Bernardino Ciaffoni

Giovanni Bernardino Ciaffoni (Latinized as Ioannes Bernardinus Ciaffonus, 1683) was an Italian theologian, Franciscan, and rigorist critic of Catholic probabilism.

His magnum opus, the Apologia, was published posthumously and became controversial in debates about moral theology. It was deemed an offense to Jesuits by the Papal State and placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1701.

Biography

Ciaffoni was born in Sant'Elpidio a Mare, a town in the province of Ascoli Piceno in the Papal States, between 1615 and 1620. He entered the Order of Friars Minor convent at a young age. On 14 May 1640, he enrolled at the College of St. Bonaventure in Rome, suggesting a birth date in the late 1610s, as degrees were typically obtained at the age of twenty-two or twenty-four. After completing his office, he returned to the Marche where he acted as theologian to the Archbishop of Fermo. His only known work is a treatise published posthumously, commonly referred to as the Apologia in favore dei Santi Padri ("Apology in favor of the Holy Fathers"). First printed in Turin by Pietro Vianelli in the early 1690s, almost a decade after his death, it was reissued in Bassano del Grappa in 1696 and Avignon, France, in 1698.

In the Apologia, Ciaffoni criticized contemporary theologians, principally Jesuits, who taught probabilism in ethics. In 1701, the Minister General of the Conventual Franciscans, Vincenzo Coronelli, issued a decree distancing the Franciscan order from the work and condemning certain statements critical of the Jesuits.

Works

Apologia in favore dei Santi Padri contro quei che nelle materie morali fanno de medesimo poca stima (c. 1690)