The Roman Magisterium in the Twentieth Century: New Perspectives from the Vatican Archives

Abstract

This issue of the Journal of Modern and Contemporary Christianity documents a workshop held at Villa Vigoni, the German-Italian Centre for European Dialogue, in October 2023. It was organised by Claus Arnold, Dominik Heringer and Giovanni Vian. The opening of the Vatican archives for the pontificate of Pius XII has also created new possibilities for research into the history of theology. The Franco-German-Italian workshop examined ongoing projects in this context and related them to earlier research on the history of the Magisterium and Roman censorship. Theologically, the pontificate of Pius XII was characterised by an interesting mixture of cautious tendencies towards openness and renewed repression. Against this background, the workshop offered an impressive panorama of current research on the Roman Magisterium under Pius XII, which unfolds in the contributions to this issue. These offer many doctrinal, source-critical, institutional and prosopographical points of contact.