, would produce optimal results from a eugenic point of view.

As for premarital examinations, despite the favorable position of several physicians, 93 the Congress voted for a rather moderate resolution, that mirrored the proposal of the Royal Society of Hygiene:.

• Things to do in while in Chengdu, China.
• Julia Extra Band 0353: Neue Chance, neues Glück / Prinzessin für eine Nacht? / In einer Gondel durch Venedig / Meine Liebe verzeiht alles / (German Edition).
• A Step Away from Paradise: A Tibetan Lamas Extraordinary Journey to a Land of Immortality!

The First Italian Congress of Social Eugenics approves the institution of a medical premarital certificate as simple eugenic information for the betrothed of the reciprocal conditions of health, and as a means of propaganda for an improvement of popular hygienic awareness. It is not a legal means upon which the permission to marry is granted by an authority, and we hope that, at least in the large urban centers, special public offices will be instituted to issue the certificate. Where education from experts of eugenics and related sciences is able to deeply permeate the social strata of the various classes, even the surgical instruments will be condoned, and sterilizing activities, carried out in accordance with the most recent scientific findings, will be proclaimed necessary and blessed.

Currently, there are too many elements of a sentimental nature, too many customs that oppose, at least in Europe, any practice of the kind. This does not take away the fact that this is an aim that we must have, in order to set ourselves on the path to modern civilization. What I hope for eugenics is that, in the research of means to achieve its radiant ideals, it does not borrow from medicine any ancient, obsolete and repugnant operations. And, even if we do not believe in leaving the gradual elimination of appalling offspring to nature, the new science of eugenics can find in social hygiene promising rules to allow us to overcome single morbose conditions, focusing on every scientific research that extends the benefits of hygiene, that we are already able to offer to the individual and society, to the entire stock.

On this occasion, the International Commission approved the Italian project of constituting an international library of eugenics, which had been proposed during the Lund meeting by Corrado Gini and Ettore Levi. In the second half of the s, as well as intensifying the battle against birth control and eugenic selection of marriage, Gini specified, always in opposition to Anglo-American eugenics, his own interpretation of racial crossing.

Significantly, Gini expounded his view on this topic during two international conferences: When, in other words, an unfavorable trait appears in bastards, this does not actually signify degeneration, but is simply the effect of a scission typical of Mendelian laws, and is verifiable—given the presence of those unfavorable traits—also in the product of individual heterozygotes within the same race.

We must not forget that, especially in countries where the union between individuals of different races is the subject of general disapproval, if not legal penalties, the mulatto or hybrid derives generally from the illegitimate coupling of a white man and colored woman, both of low class and bad morals. It is also reasonable to admit that it [moral disharmony] may often be due to the even greater contrast between the psychology of the various races, as, for instance, between the ambition, the love of power, and the adventurous spirit of the whites and the idleness, the inconstancy, the lack of self-control and often adequate intelligence of many colored people.

While some crosses, such as those between whites and blacks, have mostly damaged products, those between the colonial Dutch and Hottentot women in South Africa—studied with particular diligence by E. Fischer—resulted in several traits intermediate from the parent races and in others superior to both.

Analogous results have been observed in the United States in crosses between whites and Red Indians, and in Oceania, between whites or Chinese with the Polynesians. According to Gini, it was necessary to consider the multiplicity of factors that determined the eugenic quality of hybrids: In Chicago, in , he declared:. It cannot be denied that mulattoes are generally intermediate between the Whites and Negroes, consequently superior on the whole to the latter and inferior as regards most of the traits in which the Whites are superior; superior to the former and inferior to the latter in those few traits in which Negroes excel.

Now among these races the pigmentation of eyes and hair, which display—albeit with varying frequency—all gradations from blue to brown and from fair to black, respectively, and even the form of the hair, which varies from absolute straightness to the thickly curled variety, are indisputable evidence of the fusion of diverse racial elements. In the same way, among the Malaysian races, the Javanese dominated and were a combination of diverse anthropological elements.

Nature also gave rise to crossing and selective isolation:. Apart from the appearance of mutations, not only the dominating races of mankind […], but all races, derive their origin from crossbreeding. The group feeling determined by physical, or social, or cultural, or administrative factors race, cast, city, state, etc. In this consists the biological function of the group feeling. In the first aspect, the concept of the germinal plasm was again central.

