L'Ateneo e la Chiesa

The contribution offers an initial reconstruction of the relationship between the University of Florence and the Florentine Catholic Church from 1924 to the present. There is no academic bibliography on the subject, so the reconstruction, although necessarily synthetic here, has been carried out on the basis of printed and archival sources. Attention is paid, in particular, to the University's relations with the diocesan authorities and (through some of its professors) with some circles of post-conciliar Florentine Catholicism, opened to ecclesial renewal. These include, in particular, the milieus referring to the figures of Giorgio La Pira and Ernesto Balducci, and the Isolotto Base Community (to which a specific in-depth study has been dedicated).