The Italian theologian Valfredo Maria Rossi offers us a fascinating window into the thought of the under-appreciated nineteenth-century Jesuit Carlo Maria Passaglia (1812–87), a dogmatics professor at various Roman colleges who wrote copiously. Rossi's welcome contribution builds upon studies such as Walter Kasper's Die Lehre von der Tradition in der Römischen Schule (1962) and C. Michael Shea's recent works, in English, on John Henry Newman, Giovanni Perrone and the Roman School. Rossi's monograph pushes back against the still quite prevalent tendency to write off nineteenth-century Catholic theology as ‘reactionary or neo-scholastic’ (p. 7) – though often with noble exception made for Newman and Tübingen School thinkers like Johann Adam Möhler. Though Rossi places Passaglia in the Roman School of Perrone, Clemens Schrader, Johann Baptist Franzelin and their pupils Matthias Joseph Scheeben and Heinrich Denzinger, he makes clear that even in that so-called ‘school’ there was significant intellectual and theological diversity.

What united this loose ‘movement’ were shared ‘common approaches’ (pp. 7–9). Among these approaches, the exploration of which makes this book of interest to students of contemporary Catholic theology as well as to historians, was a preference for positive theology, a kind of proto-ressourcement methodology, and efforts to tackle the problem of doctrinal development. An awareness of development and change must not be confined to a handful of idiosyncratic figures north of the Alps like Newman and Möhler. Passaglia should be reckoned with Perrone as a leading theologian close to the papacy who wrestled with such questions with sophistication. Such efforts were especially à propos in an era of novel dogmatic definitions. Rossi's discussion of Passaglia's involvement in the preparations for Pius ix's definition of Mary's Immaculate Conception in 1854 are among the most fascinating in the book (see pp. 156–68; and especially Passaglia's positive and negative criteria for definitions at p. 163 n. 61).

As the title suggests, the monograph focuses less on Passaglia's life and times and more on a thorough exploration of his major works in ecclesiology and Marian theology. From these lengthy Latin tomes Rossi draws a number of interesting systematic and pastoral insights. Rossi appropriately grounds Passaglia's methods and thought in their nineteenth-century context but always with an eye toward the further development of Catholic theology, especially by nouvelle théologie and conciliar theologians (Rahner, Ratzinger etc.). The author argues that, while Passaglia uses much of ‘the methods and language typical of traditional theology [of the nineteenth century]’ (p. 258), his deep learning in Scripture and patristics positioned him ‘between tradition and innovation’ (pp. 21, 58) and led him to prefigure a number of lines of thought which came to fruition at Vatican II, especially in the ecclesiological constitution Lumen gentium.

Part i of the book (chs i–iii) explores Passaglia's massive three-volume De ecclesia Christi (1853–6). Central to Passaglia's ecclesiology is a Trinitarian approach which, while by no means bypassing the hierarchical and social realities of ecclesial life, ultimately privileges an image of the Church as a manifestation of the love of the Trinity. Each hypostasis is linked to the creation of the Church, yielding a rich pneumatological understanding of the mystery of salvation and the Christian life. From Passaglia's understanding of the Church as mysterium Trinitatis and even unitatis sacramentum flows a view of ecclesial ministry as, primarily, service. This in turn informs Passaglia's ‘ecclesial anthropology’, which forms a bridge to the second part of the book, an exploration of Passaglia's Mariology.

One can hardly find more traditional – perhaps sometimes even parochial or sectarian – topics for a nineteenth-century Roman theologian than expounding at length on the many prerogatives of Mary. Rossi provides indispensable cultural and devotional context (pp. 150–6) that allows readers to appreciate the significance of Passaglia's three-volume De Immaculato (1854–5), a work which was not so much a Mariology as such, but rather an exploration of the ‘mystery of Mary’. It is this fundamentally anthropological concern that links meditation on Mary to Passaglia's ecclesiology. In De Immaculato, Rossi locates the full flowering of Passaglia's ‘Trinitarian ecclesiology’. For it is in Mary and a ‘Marian anthropology’ that Passaglia sees, as Rossi puts beautifully, ‘the fulfillment of the enormous potential of the human being’ (p. 1).

Passaglia was a remarkable thinker in his own right, but what makes him – and therefore this book – of particular interest is the fruitful interplay with other theologians. These include contemporaries like Perrone and Möhler, Passaglia's students who included Scheeben (see the questions Rossi raises at pp. 262–3), and finally Passaglia's reception in a twentieth-century Catholic theological world fixated upon questions of doctrinal development, ecclesiology and ressourcement.

Some minor quibbles: a fuller treatment of Passaglia's life and especially the nature of his political and personal conflicts with Catholic authorities that led to his exit from the Jesuit Society in 1859 and his retreat from Rome to Turin (from 1861 to the end of his life) would have further elucidated the theological insights in this book. No doubt length constrained – and the author and others have treated these matters elsewhere. One unanswered question that this reviewer kept asking was whether, as one would expect, there were identifiable links between Passaglia's later liberalising political thought and his fully developed ecclesiology (one which Rossi shows foreshadows Vatican II in key areas). Finally, the Latin sententia should in these contexts be rendered into English not as ‘sentence’ but as something like ‘judgement’ (for example, p. 194 n. 246).

Rossi's work is thorough and meticulous and will be of great benefit to students of nineteenth-century Christianity and the development of Catholic thought, both systematically and magisterially. Combing the footnotes – which reveal the author's rich erudition concerning the last two hundred years of Catholic systematic theology – is a rewarding endeavour for the historian or theologian.