The populations in which these phenomena occur are, generally speaking, those in which different races have lived side by side, sometimes for long periods of time, whose amalgamation has hitherto been hindered by political barriers, or by psychological resistance, or by legal prohibitions, or by differences of culture or of language. The time comes when these obstacles which kept them apart are eliminated, when they assimilate their respective cultures, intermix [ sic ] on a large scale, and come to form indeed a single nation. Our Italy, from the start of the previous century, has finally started to show undoubted signs of revival, which have accompanied the Risorgimento and the reconquest of independence; in the current century, this phenomenon seems to have quickly undergone intensification, accentuated all the more by the last war, from which the fascist revolution is the recent fruit.

Not only from the point of view of political psychology, but also from the racial standpoint, Italians had to be unified, and that unification, now hastened by the centralizing policy of the government, is beginning to bear its fruits. If this be the case, then the hope—and more than the hope, the intimate feeling which many have—that the Italian nation is now reviewing itself to write new and glorious pages in its history is not without biological foundations. This signifies that the study of factors, susceptible to social regulation, which might improve or worsen the physical and psychical characteristics of the human race—study that constitutes the object of eugenics—is indissolubly connected with the laws of heredity and the variability of all the animal and vegetal world, laws that form the contents of genetics.

If eugenics concludes that the factors that, under social direction, can improve or impair the racial characteristics of future generations are a bit less hereditary than was believed, and a bit more of a different nature, no one can say that eugenic science is any less than originally aimed for. How do new stocks grow? Admitting that they definitely come from the obscure mass of population, what are the circumstances that determine their rise? Evidently, this cannot come from the heredity of superior factors, which in the past did not exist.

Could the origin be found in fortunate combinations; sorts of crosses between stocks not overly different and favored by natural selection? Could the change of environment caused by migration contribute? And what importance does the selection that operates within migration have? Shapiro, coordinator of a study on Polynesian crossing financed by the Rockefeller Foundation. The improvement of the stock is not to be expected from neo-Malthusianism, nor from the limitation of offspring, nor from compulsory sterilization; in sum, not from limitation and prohibition, which represent only the negative part of the eugenic program.

It is a program of positive eugenics that we should value, like the program implemented by our national Italian government, with guaranteed assistance aimed at maternity and infancy, with prenatal care, social welfare, and the physical and moral education of the youth. Hodson, secretary of the IFEO, declared themselves favorable to sterilization, the latter not hesitating to praise the humanitarian characteristics of Californian eugenic legislation.

Hodson I would say that I reserve my enthusiasm for those surgical operations that tear the ill from their illness or from death, and not for mutilating surgical operations, that I as a surgeon would not deign to carry out, because there is no medical necessity, but only a social interest that has not been demonstrated. Several Italian contributions at the and Congresses focused on this problem: In , Silvestro Baglioni analyzed the parallels existing between the somatic and genetic functions, while Agostino Gemelli, in , proposed Catholic sexual ethics as a remedy for the psychological causes of sterility.

This is quite evident in the works of the statistician Marcello Boldrini, attempting to find a connection between the biology of social stratification and the demography of differential fertility. We are no longer looking at persuading the poorer classes to decrease their fertility, offering them a dream of greater well-being, but rather at resounding, as in the past, that internal voice in members of the higher classes, which encourages them to value paternity by the same standards of moral criteria.

Based on the data of the registry office and declarations from the heads of families, priorly advised by the Mayor, the research was a census of more than a million and a half large families exactly, 1,, The analysis of the data was carried out in successive stages: Thanks to the mobilization of the municipalities, previously alerted by CISP, the examinations were carried out in municipal clinics or in specific locations prepared for the occasion, although home visits were also carried out, particularly in the big cities.

Menu di navigazione

In August, the inquiry could be said to be already concluded, and its results dominated the section of Anthropology and Geography at the International Congress. In first place, large families had to become the fulcrum of the demographic and eugenic policies of the fascist regime, as Gini clearly confirmed at a conference held on 16 March , at the Faculty of Law of the University of Bari:.

The most effective method to re-raise the birthrate, or to contain the decrease, is not to encourage the reproduction of small families and individuals that shun marriage, but rather that of those who have managed to remove every obstacle from their families that opposed their expansion and multiplication, who have preserved the generative power of earlier times intact. Keeping these families in the country by putting the brakes on emigration, facilitating their natural tendency to reproduce by appealing to the sentiments and considerations that could entice them, executing, wherever necessary, their transplantation to regions that have strong need of prolific elements, constitute the most effective measures.

