Personae

Extract

In the past few decades the Church in Italy has produced a number of remarkable priests, widely known and venerated as initiators of organized works of charity. A Don Orione, a Don Gnocchi, a Don Calabria—such men are the flower of the Italian clergy and in their presence anticlcricalism is simply disarmed. The ex-priest Carlo Falconi, in a bitterly critical survey of post-war Italian Catholicism, interrupted his polemic to salute the ‘courageous initiative’ of these ‘darlings of the Italian public’.

The case of Don Giovanni Rossi, our present subject, is very different. It is different, first of all, because the founder of the ‘Pro Civitate Cristiana’ association at Assisi is primarily concerned not with works of charity, in the usual sense of this term, but with the propagation of the faith. The expressed aim of Don Rossi’s association of lay ‘volunteers’ (men and women, who must all be university graduates and who all make a promise of celibacy) is to bring the knowledge of Christ to those sections of society that arc most estranged from the Catholic faith. This description covers workers and peasants as well as the more educated classes, though in its actual working the P.C.C. seems to be more concerned with the latter category. From its ‘Citadella’ at Assisi issues fortnightly the brilliantly edited and illustrated magazine La Rocca; here also take place the annual ‘Courses of Christian Studies’ and the frequent gatherings of artists and intellectuals, of workers and employers. The nearest English parallel is perhaps Spode House, but the Citadella is a larger affair and far more chic.