Vincenzo Gioberti, the most important exponent of liberal Catholicism, envisions a new and positive role for the temporal power of the papacy.

His celebrated On the Moral and Civil Primacy of Italians (Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani), written in Parisian exile and published in 1843, affirms the idea of progress as the return of the material to the spiritual, of man to God.

Because such progress can be realized only through the mediation of the church, Gioberti advocates an Italian federation free from Austrian hegemony and under the nominal presidency of the pope.