Like a prophet

“In calamitous times in which the compass of safe navigation has once again been lost and hope is dashed, in which wars of religion and clashes of civilization are unconsciously being ignited, the utopia of Giorgio La Pira is once again becoming terribly actual”. Born in the province of Ragusa (Italy) in 1904, La Pira served as Mayor of Florence – save for one brief interruption – from 1951 to 1965. He committed his whole life to the defence of the poor and the promotion of peace. The life and work of the “mayor saint” of Florence are traced by GIUSEPPE DALLA TORRE, Rector of LUMSA (Free University of the Santissima Maria Assunta in Rome), in a profile published in the last number of the Italian review of culture “Studium”. He draws the portrait of a man who “lived between two eclipses of the sacred”, who died in 1977, and whose cause of beatification has now opened. Following the Pan-European Conference of Helsinki (1975) Giorgio La Pira wrote: “The European peoples have undertaken this journey [towards the stability of Europe] and the continent at Helsinki has been pacified and has with farsightedness opened its doors to the Mediterranean. It cannot dissociate itself from this context, indeed the dialogue between Europe and the Arab world is inseparably linked to it”. PEACE AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN EUROPE. The thought of La Pira, observes Dalla Torre, rested on two main pillars: “the value of the human person” and the idea of the “positive role of religions for peace”. Central is “the freedom of man, that cannot be prevented or forced without dehumanising consequences”. And religious freedom, “historically and logically the mother of all liberties”, according to Dalle Torre, becomes in turn “the means to achieve peace”. This is a recurrent idea in the thought of La Pira, who was not a champion of “an eirenic or ideological pacifism – argues Dalla Torre – but a pacifier, who was very well aware that peace is “the fruit of the commitment of everyone”. In the Final Act of the Helsinki Conference, which met in 1975 to discuss security, cooperation, human rights and peace with a view to the stability of the European continent, according to the Rector of LUMSA, “we can in some sense glimpse the point of arrival of various suggestions made by La Pira… including religious liberty, which he held to be the fundamental and inalienable principle of the system of security and cooperation that the countries of Europe intended to promote”, and “the role played by the Catholic Church, through the Holy See, in achieving this objective”. HISTORY OF OUR TIME. This religious liberty, notes the author of the article, “cannot be dissociated from the great teleological vision of history which was cultivated by La Pira” and in which an essential part was “the historic mission of the Abrahamite religions in the pursuit of universal peace”, in other words, “the function of pacification and restoration of the unity of the human being” attributed to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This is a view which, according to the Rector of LUMSA, “conceals, below a utopian vision of great force, the realistic acknowledgement that the signs of the time indicate that history is moving towards other configurations” with the “shift of the barycentre of the life of peoples” once again back to the shores of the Mediterranean. This is the history “of our time” – observes Dalla Torre -, a history of alleged wars of religion and prospected clashes of civilization”: a history that La Pira “obviously could not have known, but which he seems in some way to have had a presentiment of”. THE “GEOGRAPHY OF GOD”. Jerusalem, Rome and Mecca thus constitute a kind of “geography of God”, a “geography of grace” from which the salvific mission for humanity must start out, “in an era of theoretical and practical atheism”. In a world torn between “the State atheism brutally imposed on a plurality of peoples” and “the practical atheism spreading in the other half of the world, in the grips of galloping secularism”, the great religions of the Book must be able to “rediscover their common roots, not only to achieve pacification between each other, but also effectively to play the role of universal attraction to which they are called”. This “dream of disconcerting actuality”, as it is called by Dalla Torre, has inspired, since 1952, the “international Meetings for peace and Christian civilization” and, from 1958, the “Mediterranean Colloquia” with the participation of Arab and Israeli representatives to promote dialogue between Christians, Jews and Muslims. The Mediterranean, then, is a “context from which”, as La Pira observed, the process begun by Europe following the Helsinki conference “cannot dissociate itself, indeed the dialogue between Europe itself and the Arab world is inseparably linked to it”. This dialogue, points out the Rector of LUMSA, “seemed to be realized in concrete historic forms”, but was then interrupted, with the consequences that are now visible to us all”. However, he concludes, “like a biblical prophet, the “mayor saint” of Florence found himself having “to announce the dawn when it was still night, and to foresee an era of peace and freedom, even in conditions of captivity that dashed all hope”.