The Jesuit Emblem in the European Context. Peter M. Daly and G. Richard Dimler, SJ. Early Modern Catholicism and the Visual Arts 14. Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2016. xii + 468 pp. $70.
end this principle was not approved. Disillusioned and very ill, Foscarari spent his last years working on such important projects as the revisions of the Index of forbidden books, of the breviary and of the missal book, as well as on the drafting of the first Roman catechism, a fitting legacy for a man wholly committed to the religious instruction of the laity. The book charts with documentary rigor and sensitivity the trajectory—not devoid of ambiguities—of a man who envisioned the reform of the church as strongly founded on the scriptures, set to mend the schism with Protestants, and lead by highly motivated bishops under the undisputed primacy of the pope. Al Kalak aptly contextualizes Foscarari’s projects in the brief, extraordinarily intense period of soul-searching (roughly 1520s–1550s) among those high-ranking prelates who hoped for a reunification of Christianity in the name of a religion purified of ecclesiastical abuse and theological deformations. The fading of their hopes spelled the onset of the authoritarian and conformist brand of Catholicism championed by the Holy Office, to which Foscarari had strenuously if unsuccessfully opposed his model of a pastoral church always favoring mercy over justice, open to the dialogue with dissenters, and ever willing to reconcile divisions among Christians.