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Giorgio La Pira

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Giorgio La Pira

Giorgio La Pira, TOSD (Raimondo in religious life; 9 January 1904 – 5 November 1977) was an Italian Catholic politician who served as the mayor of Florence. He also served as a deputy for Christian Democracy (DC), the ruling party of post-war Italy, and participated in the assembly that wrote the Italian Constitution following World War II. In his public and private life he was a tireless champion of peace and human rights who worked for the betterment of the poor and disenfranchised. La Pira belonged to the Third Order of Saint Dominic. From 1934 until his death, he lived in the San Marco complex.

Quotes

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  • 10,000 unemployed, over 200 evictions [...], 17,000 poverty books [...]. Excuse me: in front of all these "wounded", thrown to the ground by the "thieves" – as the parable of the Samaritan says (Luke 10:30ff.) – what should the mayor do, that is, the head and in a certain way the father and the head of the common city family? He can wash his hands telling everyone: – sorry, I can't care about you because I'm not a statist but an interclassist?
  • Scendere da cavallo (Risposta a don Luigi Sturzo), Il Focolare, 30 maggio 1954; in Il fondamento e il progetto di ogni speranza, A. Alpigiano Lamioni and P. Andreoli (editors), AVE.
  • Florence is the center of the world. [The Dominican convent of] San Marco is the center of Florence and the Annunciation by Beato Angelico frescoed there is the center of San Marco. So the Annunciation is the center of the world.
  • Young people are like swallows, they go towards spring.
  • Il sentiero di Isaia. Scritti e discorsi: 1965-1977, Paoline.
  • Tomorrow you go to the SS. Annunziata and pray that even in future centuries the Archangel Gabriel will always be an announcer of beautiful things.
  • Luigi de Candido, Il 'Sindaco santo' e l'Annunziata; in Madre di Dio, February 2003.
  • Christianity is the city of Mary: virginal in being, contemplative in working; reflected in the "contemplative city," also reflected in "Christian" cities and "Christian" civilizations; Marian Christianity…, a hope that shines on the horizon of the entire present civilization.
  • Luigi de Candido, Il 'Sindaco santo' e l'Annunziata; in Madre di Dio, February 2003.
  • The Lord… made Florence the city of the Santissima Annunziata! There is no other Christian city (another type of Christian civilization) that is, in this respect, comparable to Florence: the urban structure of the city itself unfolds homogeneously around the Marian mystery: the entire city, all its culture and all its history, is like a poem centered on Mary.
  • Luigi de Candido, Il 'Sindaco santo' e l'Annunziata; in Madre di Dio, February 2003.
  • Our Lady – Sedes Sapientiae – can do anything: and so I proposed to come to Loreto to ask for this grace: that the Constitution truly had a scheme in accordance with certain essential Christian orientations and that this scheme first of all be accepted by our [colleagues of the Christian Democracy party].
  • Luigi de Candido, Il 'Sindaco santo' e l'Annunziata; in Madre di Dio, February 2003.
  • I know: the 'cunning' – those who believe they have the fate of peoples in their hands– laugh; but I say to them: what if my point of view were true? Praying for the Christian rebirth of peoples (authentic rebirth, however) and for the peace of peoples is never wrong! God is father; Christ is our brother; Our Lady is our mother of grace; so what? Praying for peace, grace, fraternity, you can never go wrong.
  • Luigi de Candido, Il 'Sindaco santo' e l'Annunziata; in Madre di Dio, February 2003.
  • This is how we see and interpret the global youth movement of protest: as a fact of inevitable and irreversible migration of new generations who, with the changing historical season, move inevitably and irreversibly towards new continents, towards new structures, new societies.
  • Riccardo Bigi, Il sindaco santo. La vita, le opere, i segreti di Giorgio La Pira, San Paolo, Cinisello Balsamo, 2004, pp. 129-131. ISBN 88-215-5249-7.
  • New generations are like migratory birds, like swallows: they feel the weather, they feel the season. When spring comes, they move in an orderly fashion, driven by an invincible vital instinct...towards the lands where spring is in bloom.
  • Riccardo Bigi, Il sindaco santo. La vita, le opere, i segreti di Giorgio La Pira, San Paolo, Cinisello Balsamo, 2004, pp. 129-131. ISBN 88-215-5249-7
  • Bread, and therefore work, is sacred; the house is sacred, one does not touch one with impunity: this is not Marxism, it is the Gospel.
  • Fanfani's boat left Lourdes on February 11, 1958: perhaps the Madonna added an acronym to it: it is in vain to try to unload him from that boat (if this acronym really exists!): the boat does not set sail again without its captain! (July 16, 1963)::*(Lettera) a Paolo VI - sul futuro del centro sinistra, 16 July 1963, on giorgiolapira.org.
  • [Amintore Fanfani has] the intellectual immediacy and capable of intuiting the great orientations of the present history of the world and has the immediate (and prudent) will to adapt to the new and vast course of the present history of the world! He is a qualified builder of world peace and unity: ut aedificentur muri Jerusalem!
  • The seasons are not made by the farmer; they come, and he helps them. They all orient themselves towards summer, towards the days of maturation. This is what history does.
  • DaIl sentiero di Isaia, Cultura editrice, 1979.
  • Don't say that usual unserious phrase: politics is a "bad" thing! No: political commitment –that is, direct commitment to the Christianly inspired construction of society in all its systems, starting with the economic– is a commitment to humanity and holiness: it is a commitment that must be able to channel toward itself the efforts of a life entirely woven of prayer, meditation, prudence, fortitude, justice, and charity. (from Our Social Vocation, AVE)

