Buza, Roberto

Buza was born in the Italian city of Vicenza , becoming the second of five children in the family. He attended elementary school in Bolzano , and then high school in Verona and in Belluno . In 1928 he entered the episcopal seminary of the city of Belluno, where he completed his secondary education and enrolled in a two-year course in theology under the direction of Albino Luciani, the future pope John Paul I. In 1933, he joined the Jesuit Order, where he received first a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1937, and then a bachelor’s degree in theology in 1941. In the same place, in 1940 he was ordained a priest. From 1940 to 1943, Roberto Buza served as a military chaplain in the national army, and then in the partisan movement. In 1946, he graduated from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome with a thesis on "Tomistic terminology of interiorism", which was published in 1949. Then he taught ontology , theodicy, and scientific methodology at the Jesuit Institute of Philosophy Aloisianum, where he also worked as a librarian for several years.

In 1946, Buza drew up the concept of Index Thomisticus , a tool with which one could easily search through the massive body of works by Thomas Aquinas. In 1949, he met Thomas Watson , the founder of IBM , and managed to convince him to sponsor the creation of Index Thomisticus. ^[5] The project took about 30 years, and as a result, in the 1970s, 56 printed volumes of Index Thomisticus were published. In 1989 Index Thomisticus was released on optical discs for CD-ROMs , and in 2005, an online version was launched, sponsored by the Thomas Aquinas Foundation ( Fundación Tomás de Aquino ). A year later, the Index Thomisticus Treebank project was launched ^[6] , the purpose of which is the syntactic markup of the body of texts by Thomas Aquinas.

Before his death, Buza taught at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, at the Institute of Philosophy Aloysianum in Gallarate, and at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan . He also worked on the project “bicultural Tomistic vocabulary”, whose task is to study the Latin concepts used by Thomas Aquinas in the framework of modern culture.