Aggiornamento on the Hill of Janus: The American College in Rome, 1955-1979

In this follow-up to Father Robert McNamara’s monumental work, The American College in Rome, 1855–1955, Monsignor Stephen M. DiGiovanni advances the history of the College over the next quarter century. The American students in the 1950s were not the same as those who had lived in the old seminary during the previous century. The world was very different after numerous revolutions, social upheavals, and two world wars. Other forces were at work as well, including some changes just beginning to take place in American society, which would become radically and publicly manifest on American university and seminary campuses during the next decades—even in Rome. If prior to the Second Vatican Council everything was clear and regimented, then during and after the Council less and less was clear-cut or well-defined on the “Hill of Janus.” In fact, few could have predicted the aggiornamento or “updating” that was on the horizon that would profoundly reshape, for better or worse, the NAC and its future priests.