Talk:La Civiltà Cattolica

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Template:Infobox Magazine[edit]

For some reason the image_file, image_size, and image_caption attributes of the "Infobox Magazine" Template don't seem to be working properly...Lwangaman (talk) 00:03, 27 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Was fixed 27 August 2008, see User talk:Lwangaman#La_Civilt.C3.A0_Cattolica --Lwangaman (talk) 23:06, 16 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]


Careful about POV statements regarding anti-semitic policies[edit]

I would invite contributors to discuss here any modifications to the section of the article regarding La Civiltà Cattolica's stance towards anti-semitism. I noticed that many quotations tend to be biased, POV, and not objective. When reading the original sources referred to, the author does not say what has been printed in these statements. So I have corrected them to reflect the author's original statements.

Please also be careful about statements that are off topic. This article is about La Civiltà Cattolica, not about anti-semitism in the Catholic Church. Any further statements in this article must be strictly related to La Civiltà Cattolica's stance towards anti-semitism. --Lwangaman (talk) 02:25, 11 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The section Anti-Judaism/Semitism was written by me and I'm puzzled about your assertion that what was put in the article doesn't conform to sources. I still have access to the books in question so could you please go through the points of concern one by one. As regards sticking to the point I agree but in this instance the journal is frequently treated in the context of it's influence on anti-semitism/judaism within the Church so I don't think it should be deleted. It's also important to provide some kind of understanding regarding the use of the term anti-Judiasm and anti-Semitism otherwise the average reader will be confused. I will revert to the original well sourced sectioned pending your reply.A Professor who is one of the main sources in this section I gather is subject to the un-scholalry, bullying, menadicious, attacks of "Catholic" apologists at present and I hope this doesn't form part of that of that attack. Yt95 (talk) 15:17, 11 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
In fact looking at your other edits elsewhere in the article I am having grave troubles assuming good faith. I am reverting to the original version. Before deleting sourced material please bring it to the talk page to discuss. Well sourced additions, not from apologetic outlets, are welcome if you think there is any want of balance. Yt95 (talk) 15:32, 11 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't say that you didn't quote any sources, however you quote the same two sources that don't necessarily give the whole picture. You also quoted these same sources throughout the whole article, and not just in the section regarding the "Jewish question". You must quote the right sources for the right topics. And I am sorry to say but your language in your comment tends to be biased. You speak of "bullying, mendacious attacks", that is a personal stance and is not scientific or NPOV. You also made many statements in the article that were either unsourced or off topic. This is an article on La Civiltà Cattolica, and not on anti-semitism in general or on the catholic church in general, or on catholic politicians throughout the world and their stance on anti-semitism. And what did you revert? You moved the paragraph on anti-semitism back under the paragraph on the 20th century, when I had given it its own paragraph. I don't believe the question of anti-semitism falls only or specifically under the history of La Civiltà Cattolica in the 20th century. It is a topic on its own and deserves its own paragraph. Do you see my point? The article showed different viewpoints, you seem to want to give only one viewpoint and enforce that one. So I will have to revert back again. --Lwangaman (talk) 15:41, 11 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
You wrote " When reading the original sources referred to, the author does not say what has been printed in these statements. So I have corrected them to reflect the author's original statements.". I quoted from all the sources I had available. As stated if you have other scholarly sources that dispute these points or other matters that are not mentioned then please add them. You didn't just move the section of anti-Judaism you deleted large parts ot it. It was me, not you, who created a separate paragraph on this topic- you deleted large parts of it. You deleted viewpoints you don't like, I replaced them with an invitation to you to add other scholarly sources. You now twist this by suggesting that I am enforcing one point of view! As for the my reference to bullying and mendacious attacks this is not my viewpoint. See this link to a holocaust and geneocide scholar who talks of the "fatwah" "snake oil merchants", "bullies" and so on and their attacks on scholars.[1] (scroll down to section "First Madigan, now Kertzer. Open season on historians") Yt95 (talk) 15:56, 11 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
