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Giuseppe Alberigo (1926-2007) passed away in Bologna on June 15 at the age of 81. He was one of the great masters of church history-the discipline he taught in the University of Bologna for thirty years after his teacher training in the University of Modena and in the University of Florence-on the international scene as well as in the Italian milieu, where the state of religious studies was particularly poor in the early fifties. In this situation the young Alberigo (he took his degree in law at the Catholic University of Milan just after World War II) met Giuseppe Dossetti (1913-1996). The former vice-secretary of the Christian Democratic Party was on the eve of radical change and was looking for new fellows to start a new life: Dossetti thought that his political project was useless and weak in a situation which was "catastrophic" for the world as well as "critical" for the Church. Therefore, he suggested to a group of young and untrained scholars a move to Bologna (because Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro was archbishop there) in order to start a research community of prayer and study devoted to the historical exploration of the forgotten issue of church reform, which in the last years of Pius XII seemed very far away Alberigo and his wife Angelina were among the enthusiastic founders of the "Centro documentazione," where intellectual and spiritual rigor went together. There he started his historical training with the two scholars that Dossetti saw as the most useful for his research on the Council of Trent, and in this...