Catholics and the Italian Revolutionary Left of the 1960s

Richard Drake

The Catholic Historical Review, Volume 94, Number 3, July 2008,pp. 450-475 (Article)

Published by The Catholic University of America PressDOI: 10.1353/cat.0.0097

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CATHOLICS AND THEITALIAN REVOLUTIONARY LEFT OF THE 1960S

BY

RICHARD DRAKE*

Radical left-wing Catholics played an important role in Italy’s extra-parliamentary revolutionary movement of the 1960s, which took asits starting point the need to fill the void created by the growingmoderation of the official Communist party. For guidance in oppos-ing the American-dominated capitalist status quo in Italy, Catholicslooked to activist intellectuals, such as the priests Lorenzo Milani athome and Camilo Torres abroad. The vital Catholic component inLotta Continua, the foremost extraparliamentary left group of theperiod, illustrates the practical consequences, at their most extreme,of the Catholic-Marxist dialogue in Italy.

The Catholic political tradition in Italy consists of every ideologythat the modern world either has produced or allowed to remain inexistence. Catholic liberals, conservatives, fascists, and communistshave been present at the country’s historic turning points in thetwentieth century.The protean character of the Catholic political tra-dition as a general phenomenon arises from the absence of a clear anddefinite injunction about politics in the New Testament. As voters andactivists, Catholics can and do end up at all points on the politicalcompass.

The case of each national Catholic tradition, however, has its ownparticularities. In Italy, the role of the Vatican as a direct institutionalprotagonist confers upon Catholic politics there a unique intensity, forand against the Church.Throughout the modern era, the institutionalchurch repeatedly expressed itself with antisocialist and anticommu-nist vehemence in papal encyclicals and other pronouncements, as ina famous 1949 decree: “. . . the faithful who profess the doctrine ofmaterialist and anti-Christian communism, above all if they defend and

450

*Dr. Drake is chairman of the History Department and teaches modern European his-tory at the University of Montana in Missoula.

proselytize for it, ipso facto will be treated as apostates to the Catholicfaith, in the excommunication procedure especially reserved to theHoly See.”1 Nevertheless, the Italian church’s national religious historyis rich in examples of controversy over the true political meaning ofChristianity.2

During the tumultuous 1960s, the historic pattern of Catholic polit-ical eclecticism continued unabated in Italy. By and large, people stilltended to see the institutional Church as an antimodern force.3

Conservative and reactionary elements certainly existed in theChurch, but Catholic individuals and groups also were to be found onthe left. Franco Rodano and other Catholic intellectuals who hadjoined the Communist party (PCI) in the aftermath of World War IIwent on arguing for a conciliation of Marxism’s socioeconomic truthsand the Church’s spiritual truths.4

To the left of the official Communist party a broad arc of pro-revolutionary groups, including some of a Catholic provenance,emerged during the 1960s. Known collectively as the extraparliamen-tary left, these groups responded with varying degrees of antagonism tothe Communist party’s growing moderation after Nikita Khrushchev’srevelations in 1956 about Stalin as the worst state terrorist of all time.5

BY RICHARD DRAKE 451

1 “Suprema Sacra Congregazione del Sant’Offizio, Scomunica dei comunisti (1949),”in Paolo Pombeni, Socialismo e cristianesimo (1815–1975) (Brescia, 1977), p. 300.Thisclassic anthology of texts is preceded by a brilliantly illuminating hundred-page intro-ductory essay by Pombeni, who is one of the great scholarly authorities on the historicclash between Christianity and Marxism.

2For a splendid essay on some of the divisions within Christianity between the insti-tutional church and outliers among the faithful, see Mariateresa Fumagalli BeonioBrocchieri, Cristiani in armi: Da Sant’Agostino a Papa Wojtyla (Rome-Bari, 2006). Shefocuses on the issues of war and peace, but the implications of her argument extend topolitics in a general sense.The second part of the book deals almost entirely with theItalian Catholic Church.

3Arthur Marwick reflects this standard perception, asserting that the Church “tendedto operate as a centre of opposition to all the great movements aiming towards greaterfreedom of ordinary human beings,” in The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain,France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958–c. 1974 (New York, 1998), p. 34.

4For an analysis of Rodano’s Catholic-Communist politics, see Augusto Del Noce, Ilcattolico comunista (Milan, 1981).

5For an overview of the extraparliamentary left in Italy, see Giuseppe Vettori, ed., Lasinistra extraparlamentare in Italia: storia, documenti, analisi politici (Rome, 1973),Patrizia Violi, I giornali della estrema sinistra: i tranelli e le ambiguità della lingua edell’ideologia (Milan, 1977), and Nanni Balestrini and Primo Moroni, L’orda d’oro1968–1977: la grande ondata rivoluzionaria e creativa, politica ed Esistenziale, 2nded. (Milan, 1997).

