MASTROFINI (Marco). Italian ecclesiastical writer, born in the Roman district of Montecompatri on April 25, 1763, and died in Rome on March 4, 1845. He distinguished himself as a professor of philosophy and mathematics at the College of Frascati. His works suffer from the superficiality with which religious arguments were treated in the era in which he lived. Noteworthy among them: Ritratti poetici, storici, critic dei personagi piu famosi nell'antico e nuovo Testamento, 3 v. (Rome 1807). He also turned to liturature, bringing out a Dizionario dei verbi italiani (Rome, 1814), Le Usure, 3 v. (Rome, 1831); Metaphisica sublimior de Deo triun et uno (Rome, 1816), a work toward which there seemed to be endless opposition; Antico e Nuovo Testamento (Rome, 1807), L' anima umana e i suoi stati (Rome 1842), Teorica dei nomi (1855), and Teorica e prospetto de' verbi italiani conjgeti (Rome, 1844). He translated into Italian the works of Appiano, Quinto Curcio, Floro, Dionisio de Halicarnaso and Arriano.

In 1834 the Abbé Mastrofini's recommendation for reforming the Gregorian calendar was published under the title, Amplissimi Frutti da Raccogliersi sul Calandario Gregoriano Perpetuo—roughly, "Reseach Conclusions Toward a Perpetual Gregorian Calendar." He proposed a reformed calendar year of 364 days, always beginning on Sunday, January 1. The 365th day of the solar cycle would then be a year-end, "extra calendrical" day, and a holy day. In leap years, a second extra day would follow, regarded as the "intercalary day."

Mastrofini is perhaps most well known for his work on usury or interest, Le Usure (1831). It was translated into French (1834), and there are at least two scholarly commentaries on it; one as late as 1943. The following paragraph in History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1895), by Andrew Dickson White, discusses Mastrofini's contribution to the evolution of the Catholic stand on usury.

in the decade between 1830 and 1840 the Abbate Mastrofini issued a work on usury, which, he declared on its title-page, demonstrated that "moderate usury is not contrary to Holy Scripture, or natural law, or the decisions of the Church." Nothing can be more comical than the suppressions of truth, evasions of facts, jugglery with phrases, and perversions of history, to which the abbate is forced to resort throughout his book in order to prove that the Church has made no mistake. In the face of scores of explicit deliverances and decrees of fathers, doctors, popes, and councils against the taking of any interest whatever for money, he coolly pretended that what they had declared against was exorbitant interest. He made a merit of the action of the Church, and showed that its course had been a blessing to humanity. But his masterpiece is in dealing with the edicts of Clement V and Benedict XIV. As to the first, it will be remembered that Clement, in accord with the Council of Vienne, had declared that "any one who shall pertinaciously presume to affirm that the taking of interest for money is not a sin, we decree him to be a heiretic fit for punishment," and we have seen that Benedict XIV did not at all deviate from the doctrines of his predecessors. Yet Mastrofini is equal to his task, and brings out, as the conclusion of his book, the statement put upon his title-page, that what the Church condemns is only exorbitant interest.

This work was sanctioned by various high ecclesiastical dignitaries, and served its purpose; for it covered the retreat of the Church (p. 458).

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