Tito Casini

Tito Casini (1897 – 1987) was an Italian novelist, translator and religious writer.

Biography

Tito Casini was born at Cornacchiaia in Firenzuola. After attending the local primary school, he completed his early education at the seminary in Firenzuola, alongside Giorgio La Pira. He graduated in law in Pisa, but never practised the profession. Casini turned, therefore, his interests towards circles of Florentine literary culture in the 1920s. He collaborated with Giovanni Papini and Domenico Giuliotti in Il Frontespizio.

In 1927 appeared his translation of De Maistre's The Pope, and ten years later the study of Louis Ponnelle (1879–1918) and Louis Bordet, Saint Philip Neri and the Roman Society of His Time: 1515-1595. Casini also translated Pierre Coste's biography of Vincent de Paul and Pius X by René Bazin, among other works.

At the time of the Consilium, he wrote one of the first works of resistance to the liturgical transformation of the Church, The Torn Tunic. Casini had his book ready for publication by the summer of 1965, after Pope Paul VI celebrated his famous Italian Mass in a Roman parish. He then hesitated to publish it after the pope, in his apostolic letter Sacrificium Laudis, had exhorted the superiors of religious orders to keep Latin and Gregorian chant. Then, as liturgical upheaval continued in Italian parishes, Casini published his book: an open letter to an unnamed cardinal, easily identified as Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro, president of the Council for the Implementation of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. He charged that the liturgical reform had betrayed the faith of the Council of Trent, and that Cardinal Lercaro, was "Luther resurrected". The book caused a bitter controversy that was magnified by its being prefaced by another cardinal, Antonio Bacci. Casini followed immediately with another work, Dicebamus Heri ("As We Were Saying Yesterday").

Casini forced his way into the pages of the press again with the unmasking of Cardinal Annibale Bugnini as a Freemason in The Smoke of Satan, a book that he published in 1976.

Works

• Bibliografia papiniana, 1902-1927 (1927)
• La bella stagione (1929)
• I giorni del ciliegio (1931)
• Il poema dei Patriarchi (1932)
• I giorni del castagno (1933)
• Al fuoco e all’ombra (1934)
• La vigilia dello sposo (1935)
• Il pane sotto la neve (1935)
• Catechismo popolare in versi (1935)
• San Vincenzo de' Paoli (1937)
• La parrocchia (1937)
• Il rosario (1938)
• Storia sacra (1939)
• San Francesco Saverio (1940)
• Intermezzo (1942)
• Per un'Italia migliore (1943)
• Medicina (1947)
• Storie e fatti veri: 26 racconti (1951)
• “Per loco eterno”. Il viaggio oltremondano di Dante narrato in prosa (1952)
• Il libro delle origini: storia epica dei patriarchi (1954)
• La Santa cintura: storia della reliquia mariana che si venera nella Cattedrale di Prato (1954)
• Novelle medievali (1958)
• Il dilettoso monte (1965)
• La tua stella (1965)
• Maremma amara (1965)
• Francisco Javier (1965)
• La Tunica Stracciata. Lettera Di Un Cattolico Sulla ‘Riforma Liturgica’ (1967)
• Dicebamus heri… La “tunica stracciata” alla sbarra (1968)
• Super flumina Babylonis (1969)
• L'ultima messa di Paolo VI: sogno di una notte d'autunno (1970)
• Elia Dalla Costa: vita e magistero (1972)
• Nel fumo di Satana. Verso l'ultimo scontro (1976)
• Nel nostro piccolo paese (1980)

References

• Buonasorte, Nicla (2004). Araldo del Vangelo. Studi sull'episcopato e sull'archivio di Giacomo Lercaro a Bologna 1952-1968. Bologna: Il Mulino.
• Castagnola, Luigi (1958). "Tito Casini: Escritor por Vocação," Revista Letras, No. 9, pp. 6–24.

External links

• "The Mass will rise again": Remembering Tito Casini