Romano Guardini

Born Feb. 17, 1885, in Verona; died Oct. 1, 1968, in Munich. Religious figure, idealist philosopher, writer, and publicist. Italian by origin. Catholic priest from 1910. Doctor of theology (1915); professor at the university in Breslau from 1923 to 1939.

In 1939, Guardini came out against Nazi anti-Semitism, publishing The Christian Confronted by Racism in France under the pseudonym of L. Valdor. After this he was removed from teaching and public activities by the Hitler regime. He became a professor of religion at Tübingen in 1945 and at Munich in 1948. After World War I he was influential as a teacher of young Catholics. His work with them in the Quickborn organization caused him to become interested in problems of pedagogical theory. Divorced from the traditionalism of the conservative wing of neo-Scholasticism and from modernist religious existentialism, Guardini’s philosophical essays seek to give a Catholic interpretation of the experience of European cultural creativity from the classics of the ancient world to the present day. (Guardini devoted special works to Socrates, Dante, J. C. F. Hölderlin, F. M. Dostoevsky, and R. M. Rilke.) In his much publicized book The End of the New Era (1950), Guardini posed a number of problems of sociological criticism of late bourgeois culture.