Lorenzo Milani (1923-67) was born 100 years ago into a well-to-do, intellectual and secular Florentine family. He disappointed his parents by not going to university and taking up painting instead. His encounter with religious art made him read the Gospel. He became a transformed person. His mother, Alice said: “My son was in search of the Absolute. He found it in religion and in the priestly vocation.” He was sent as a curate to San Donato, not far from Florence, where he started a night school open to people of all political and religious persuasions, atheists included. This upset some of his fellow priests, leading parishioners and local members of the Christian Democratic Party close to the Church. They complained to the local curia. In 1954, the ecclesiastical authorities sent him into exile to a small hamlet in the mountains above Florence. At the launch of Milani’s Complete Works in 2017, Pope Francis said: “His family education came from non-believing, anti-clerical parents who had accustomed him to an intellectual dialectic and a frankness that could at times appear too rough, when not marked with rebellion. He maintained this characteristic, acquired in the family,...
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