Romano Michele Antonio Maria Guardini was born in Verona in 1885 and was baptized in the Church of San Nicolò all'Arena. His father, Romano Tullo (1857–1919), was a poultry wholesaler. Guardini had three younger brothers. The family moved to Mainz when he was one year old and he lived in Germany for the rest of his life. He attended the Rabanus-Maurus-Gymnasium. Guardini wrote that as a young man he was “always anxious and very scrupulous.”[1]
Fluent in Italian and German, he also studied Latin, Greek, French, and English. After studying chemistry in Tübingen for two semesters, and economics in Munich and Berlin for three, he decided to become a priest. He studied Theology in Freiburg im Breisgau and Tübingen. Impressed by the monastic spirituality of the monks of Beuron Archabbey, he became a Benedictineoblate, taking the name Odilio.[2] Guardini was ordained a diocesan priest in Mainz by Georg Heinrich Kirstein in 1910.
He became a German citizen in 1911 so that he could teach theology in Germany, a job paid by the government.[3] He briefly worked in a pastoral position at St. Christoph's Church, Mainz before returning to Freiburg to work on his doctorate in Theology under Engelbert Krebs. He received his doctorate in 1915 for a dissertation on Bonaventure. He completed his "Habilitation" in Dogmatic Theology at the University of Bonn in 1922, again with a dissertation on Bonaventure. Throughout this period he also worked as a parish priest at St. Ignatius, St. Emmeran's, and St. Peter's and served as chaplain to the Catholic youth movement. During World War I he served as a hospital orderly.[2]
In 1923, he was appointed to a chair in Philosophy of Religion at the University of Berlin.[1] In the 1935 essay "Der Heiland" (The Saviour) he criticized Nazi mythologizing of the person of Jesus and emphasized the Jewishness of Jesus. The Nazis forced him to resign from his Berlin position in 1939. From 1943 to 1945 he retired to Mooshausen, where his friend Josef Weiger had been a parish priest since 1917.
In 1945, Guardini was appointed professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Tübingen and resumed lecturing on the Philosophy of Religion. In 1948, he became professor at the University of Munich,[1] where he remained until retiring for health reasons in 1962. That same year, he received the Erasmus Prize,[2] an annual prize awarded by the board of the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation to individuals or institutions that have made exceptional contributions to culture, society, or social science in Europe.
Pope Paul VI offered to make Guardini a cardinal in 1965, but he declined.[4]
Guardini died in Munich, Bavaria on 1 October 1968. He was buried in the priests’ cemetery of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in Munich. His estate was left to the Catholic Academy in Bavaria that he had co-founded.
Guardini's books were often powerful studies of traditional themes in the light of present-day challenges or examinations of current problems as approached from the Christian, and especially Catholic, tradition. He was able to enter into the worldview of those such as Socrates, Plato, Augustine, Dante, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, and make sense of them for modern readers.
His first major work, Vom Geist der Liturgie (The Spirit of the Liturgy), published during the First World War, was a major influence on the Liturgical Movement in Germany and by extension on the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council.[5] He is generally regarded as the father of the liturgical movement in Germany, and in his "Open Letter" of April 1964 to Mgr. Johannes Wagner, the organizer of the Third German Liturgical Congress in Mainz, he "raises important questions regarding the nature of the liturgical act in the wake of individualism, asking whether it is possible for twentieth-century Christians really to engage in worship. Is it possible to 'relearn a forgotten way of doing things and recapture lost attitudes', so as to enter into the liturgical experience?."[6] It was his glad hope that after the call by the Second Vatican Council for liturgical reform, the Catholic Church might shift its focus from the merely ceremonial, important though that was, to a broader idea of true liturgical action—action that "embraced not only a spiritual inwardness, but the whole man, body as well as spirit."[7] He himself gave an example of his meaning: A parish priest of the late 19th century once said (according to Guardini's illustration), "We must organize the procession better; we must see to it that the praying and singing is done better." For Guardini, the parish priest had missed the point of what true liturgical action is. He should instead have asked, "How can the act of walking become a religious act, a retinue for the Lord progressing through his land, so that an 'epiphany' may take place."[7]
The 1990s saw something of a revival of interest in his works and person. Several of his books were reissued in the original German and in English translation. In 1997 his remains were moved to the Sankt Ludwig Kirche, the University church in Munich, where he had often preached.
Guardini's book The Lord, published in English translation in the late 1940s, remained in print for decades[9] and, according to publisher Henry Regnery, was "one of the most successful books I have ever published".[10] The novelist Flannery O'Connor thought it "very fine" and recommended it to a number of her friends.[11]
Dante-Studien. 1. Band: Der Engel in Dantes Göttlicher Komödie 1937
Welt und Person, 1939
Der Tod des Sokrates, 1943
Die Lebensalter, 1944
Freiheit, Gnade, Schicksal, 1948
Das Ende der Neuzeit, 1950
Sorge um den Menschen, 1962
Begegnung und Bildung, (together with O. F. Bollnow), 1956
Dante-Studien. 2. Band: Landschaft der Ewigkeit (München 1958)
Dante-Studien. 3. Band: Dantes Göttliche Komödie. Ihre philosophischen und religiösen Grundgedanken (Vorlesungen). Aus dem Nachlaß herausgegeben von Martin Marschall. Grünewald / Schöningh, Mainz / Paderborn 1998, ISBN3-7867-2129-7 / ISBN3-506-74559-X
^Robert Anthony Krieg, Romano Guardini: A Precursor of Vatican II. University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. ISBN978-0-268-01661-6
^Bradshaw & Melloh (2007). Foundations in Ritual Studies: A Reader for Students of Christian Worship. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. p. 3. ISBN978-0-8010-3499-2.
^Regnery, Henry S. (1985). Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher(PDF). Lake Bluff, Illinois: Regnery Gateway Inc. Archived from the original(PDF) on 1 December 2007. Retrieved 8 September 2007.
^O’Connor, Flannery (1 August 1988). The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. p. 74. ISBN978-0374521042.
Further reading
The Essential Guardini: An Anthology, edited by Heinz R. Kuehn. Liturgy Training Publications, 1997. ISBN978-1-56854-133-4
The World and the Person: And Other Writings. Gateway Editions, 2023. ISBN978-1684514496