22 0.2 Restoration and Awakening – Tensions in the Life of Pallotti Vincent Pallotti’s religious upbringing took place in a protected familial framework. His parents, Peter Paul Pallotti and Magdalena, nee de Rossi, were both attached to the Church, faith and socially disposed people, who wanted to convey their religiosity to him and his four brothers and in whom Pallotti saw models. Pallotti was from the start, as a matter of course, formed by the church and raised to be loyal. Nevertheless, he did was not uncritical. For example, this is demonstrated in his sceptical remarks toward Pius IX, which were later a reason why his beatifi cation was delayed.13 He also raises his voice against corrupt clerics, vanities, and the abuse of power. He bemoaned the drifting apart of laity and clerics, the abuse of the real and mystical body of Christ.14 However, he was essentially a child of his time, had a part in highly ambivalent ecclesial positions, the restorative attitude of the hierarchy and the new approaches, a quiet awakening of parts of the members of the Church. He was opposed to processes of democratisation and emancipation, against secularity and rationality and its apparent delineation toward ecclesial authority. Pallotti studied under notable theologians of his day. The Roman canonists Muzzarelli, Devoti uad Cappellari, all supporters of Tridentism are only a few of those who formed him. In the pope, Pallotti saw the single, divinely ordained center of all religious and political power, his image of the Church was apologetic, centralized and Tridentine. B. Forte sees the defi ning characteristic of the Catholic Church of this period in the rejection of world of the laity.15 Nevertheless, there were people, within the Church as well as without, in whom discomfi ture was awakened by the political, ecclesial-political and social circumstances and who initiated the reforms or also revolutions. Perhaps less out of theological refl ection than from an intuitive insight into an urgent necessity, Pallotti initiated precisely in this context something new: a model of collaboration with all people, men and women of the Church, regardless of this state, without being fully aware of the scope of this approach. It was a prophetic and epochal proposal in whose divine inspiration Pallotti had no doubt, after he had his thinking examined by people he trusted. Therefore, he too did not escape the tensions and resistance, which 13 Cf. FRANK II, 610; TODISCO, 750 f. 14 OOCC XII, 55, where Pallotti speaks of the twofold abuse of the real and mystical Body of Christ. 15 Valentino PIZZOLATO, Die Kirchenvision … (see Note. 8), p. 22 f.
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