The Hungarian uprising and its bloody suppression by the SovietUnion later that year propelled the party further along a path awayfrom its revolutionary origins. Proponents of the extraparliamentaryleft disdainfully thought of PCI leader Palmiro Togliatti as little morethan a time-serving reformist. Raniero Panzieri, a Jewish socialist andthe extraparliamentary left’s most influential intellectual in the early1960s, called for more, not less, revolutionary Leninism as the properresponse to the news about Stalin and the other recent developmentsbehind the Iron Curtain.6 Panzieri edited the Quaderni rossi, the pio-neering extraparliamentary-left journal. Giving voice to amorphousgroupings of students, workers, professionals, and dropouts, heinspired the generation of 1968. The movement spread throughoutItalian society in the schools, the factories, and city neighborhoods. Itcontained diverse groups and personalities,but they all believed in thenecessity of a revolution against capitalism.

Catholics entered the extraparliamentary left through the studentprotests of the mid-1960s against overcrowding,understaffing,and lowretention rates of working-class students in higher education. Theseproblems had manifested themselves even earlier in the middle andhigh schools. In 1962, the government had ordered compulsory edu-cation for all students to the age of fourteen, but without mandatingstructural reforms in the schools.The sudden creation of large classesthat included many poorly trained pupils overwhelmed the resourcesof the elitist school system still in place from the Fascist era. By 1965,when students no longer had to take entrance examinations, Italianuniversities began to undergo uncontrolled growth. By the end of thedecade, the total number of university students in the nation stood at450,000, a gain of nearly 200,000 from 1960.7

The ensuing combination of low graduation and high dropout ratesproduced widespread demoralization. Demonstrations and sit-insinvolving large numbers of disaffected students took place at universi-ties across the country in 1966 and 1967.Writing a firsthand accountof the disturbances in Turin, Luigi Bobbio—the son of the eminentphilosopher Norberto Bobbio and an important figure on the extra-parliamentary left—reported that the breakdown of university institu-

452 CATHOLICS AND THE ITALIAN REVOLUTIONARY LEFT OF THE 1960S

6For an analysis of Panzieri’s impact on the extraparliamentary left, see RichardDrake, The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy(Bloomington, 1989), chap. 3,“Living the Revolution.”

7Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988(New York, 1990), pp. 298 et ff.

tions had produced a rage and disillusionment “radically new.”8 Thespectacular student rebellion of 1968 that erupted in France wouldmake a deep impression in Italy, but the radicalization of Italian uni-versities had become a major issue even earlier.9

The Italian economy also played an important part in radicalizingthe student movement, though not in the way commonly understood.Recent research contradicts the standard view that 1963 was the lastyear of Italy’s economic miracle.10 Productivity remained high until the“hot autumn”of 1969,when an unprecedented burst of worker strikes,wage hikes, and price inflation led to a severe downturn.11 Neverthe-less, the sectors of the Italian economy on which university studentsdepended for their professional advancement—research and develop-ment as well as education—remained notably substandard throughoutthe 1960s.12 Students found it increasingly difficult to obtain adequatetraining and then to find good jobs.

The specific issues that had engendered the student movementbecame subsumed in a general critique of the capitalist order.Marxists,who furnished the political vocabulary for the extraparliamentary left,portrayed Italy as a branch office of the multinational empire head-quartered in Washington.They linked every specific university reformissue to, in their parlance, the historically unparalleled evils of multi-national capitalism.The war in Vietnam reinforced the trend in the stu-dent movement to see the dysfunction of the university as merely onemore symptom of Italy’s subservience to the United States. Panzieriand other like-minded Marxist thinkers, such as the University of Paduapolitical science professor Toni Negri, provided the core elements ofthis extraparliamentary left ideology.

BY RICHARD DRAKE 453

8Luigi Bobbio,“Le lotte nell’università,”Quaderni piacentini, no. 30 (April, 1967).9For the origins of the Italian student movement, see Carlo Oliva and Aloisio Rendi,

Il movimento studentesco e le sue lotte (Milan, 1969);Walter Tobagi, Storia del movi-mento studentesco e dei marxisti-leninisti in Italia (Milan, 1970); Luisa Cortese, ed., Ilmovimento studentesco: storia e documenti (1968–1973) (Milan, 1973); GianfrancoCamboni and Danilo Samsa, PCI e movimento degli studenti (1968–1973): ceti medi estrategie delle riforme (Bari, 1975); and Mino Monicelli, L’ultrasinistra in Italia,1968–1978 (Rome-Bari, 1978).

10Massimo Di Matteo, “Italy’s First Phase of Postwar Development: The Role ofAggregate Demand,” in The Italian Economy at the Dawn of the 21st Century, ed.Massimo Di Matteo and Paolo Piacentini (Aldershot, UK, 2003), pp. 3–11.

11Alessandro Vercelli and Luciano Fiordoni, “The Italian Economy after the BrettonWoods Era (1971–2001),” ibid.

