Enzo Bianchi

Enzo Bianchi (3 March 1943 – 1 September 2026) was an Italian Christian monk and the founder of the Bose Monastic Community.

Quotes

For us Christians, rituals are not enough; we need adherence of the heart and intellect. It is not enough to repeat formulas whose meaning is unknown: those who pray must understand what they are saying, and in this sense the liturgical reform of the Second Vatican Council was fundamental for a more thoughtful faith, one that is not merely devotion.
- Riccardo Bigi, Festival delle religioni: a Firenze basilica di San Miniato gremita per Enzo Bianchi e Sergio Givone, Toscana Oggi.it, 26 April 2019

Hans Urs von Balthasar was a multifaceted and unique personality, probably a man greater than the times in which he lived: musician, Germanist, man of letters, philosopher, theologian, publisher, translator, spiritual master, lecturer, he was the author of a vast theological output in which he engaged in dialogue with the cultural heritage of the West.
- Von Balthasar: l'abisso e la bellezza, Avvenire, 12 August 2005

The experience of faith is an experience of beauty, of an encounter that is as real as it is indescribable, of a presence that is more intimate to us than our own innermost being. And it is an experience that also involves the body and the senses. In the East, the saint is the man with the luminous face, whose body exudes perfume, whose physicality is now an event of beauty and communion. Of course, it would be wrong to confuse the psychological and emotional with the spiritual, but the spiritual traverses the psychic and involves the senses of the body.
- Lessico della vita interiore. Le parole della spiritualità, BUR, Milano, 2004

My childhood prayer is one I would never say today: God knows how many candles I lit before an exam or a test at school. It was a spontaneous, sincere way of praying, but today I practise other forms of prayer.
- Riccardo Bigi, Festival delle religioni: a Firenze basilica di San Miniato gremita per Enzo Bianchi e Sergio Givone, Toscana Oggi.it, 26 April 2019

La differenza cristiana

Enzo Bianchi, La differenza cristiana, Einaudi, 2006. ISBN 8806183591

When political forces generously offer legal protection or financial support to churches, they are actually working for their own benefit. (I, 1)
Our society is increasingly pluralistic in terms of religion, morals and customs: Christianity must live and find its place in it without hostility or creating enemies. (I, 2)
The Gospel, in fact, inspires the historical action of Christians, but it is in history itself that it becomes understandable. The ethos is not given once and for all, it is not handed down from above or contained in books, but is constantly elaborated in history, in the journey made alongside and together with other people. (I, 5)
Not technical solutions, not political recipes, but the voice of pastors will be all the more authoritative the more it is capable of being the voice of the Gospel and not of technical responses to the implementation of Gospel demands. (II, 4)
One never encounters Islam or a religion, but rather men and women who belong to particular religious traditions and for whom this belonging is one aspect of a multifaceted and not monolithic identity. (II, 5)
In order that universalism does not degenerate into totalitarianism, it must be conceived as a universal need for the other and expressed as a vocation to exile, to diaspora, to dispersion among peoples and cultures: the Christian faith cannot coincide with a culture or an ethnicity or a system of thought. It is transcultural and must therefore be accompanied by a work of deculturation so as not to risk passing off as gospel what is cultural form. (III, 2)

Le vie della felicità

Enzo Bianchi, Le vie della felicità Gesù e le beatitudini, Einaudi, 2010

Jesus, our bliss, teaches us a path to happiness, opening up before us every day the ways to happiness that every human being longs for.
The saint is the new man, the one who lives according to the model left by Jesus Christ; he is the man of the beatitudes; he is the man who has stripped himself of his selfishness and lives for God and others; he is the transfigured man. He is the truly and fully human man.
The beatitudes firmly root those who hear them in the present, while at the same time opening them to a future of hope. They are addressed to people who are in difficult human conditions, experiencing trials and contradictions: it is in this state that they discover that they are the recipients of God's action, which is already today an occasion for happiness.

Il pane di ieri

Enzo Bianchi, Il pane di ieri, Einaudi, 2008. ISBN 9788806194888

Incipit

It is difficult to remember, revisit and recount one's own past, the world of yesterday in which we lived. It is a task that runs the risk not only of nostalgia, but also of romanticising what was not idyllic at all: a risk that is even greater if our past lies in a world that has been lost, such as that of peasant culture, and if our memories date back to a time before we reached maturity. Yet I remain convinced of the truth of a saying from my homeland: “Ël pan ed sèira, l'è bon admàn” 'Yesterday's bread is good tomorrow'...