RIVISTA DI STORIA DELLA CHIESA IN ITALIA

On the account of his membership of the Dominican Order and owing to his friendship with Noël Alexander, cardinal Vincenzo M. Orsini, archbishop of Benevento from 1686 until 1724 and later pope Benedict XIII (1724 –1730), was and is still labelled now as pro-Jansenist and deaf to the bull Unigenitus, now as anti-probabilist and opposed to Jesuits. This study, which is based on a plenty of unpublished archive material and mainly focused on Orsini’s long Beneventan episcopate, just goes to show how basically rash such assessments were and still are. As for contemporary problems, the Church worried about between the XVII and the XVIII century, Card. Orsini displaied indeed an unchanging attitude of sound balance and, above all, of genuine loyalty on Roman policy guidelines.