CONCINA, DANIEL

Dominican preacher, theologian, controversialist, leader of antiprobabilists in 18th century; b. Clauzetto, Italy, Oct. 2, 1687; d. Venice, Feb. 21, 1756. On the completion of his preparatory studies at the Jesuit college in Goritz, Austria, he entered the Dominican congregation of strict observance in Venetian territory, drawn to its austerities by love of evangelical poverty. While teaching philosophy to Dominican students at Forli, he prepared for the preaching career in which he achieved much popularity in Rome and northern Italy. His sermons were aimed at renewing the ancient Christian spirit of heroic self-denial, penance, and uncompromising separation from worldly contamination.

He was a prolific writer, mainly on the moral questions in controversy in his day: the vow of poverty, the Lenten fast, usury, the theater, and especially probabi lism. He first published the Commentarius historicoapologeticus (Venice 1736–45), which contains two dissertations. The first disproves the fiction, then accepted by the bollandists, that St. Dominic borrowed his ideas of poverty from St. Francis of Assisi. The other refuted the claim of De Pornasio, OP, that Dominican observance of poverty was the same in the 18th as it had been in the 13th century. In this work and in his Disciplina apostolico-monastica (Venice 1739–40) the reprobation of the peculium (money permitted to a religious to use as he pleases) allowed in some religious institutes, gave rise to a lengthy polemic with those who favored its legitimacy. Benedict XIV terminated the Lenten-fast dispute with his encyclical letter Non ambigimus, May 30, 1741, which favored Concina. The Storia del probabalismo e rigorismo (2 v. Venice, 1743) contains the history and principles of probabilism, its doctrinal indefensibility and the papal condemnation, a dissertation on the Church's true moral doctrine, and a commentary on some propositions censured by the Church as lax or rigorous. The Jesuits, recognized champions of probabilism, vigorously resisted this attack on the system.

Concina's greatest work, the 12-volume Theologia Christiana dogmatico-moralis [Rome (Venice) 1749–51, 1755], brought the 18th-century phase of the probabilist controversy to a climax. The author conceived it as a definitive exposition of sound Christian moral theology. It was accepted and used as such by many seminaries and schools of theology, either in the principal edition or in a two-volume compendium (Venice 1760). The Jesuits petitioned the pope to condemn it for its errors and anti-Jesuit bias. The pope, after examining Concina's reply to these charges, personally dictated a declaration in Italian that closely follows the language of Concina's reply. The pope requested that this declaration be translated into Latin, and it appeared in a subsequent edition. Few changes were made in the text of this new edition, but the author added a chapter to its preface expressing high esteem for the Society of Jesus, declaring his intention was not to attack persons but opinions that he judged perniciously lax, and professing willingness to retract any error in his doctrine and to right any wrong unwittingly done to anyone. Concina, in all his controversies, had the encouraging support of Benedict XIV and other illustrious personages. He was tainted neither with Jansenism nor the rigorism condemned in 1690 by Alexander VIII. The opening sentence of the Storia states his position: "Nothing is more alien to my mind than excessive rigor in deciding moral controversies and directing consciences…. The law of Jesus Christ is our one andonly rule of morals. To make that law too strict is as sinful as to make it too easy…. Between the two extremes [rigorism and laxity], benignity is a lesser evil than excessive rigor" (Storia, introd.).

See Also: morality, systems of.

Bibliography: r. coulon, Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, ed. a. vacant et al. (Paris 1903–50) 3.1:676–707. d. sandelli, De Danielis Concinae vita et scriptis commentarius, 4v. (Brescia 1767). a. vecchi, Correnti religiose nel Sei-Settecento Veneto (Venice 1962).

[p. o'brien]