No italics in HoPE theme?

Good afternoon. I am using the HoPE theme on http://www.reviewsbyjessewave.com/ and have never been able to get italics to work unless I force it with CSS using a <span... tag for each instance. I have looked through the theme’s style.css and found the entry for

i, em, dfn, .fn, cite {
font-style: normal;
}

so I changed it to

i, em, dfn, .fn, cite {
font-style: italic;
}

with no success. I also cannot find another entry for i or em in this css that would cause this issue. Any ideas? Thank you.