You must also be very careful in using reverts, because you undo all the cleaning up, style cleaning, grammar cleaning that has been done to the article. This makes a mess! Instead of reverting, we can try working piece by piece what belongs in the article and what not. Please do not do full reverts. And if you claim to have put the section on anti-semitism in its own separate paragraph, then why did you put this paragraph back under "20th century"? --Lwangaman (talk) 16:19, 11 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Furthermore, you are quoting Zuccotti in the section on the mission statement. If Zuccotti's book is about the Jewish question, how can that be a good source for explaining the mission statement of La Civiltà Cattolica? If Zuccotti talks about the relationship between La Civiltà Cattolica and anti-semitism, then quote her in the section about the relationship between La Civiltà Cattolica and anti-semitism, and not throughout the article. --Lwangaman (talk) 16:25, 11 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The only reason a full revert was done is because of the multiple well sourced passages you deleted because it doesn't agree with your take on reality. These are far more important issues compared with saving any style changes you would like that were buried amongst them. Zuccotti does deal with the journal in question but I will double check over the weekend all the references in this section. Yt95 (talk) 16:31, 11 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
But don't you see that you are again biased? You say that I make edits based on "my take on reality". How do you know what my take is? You have already categorized me. Here no one must make edits based on his own personal views. You are judging me rashly. Let's try to look at things objectively. I deleted only passages that were off topic, while I summarized others, and I gave other sources with a second opinion. In order to be objective and scientific, you must agree on quoting different sources. When scholars and historians have different opinions on a subject, a scientific article must quote all of them. Instead you have deleted my quotes with the second opinions, whereas I had left yours, though summarized. Try to look better at my edits and try re-evaluating them, because yours are not coming off too well. Saying that a full revert is justified instead of trying to talk things over objectively can hardly be justified. --Lwangaman (talk) 18:19, 13 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
My point now being that now we are going to have to work on this together, and you must know that if you do another revert you will probably be blocked from editing. See Wikipedia:3RR#The_three-revert_rule. --Lwangaman (talk) 18:33, 13 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
We might be speaking at cross purposes. My attention was mainly focussed on the Anti-Semitism/Judaism section. The original version is here.[2] After your recent edits it ended up like this.[3] i.e lots of material chopped and citations required tags to passages which had citations. Furthermore the only information that I can see you added was to a login page on the New York Times and another short text appended to a part sentence which purports to show William Shirer disputing the claims made about the journal in question. There is no page reference given. I don't have the edition cited but on doing a google search in another edition I cannot find the stated info. There is no objection whatsoever to you adding any information which is reliably sourced but please don't delete information that is, without first stating your objection and purpose on the talk page. On the issue of summarising info: in principle no objection to this but through practical experience it doesn't seem to work because it's hard enough getting well cited material to stick with some of the more ideologically driven editors never mind text which is largely the creation of a wikipedia editor. They only way around this would be to move text from the main article into the footnotes which then establishes the sound basis of the summary in the article. Yt95 (talk) 20:58, 13 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
If a link that I publish as a reference quote does not seem to be working, then put a {{Citation needed}} tag on it to show that it is incomplete or not working. Reference material doesn't have to be a physical book, it can be an accessible web link to an author's contents. I do not have a physical copy of Zuccotti's book, but I found a few pages from it in an article on the nytimes website. I'm not sure why the link is not working correctly, if you type "Susan Zuccotti nytimes" in google it should come up among the first results and it works fine from there. If you have the actual book and can find the page number for that specific quote, well that would be collaborative editing... --Lwangaman (talk) 22:23, 13 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I did that yesterday but had to change the text in order to conform with the source - it's a tricky passage.Yt95 (talk) 22:36, 13 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