The inquiry could also be useful for science from another point of view, as it could ascertain the scientific grounds of the arguments of the constitutionalist school, or at least of several exponents of such a school, according to which the genetic instinct would be often particularly strong among macrosplanchnic or brevilinear individuals, whose biotype would therefore be favored by selective reproduction, while microsplanchnic or longilinear individuals would be particularly obstructed. If true, this theory would explain the persistence of the brevilinear type, so frequent in the population, compared to the longilinear type, that matrimonial selection should favor.

The partial results obtained from different collaborators of the anthropometric inquiry carried out on the fathers and mothers of large families lead to the conclusion that the morphological type of the individuals examined, both men and women, for the major part of characters, oscillates around average values, as much for the fundamental measurements as for the index values. Environmental and economic conditions generally not very favorable; occupations for the father generally manual and tiring; for the mother, household duties; for the men, little adiposity, agile body shape, long limbs, large chest, normal abdomen, an on-average tall height; for the women, a more squat body shape, tendency to adiposity, narrow chest, average abdomen, short limbs, medium-short height, normal menstrual cycle.

In the matter of population, as in other fields, the problems of quantity and quality are indissolubly connected. As I see it, they are indissolubly connected not only because in practice it is difficult to think of a measure affecting the number of inhabitants which does not also affect their qualitative distribution, or of a measure hindering or encouraging the reproduction of certain categories of people which does not also modify, directly or indirectly, the number of the population, but also and above all because population is a biological whole, subject, as such, to biological laws, which show us that mass, structure, metabolism, psychic phenomena, the reproduction of organic life are all indissolubly connected, both in their static condition and in their evolution, so that it would be vain to try to modify some of these characters without taking into account the stage of development attained by the other.

Then, granted that on the contrary this reduction does occur, we must conclude that the above explanation is insufficient and that it must either be completed by an additional explanation or replaced by another more in keeping with the facts. It would appear also, that a 50 per cent reduction of heterosis from the first to the second generation of hybrids is not always in keeping with experience, so that also from this side, the theory is not always confirmed by facts.

The turning point came, not surprisingly, after the International Population Congress in Berlin, in the summer of The Italian scholars must abstain from collaborating with the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations, from which our representatives have distanced themselves in consideration of its program, which evidently contrasts with the Italian direction regarding the qualitative population policy.

The idea of a league of nations with low birth-rates could not originate among the Latins. Nor is it likely that Latins would ever grasp at the expedient of sending propagandists to countries with high birth-rates to spread the seeds of limitation of the birth-rate and mitigate their demographic pressure in this way.

It is, on the other hand, probable that, when crosses with another race appear inevitable, they can be kept from falling into the opposite extreme, judging all the races as absolutely equal from the point of view of their intellectual attitudes. This was the Latin model. As the Latin countries have never been used as colonies of deportation, they will not encounter those sources of degeneration that weigh on the economic and moral balance of other nations, nor do sexual perverts assume in their populations such importance as to suggest to scientists to constitute a third sexual category, or give rise to movements because this judgment is juridically recognized.

These are circumstances that help to understand how suggestions of radical measures of elimination came to be listened to in other countries. It is very natural that the descendents of Rome, which […] thousands of years ago imposed the abolition of human sacrifices, and then gradually achieved the abolition of slavery, feel complete reluctance in the face of a measure that deprives man of one of the most essential attributes of his personality and sacrifices one of the most salient manifestations of life.

An entire section of the Congress was dedicated to the possible forms of healing the illnesses of the germ plasm and several papers stressed the importance of environmental conditions, education and biotypological monitoring. The biological decadence of the elite—maintained Levi della Vida—did not bring about the degeneration of civilization, as Pearson had claimed, but on the contrary, was absorbed by the parallel rise of the inferior classes:.

This data showed that the brevilinear form was prevalent in the Po valley and that, on the other hand, the medium form was more frequent in Sardinia: It is a delicate subject. We need to be clear about the terms, adopt the methods that are least susceptible to criticism and set up the research in a way that responds well to the questions to resolve. The difficulties regarding this last point are multiple, and the progress will consequently be slow.