Giorgio La Pira e la Francia

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Pier Luigi Ballini (editor), Giorgio La Pira e la Francia. Temi e percorsi di ricerca: da Maritain a De Gaulle, Giunti, Firenze, 2005. ISBN 88-09-03905-X
  • We must return to man, to his greatness and to his toil; and with the return to man we will also return to Christ.
  • What does it matter if there is always a distance between the eternal ideal and its realization over time?
  • Men are waiting; they judge the truth of religion according to its fruitfulness in social life.
  • The prophets of our time are those who protested against the crushing of man under the weight of economic laws and technical apparatus, who rejected these fatalities.
  • The poet perceives the mystery of the human person and therefore the universal mystery, because he perceives the mystery of peoples, of their vocation and their historical mission, therefore everything, because he perceives in the distinction of the Homelands the mystery of the entire human family.
  • The adjective in the expression "Western civilization" has no noun value: it has only a geographical value and all it allows us is to look with a fixed, but expressionless, eye at the cardinal points.
  • The definition of man is not where he lives, but what he is.
  • Geopolitics comes to coincide fully with the geography of grace.
  • The struggle in the earth city to give bread to those who have none, to clothe those who are naked, is a condition for becoming citizens of the heavenly city.
  • Prophecy is that admirable union of continuity and progress, which ensures that the future is not a repetition of the past, but that it is not pure novelty either.
  • The spiritual vocation of every single man cannot be destroyed or absorbed by a hypothetical collective vocation; not for the proletariat or for the race or for the State God brought me into the world, but to develop in my inner life and in my life of relationship the holy call to truth and good.
  • Human hopes are not entirely alien to theological hope.
  • We have always said it: the edifice of peace demands, first of all, the peace of peoples with God.
  • For men, only one law and one end applies: the law of love and the reward of love. Everything else is lies and vanity.

Scritti vincenziani

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Giorgio La Pira, Scritti vincenziani, Giancarlo Gallici (editor), Città Nuova, Roma, 2007. ISBN 978-88-311-7327-8
  • It seems to me that the linchpin of Christianity lies entirely in the final judgment.
  • There is a spring preparing for this apparent winter.
  • What is this crisis? It's a crisis of waiting.
  • How does Christianity operate in the world? In the way the artist works on the stone he works: imprinting in it – as much as is possible! – the light and ideal beauty with which he is filled.
  • Don Bosco, Don Orione, and so on, all one: to give creatures the Grace of Christ, a grace incorporated into work and the visibility of the essential things in life.
  • [Grace] It is a movement of renewal that always brings, due to the resistance of the past, a healthy disturbance.
  • Do what the Middle Ages did: bring this new history, this new humanity, around God, around Christ, around cathedrals, around monasteries, around the temple.
  • Christianity everything is a dream: the sweetest dream of a God made man for man to become God.
  • The yardstick by which all human activity is evaluated is one: the one that Jesus reveals.
  • The [world] crisis was determined by the expulsion of this contemplative primacy of man's values.
  • The function of cloistered monasteries at this very decisive historical point of the great human and divine drama?
  • It is clear now: to be like the power plants from which this divine energy is released, shocking every laziness and every slowness... the mysterious lakes where the healthy waters gather, destined to operate in the world a «flood» purifying of grace, truth, beauty and peace!
  • The measure of judgment? Love. But to prevent this love from vaping into the generic, it is incorporated into elementary and precise acts.
  • When everything seems to fall apart everything is still magnificently valid.
  • What Jesus tells us: to leaven human society so as to bring creatures the gift of a spiritual and material elevation together.
  • This age of exile, of remoteness, of atheism, this ultimate limit of unanchoring from Christ, this extreme shore, in appearance, of materialism, invokes –perhaps by the law of opposites– the supreme shores of the glory of the resurrection and of love.
  • Beneath the surface of formless matter is the firm ideal structure of a rebirth that has, in the city of God, its model of beauty and light.
  • The entire edifice of Christian civilization and Christian history was built on the solid fortresses of the contemplative monasteries.

Quotes about

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  • [About the politicians who will remain in the history of Christian Democracy] Dossetti, De Gasperi, but I could also add Piccioni, La Pira, Moro. People of that level, of that character, of that history, in the party I have never seen her again.
  • The Pyre soon gained widespread popularity for her passionate defense of the poor and humble: a rather complex personality, she alternated attitudes marked by a mysticism with a clear evangelical influence with positions that revealed a keen political sense.
  • Giuseppe Mammarella, L'Italia dopo il fascismo 1943-1973, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1974, Part III, Ch. I, p. 224
  • A well-meaning bungler who, in the name of the Lord, supports the worst causes by appealing to the best of feelings.
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