So, in order to try to work together in a constructive manner, I will announce first some of the edits that I intend to do which may be questioned by user User:Yt95 and I shall discuss my motives, so that there be no confusion and a mutual consensus may be more easily reached. Here are the first two:

  • add an "incomplete quote" tag to reference quote number 6 under the section "The founding of the periodical and Papal influence". If you look closely, you will see that you are using the reference quote tag incorrectly, and you have provided no contents to it, no page number... generating a red text error at the bottom of the page: Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named Zuccotti; see thehelp page. As you can see, there is nothing personal. It is a simple error on your part.
  • instead this one could be misunderstood and needs to be discussed: under the same section, I intend to delete the affirmation backed by reference quote number 7: "Later, in Rome again and under close Papal supervision, the journal published anti-semitic articles", not because the affirmation is untrue but because it does not belong in this section. There is a section of the article dedicated to La Civiltà Cattolica's stance towards anti-semitism, this affirmation if anything belongs in that section. Otherwise, if you insist on keeping it here, in order to be scientific you will have to also list every single other topic that the periodical wrote about in that time period. Do you see my point? A wikipedia article has to be scientific and rigorous just like any other encyclopedia. The information has to be complete. And in the right place.

--Lwangaman (talk) 19:49, 13 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Please see my comments above. Yt95 (talk) 20:58, 13 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]


  • in the section "La Civiltà Cattolica and the rise of Fascism", the reference to the original article of Fr. de Rosa has been deleted; I have restored it. The most scientific way of treating a topic is to use first-hand material, so there is no reason to delete the reference to fr. de Rosa's article and its summary. The statement following this one, taken from Kertzer, is supposedly quoting an article from La Civiltà Cattolica, but there is no reference given to the article in question, making it difficult to verify the quality of the quotation, which is why I added a request to a better source. First-hand sources are always the best in any scientific study. We need a reference to the article itself and a check on the wording of the quote against the original source. --Lwangaman (talk) 03:27, 16 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • in this same section "La Civiltà Cattolica and the rise of Fascism", the paragraph that cites Farinacci is very badly written. The grammar is not always consistent, and it is very difficult to understand what Farinacci is saying and what Kertzer is saying. Who's saying what? I have the impression that Kertzer is relating statements made by Farinacci, but the whole paragraph is not very straightforward and factual, it needs some cleaning up. And to be scientific, we have to state facts first of all, not opinions (so actual articles by La Civiltà Cattolica with reference to author, year, page, etc.); then any opinions given by others such as Farinacci or Kertzer or whoever else may be summed up in a concept rather than in a list of "he said this, then he said that". --Lwangaman (talk) 23:28, 16 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

"Mission" section[edit]

If there is a section entitled "Mission" that intends to give the mission statement of the periodical, then Zuccotti and Kertzer are hardly the ones to quote. Their works do not represent the mission statement of the periodical, they deal with the "Jewish question". In order to use scientific method, only direct sources should be quoted here, such as the founder of the periodical or other directly related sources. Please discuss before reverting again. --Lwangaman (talk) 18:58, 13 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Geographical coordinates[edit]

Just wanted to let user User:Afernand74 know that I appreciate his edit on the geographical coordinate system, apparently mine was in error, I was simply following the tag placement on Google Maps which is on the other building. If you know that the editorial headquarters are actually in the building slightly further south, good, we'll leave it like that. (I figure it's better to clarify almost every edit here to avoid confusion or incomprehension!) --Lwangaman (talk) 20:16, 13 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Christian apologetics[edit]

I'm not sure User:Yt95 quite understands the meaning of Christian apologetics. I don't see the point in deleting the statement. It really has nothing to do with the "Jewish question". It has to do with making arguments for faith issues against protestant theology and against secularist outlooks. This is what "polemical" refers to, instead of seeking dialog with protestant theologians or with the modern world, the tendency was to prove wrong the reasoning of protestants or secularists. And to say that this was typical of the 19th century does not exclude that this was so in the 20th also. But since the statement has to do with the founding of the journal in the 19th century, that statement serves to give some context. The purpose is to say that in the 19th century, when the journal was founded, this was going on. If you understand it differently please explain? --Lwangaman (talk) 14:42, 17 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I deleted the text "The periodical initially had a polemical tone. This was typical of Christian apologetics in the 19th century." since a) it is uncited and b) it is very clear that the polemical tone of the magazine continued well into the 20th century at least with the Jews. Furthermore whilst you have given an explanation of how to read it it will obvioulsy cause confusion since Christian apologetic works for the proselytisation of Jews are nothing new (try google search). No objection at all to including something on this but it should be well cited and clear in meaning Yt95 (talk) 16:09, 17 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Well Christian apologetics does not usually refer to proselytisation of Jews. If it does ever refer to that it's an extreme case, but it's not the first thing you think of when talking about Christian apologetics. If something is uncited, just add a {{Reference necessary}} template to it rather than delete it. And if you think it's a good idea to underline that this continued into the 20th century, well I suppose that could be added onto the phrase... --Lwangaman (talk) 16:56, 17 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Jews were forced to listen to Christian apologetics in Rome in the form of weekly sermonising. The polemical tone of the journal towards the Jews continued right through much of the 20th century and according to David Kertzer it continues today. Anyhow the onus is the editor who places the material in an article to provide a citation otherwise it is zapped as being the opinion of the wikipedia editor. Yt95 (talk) 14:28, 19 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

La Civiltà Cattolica and the rise of fascism[edit]