Recognizing the necessity of racial crossings for the conservation of the stock, and acknowledging that, according to the racial elements that are combined, the quality of the products will vary, there will be diversity, from a social point of view, in the value of these crossings in relation to the different environmental demands. However, this does not negate the importance of the eugenic problems of crossings. If anything, it accentuates it, insofar as, recognizing the inevitable characteristic of the phenomenon, the need to control it becomes more evident.

From , I was introduced to studies on racial crossings by Father Mauro da Leonessa, capuchin missionary, currently in Rome at the Convent of the Capuchins of S. Lorenzo Fuori Le Mura. But only in January did the Italian press accept my article on the problem of racial crossing, since it was only then that the fascist government officially decided to follow the example that Great Britain, for some centuries, the United States of America since their constitution and the Colony of the Cape successively, had adopted, that is, racist policies, with results that even today are not denied.

Marco Pomilio, but although the first part came out, the following part was published after many difficulties due to an intervention from the government; and, unlike what had happened to similar articles, the Italian press completely ignored the highly important interview that was the synthesis of scientific research that since then has been acknowledged in that field. In the end, I myself was invited not to cite the studies of Prof. Gini in my writings on crosses, for reasons of appropriateness; I was made to understand that Prof.

Gini was unpopular with some authorities, who, moreover, were irritated by his declarations in the interview, that in various points did not seem to be in accord with the racial policies of the fascist government. In this way science perpetuates a divorce that could be damaging to fascist society, denouncing in first place a deplorable political insensitivity. It is our work to signal the most scandalous manifestations of such insensitivity, because this way we can obtain the greatest political control in every zone of culture where dissidence flowers. Regarding communications and relations, the role of Italian genetics was on this occasion more important in comparison to the preceding congresses of and Boldrini referred in particular to the research of English neo-Malthusian eugenicist Raymond B.

Cattell, according to whom the intelligence quotient was decreasing by one point every decade, due to differential fertility. On the contrary, according to the Italian statistician, the greater fertility of the lowest social classes did not necessarily have a dysgenic effect. All three populations examined behaved—notwithstanding the racial and environmental differences—in an analogous manner as regards development, demonstrating a visible slowing down in the development of all the considered characteristics compared to other populations that were not in a state of demographic isolation.

These results therefore confirm the hypothesis that the regime of endogamy would have a detrimental influence on the corporeal development of the individual. From to , CISP had two principal initiatives: In , Gini declared:. One of the essential aims of the Committee is to gather the broadest data possible on these primitive and decadent populations, and to especially study the modality and, if possible, the cause of the decadence and gradual disappearance of certain races, and in the same way, the formation and blooming of new races, on which our ignorance is almost total.

From a point of view of etiquette, of customs, social institutions, they are crystallized populations. Crystallized and often decadent. Lacking the capacity to progress, they are endowed with limited faculties of recovery: There are some populations in which individuals spend the major part of their energies in emulative acts, which neutralize each other […]. This is the case for the Armenians and the Jews. There is—it is true—the example of the Negroes of America, who, introduced into Caucasian civilization several centuries ago, maintain evident characteristics that are inferior compared to the Whites.

While that is undeniable, we must however recognize that the Negroes of America have made great strides on the path of civilization, so that it is difficult today to classify them as primitive. It was based on three general principles: From October to , he was the first chancellor at the Adriatic University of Bari. The year before, he had received honoris causa membership of the National Fascist Party. In , he was appointed senator. The first was the combination between medical constitutionalism and endocrinology. Such a chain […] must be both double and single at the same time: And since the great, inexhaustible mine of sentiment is the humble classes of manual workers—from whom the greatest moral genius, Christ, was born—the moral representatives, so to speak, of the government of the State, will rise, we hope, from this social class.

In , with the direct involvement of Mussolini, Pende was named director of the Institute of Medical Pathology and Clinical Methodology at the University of Rome, and in January , the Biotypological Institute was also transferred to the capital. Only 2 left in stock - order soon. Heartwarming Stories of the Gospel in Action Aug 01, Only 1 left in stock more on the way. Only 1 left in stock - order soon. Stato e cattolici in centocinquant'anni di storia italiana Italian Edition Mar 23, Il custode della fede.

Chapter IV. Quality through quantity

Quando la Madonna piange: Lacrimazioni di statue, veggenti, guaritori: Provide feedback about this page. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. Amazon Music Stream millions of songs.

Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally.