Romano Amerio (Lugano, June 22, 1905 - Lugano, October 4, 1997) was a Roman Catholic theologian and a late critic of post-Conciliar evolutions in liturgy and ecclesiology. His magnum opus is Iota Unum, a work dedicated to the study of philosophical relationships between Truth and Life.
Italian by nationality, he taught philosophy and greco-roman classics at the academy of Lugano in Switzerland. He served as a peritus at Vatican Council II and was an adviser to the Conservative cardinal Giuseppe Siri. He was an insider at the Council and grew more and more critical of the aggiornamento as the events unfolded. He had studied in detail the philosophy of 17th century Italian poet Tommaso Campanella, of whose work he later became a professional scholar.
In his writings, Amerio identifies three syllabuses which he says were implicitly and intellectually negated during the conciliar period : the encyclical Quanta Cura, condemning liberalism and masonic ideology, the decree Lamentabili Sane Exitu concerning radical biblical criticism, and the encyclical Humani Generis of 1950, which reproves of new ecclesial anthropologies and ecclesiologies.
Amerio was also opposed to liturgical creativity, and his thought on this issue was essentially in line with the encyclical Mediator Dei of Pius XII, which precisely held that liturgy was a cultus, and not so much a self-celebration. Amerio also examined institutional changes in the Holy Office and felt that the formal abandonment of the term heresy in official enquiries and procedures had dramatic consequences on Church life, studies and Christian academics.
Amerio was a promoter of apologetics and was dismayed by the abandonment of notions of conversion and disputation in favour of a purely dialectic approach between Church and World. He held to traditional Thomism and Augustinianism and deeply disliked the common embrace of Kantism, Hegelianism and Spinozism among many Christian intellectuals.
Amerio's essays were praised by traditional scholars in the Church, although they came at a difficult time for him because of the then public conflict between archbishop Marcel Lefebvre of the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X and Pope Paul VI. As such, his 1980s research and books were largely ignored and neglected by leaders inside the institutional Church. Amerio died in 1997.
However, Amerio is thought to have been at least partially rehabilitated during the papacy of Benedict XVI, who along with the liturgist Klaus Gamber, promoted a hermeneutic of continuity which he felt was more attuned to the Church's historic and cultural heritage. And as such, Caritas in Veritate, a 2009 encyclical dedicated to Charity and Truth, explores ideas and concepts that were at the very heart of Amerio's theological and philosophical career. [1]