Please let me know if I am not understanding correctly, but I have the impression that the information added by User:Yt95 in this section is duplicate information. The same information is summed up in the following paragraph. It seems to be to be redundant... When you talk about "publishing the details of the new Italian race laws", that's exactly what is stated in the following paragraph when it says that the journal "commented favorably on the fascist 'Manifesto of Race'". --Lwangaman (talk) 15:04, 17 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I have made several edits to the area today so have a look at it now (I'm finished for day) and see what you think. The section I added is from reliable academic sources and doesn't rely on translation of the primary source document. There are lot's of sources out there which deal with this journal so we shouldn't be translating and interpretating ourselves when we have scholars who are skilled in providing a context for their interpretation. Please feel free to add to it from reliable scholarly sources. Yt95 (talk) 16:20, 17 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Actually that is not the scientific method. Scientific method requires to go first of all to first-hand sources, because any second-hand study is always going to be interpretation and therefore opinion. Anyone who writes a scientific article must first utilize first-hand sources, then move on to second-hand sources. Even in academic matters the telephone game comes into play: you said that he said that the other one said... And no one knows any longer what was truly said. I do know my own limits, I'm not the person to know La Civiltà Cattolica inside out, but I do have some knowledge of scientific methodology. I do however have some friends who do know La Civiltà Cattolica and its history quite well and I'm trying to get them involved in this article, so they might come on and contribute too. And as for translation goes, that's not a problem at all, I'm fluent in both English and Italian and have done a number of translations. --Lwangaman (talk) 21:27, 17 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
What you are describing is original research and that isn't allowed on Wikipedia. You have to use in this instance reliable published sources. There are plenty of books written in English which deal with the journal so there is no lack of sources. One of the big problems you will find with translatation into English and interpretation is cherry picking of quotations; e.g it was not unusual for the journal to tack onto an article an appeal for charity towards the Jews and if taken in isolation the reader of the Wiki article will not realise that there was a whole lot of invective preceding the quotation. Kertzer in particular points out the routine use of christian platitudes buried amongst what in the modern world is considered the language of hate and violence. Yt95 (talk) 14:36, 19 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Quoting first-hand sources is not original research. It is the basis of any scientific article. And I still have the impression that you are biased towards one side of reality. You prefer some sources to others, you develop certain sections of the articles much further than others, you make undue associations that tend to be off-topic... You are trying to prove in any way possible that the Catholic Church caused the Holocaust. That is right down wrong and has no place in this article. --Lwangaman (talk) 14:12, 5 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think that Christianity was responsible for the Holocaust but I, like many scholars, am doubtful it could ever have happened to the extent it did without minds being prepared long before by traditional anti-Judaism/Semitism that was a feature of not just Roman Catholicism but Christianity in general (with notable exceptions). I have already given reasons above why I don't favour your translation into English of the journal because of the bias which could be introduced. To take one example, which I haven't corrected as yet, you make a claim relating to the journals position on the manifesto of race based on your translation of a passage however, in the academic works I have they do not make the same claim partly because in the same edition there is another article which, according to Zuccotti, reflects a greater spread of opinion within Vatican circles. So based on my reading of reliable secondery sources the simple assertion that the journal took a favourable position towards the manifesto isn't justified but according to your translation and reading of the primary source it is. You write "You prefer some sources to others", but which sources am I neglecting? I purchased Ronald Rychlak's book, perhaps the most well known Church apologist on this era, but couldn't find anything positive about the journal. All I can say on the issue of my own bias is that it reflects what the sources say: I haven't read anything that be construed as positive in the journals role with respect to Jewish people so I am not suprised that the journal apologised, albeit in non-straightforward way (according reliable sources), for a century long campaign against the Jews. I have asked you more than once to add whatever material you like from reliable sources to the article if you feel there isn't enough weight given to other points of view. You write that I "develop certain sections of the articles much further than others". The books I have cover issues relating to the Holocaust but if you have sources that report their views on other important issues then of course please add to the article. If the article becomes too big then it's possible to create sub-articles. You write "you make undue associations that tend to be off-topic". Can you please give examples? If a reliable source makes that association and at face value it is not unreasonable then what is the issue? Yt95 (talk) 15:07, 6 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Karl Lueger[edit]

The following text has recently been added: " "…his opponents, including the Jews, readily conceded that he was at heart a decent, chivalrous, generous and tolerant man. So there is not a lot of evidence to support his large effect on the views of Adolf Hitler." No page number is given for the assertion and on reading the passage available online[4] from the National Book Foundation we find "But Lueger, who had risen from modest circumstances and worked his way through the university, was a man of considerable intellectual attainments, and his opponents, including the Jews, readily conceded that he was at heart a decent, chivalrous, generous and tolerant man. Stefan Zweig, the eminent Austrian Jewish writer, who was growing up in Vienna at this time, has testified that Lueger never allowed his official anti-Semitism to stop him from being helpful and friendly to the Jews." i.e the the part about him having little or no influence on Hitler doesn't appear in the published text. Furthermore Shirer goes on to write "But in the end Hitler was forced to acknowledge the genius of this man [Lueger] who knew how to win the support of the masses, who understood modern social problems and the importance of propaganda and oratory in swaying the multitude...Here in a nutshell were the ideas and techniques which Hitler was later to use in constructing his own political party and in leading it to power in Germany". The only reference I can find on google search to the disputed text all link back to the Wikipedia article Karl Lueger and once again no page reference is given. I think the passage should be delted until somebody can provide a reference to a revised edition of the book in which Shirer adds the text claimed by this article. At that point I can expand the article with specific examples relating Lueger to the journal and to the Vatican support Lueger recieved with his own brand of anti-Semitism. Yt95 (talk) 16:08, 21 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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