Biography
In 1840, having already expressed liberal views, he was removed to Rome to fill a subordinate position. Leaving his own country after the capture of Rome by the French, he carried on a vigorous campaign against priests and Jesuits in England, Scotland and North America, partly by means of a periodical, the Gavazzi Free Word.
While in England he gradually went over (1855) to the Evangelical church, and became head and organizer of the Italian Protestants in London. Returning to Italy in 1860, he served as army-chaplain with Giuseppe Garibaldi. In 1870 he became head of the Free Church (Chiesa libera) of Italy, united the scattered Congregations into the Unione delle Chiese libere in Italia, and in 1875 founded in Rome the theological college of the Free Church, in which he himself taught dogmatics, apologetics and polemics. He died in Rome on 9 January 1889, aged 79.
Among his publications are No Union with Rome (1871); The Priest in Absolution (1877); My Recollections of the Last Four Popes, etc., in answer to Cardinal Wiseman (1858); Orations, 2 decades (1851).
Read more about this topic: Alessandro Gavazzi
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)