The paper deals with the attitudes toward, the uses and the receptions of the science on the Italian Catholic press in the second half the 19th Century. In the course of the nineteenth century and particularly in the second half of the century, science started having a growing influence on Italy’s society and culture, hence threatening the authority and the influence of the Church and of Catholicism in Italy, which was in turn already under pressure because of the slow but gradual secularization. The centrality of science in the nineteenth century, moreover, put Catholics up against the question on how to react and face modernity, which had its strength in science and in the positive method, thus safeguarding the role of the Church and orthodoxy. Hence the spreading in some sectors of the catholic movement, especially in some clerical periodicals, of the need to build a science in accordance with Revelation, with the idea of developing strategies to embrace scientific matters through a Christian perspective, to respond to the lay and positivist materialistic theories of scientists, to strengthen a Catholic public opinion also in the sciences, and to strive for a scientific popularization harmonised with faith. The paper analyses how the science was faced and used by the Italian Catholic press, focusing in particular on three main topics: the evolution, the technological progress, and the medicine and its relationship with sanctity, miracles and supernatural.