12Di Matteo,“Italy’s First Phase of Postwar Development,” ibid.

With the university and the capitalist society it served in crisis,Marxist radicals found support among the students. Nuovo impegno,an extraparliamentary intellectual journal founded by RanieroPanzieri’s close friend and collaborator on the Quaderni rossi, LucianoDella Mea, achieved particular prominence in the late 1960s, and it fre-quently reflected in these years on the revolutionary significance ofthe student movement.13 Commenting on the February 1967 occupa-tion of the University of Pisa, the journal drew attention to “the newand in many respects revolutionary aspect that is implicit in the birthof a decidedly Marxist and anti-capitalist student force.”14 Marxisttheory stood firm on the principle that the proletariat alone wouldbring about the fulfillment of history in communism, but the studentmovement could constitute “an important moment in the generalmovement of the revolutionary struggle.” The effects of capitalism’sfailure on the students had turned their movement into a powerfulforce with implications that threatened “the more general structures ofdomination and exploitation” in the country.15 Moreover, by under-standing “the connections between the authoritarian structures of theschool and capitalist structures,” the students had placed their move-ment in the context of the global struggle against capitalism.16

Extraparliamentary Catholics also gained a hearing at this time.Nuovo impegno approvingly noted that even the Catholic segment ofthe student movement had become identified with illegal methods inopposing the academic status quo, i.e., they had accepted “the formsof struggle that the university Marxist left had proposed.”17 That sameyear, Don Lorenzo Milani, a radical priest, had enjoyed a huge popularsuccess with a book not of his official authorship, but forever associ-ated with his name, Lettera a una professoressa (Letter to a SchoolMistress,1967). The book made a profound impression on the Catholicleft by linking Christianity with the revolutionary cause. As GuidoViale, another important radical of the period, later recalled, Lettera a

454 CATHOLICS AND THE ITALIAN REVOLUTIONARY LEFT OF THE 1960S

13Giuseppe Vettori analyzes the founding, the personnel, and the ideological view-point of Nuovo impegno in La sinistra extraparlamentare in Italia, op. cit. Hedescribes the journal as an essential organ “for anyone who wants to study the historyof the revolutionary groups of the 1960s,” p. 27.

14Umberto Carpi and Romano Luparini, “L’occupazione della Sapienza e il nuovomovimento studentesco,” Nuovo impegno, nos. 6–7 (November, 1966–April, 1967).

15Gian Mario Cazzaniga,“Cronache e documenti del movimento studentesco,”Nuovoimpegno, no. 8 (May–July, 1967).

16Nuovo Impegno, “Contro la scuola dei padroni,” Nuovo impegno, nos. 9–10(August, 1967–January, 1968).

17Ibid.

una professoressa brought a Catholic dimension to “the class strug-gle.”18 Don Milani, an eclectic thinker, does not fit any political or ide-ological pattern,but he embodied the most implacable Italian Catholicresistance to the status quo.

Don Lorenzo Milani (1923–67)

Born in Florence on May 27, 1923, of a Jewish mother and a gentilefather, Milani grew up in the cultivated ease that his family’s wealthmade possible. Nothing in his childhood and adolescence indicatedthe likelihood of a church career for him.Both of his parents professedagnosticism.Their world centered on art, literature,philosophy,and sci-ence. Milani, pursuing his studies desultorily in Milan where the familyhad relocated in 1930, decided not to go to the university. Instead, hereturned to Florence in 1941 and studied painting briefly with theGerman expatriate artist Hans Joachim Staude, who liked him but cor-rectly surmised that art would not be his life’s calling. At the age oftwenty, in 1943, Milani shocked his family with the decision to convertto Catholicism. He gave them an even greater shock later that year byentering the seminary.On July 13,1947,he became an ordained priest.His foremost biographer, Neera Fallaci, exhaustively analyzed hismotives for turning to the Church and made a case for the initial roleof religious art as his probable source of inspiration.Yet she concludedthat “what inspired the faith of Lorenzo Milani remains quite mysteri-ous; as in almost all conversions.”19

As a priest in the impoverished community of San Donato diCalenzano near Florence, Don Milani opened a school for the poorchildren of the parish. Soon he became well known in the area for hisactivism on their behalf. He began to comment publicly on the anti-Christian character of the socioeconomic system that exploited thepoor. His radical ideas did not originate in Marxist theory, but from themessage of the Gospel about the evil consequences for mankind ofcupidity. He inevitably made numerous enemies among churchmenand local Christian Democratic politicians.

BY RICHARD DRAKE 455

18Guido Viale, Il Sessantotto: tra rivoluzione e restaurazione (Milan,1978),pt. 1,“GliStudenti.” See also his S’avanza uno strano soldato (Rome, 1973).

19Neera Fallaci, Vita del prete Lorenzo Milani: Dalla parte dell’ultimo (Milan, 1993),p. 73. The footnotes in this edition of the Fallaci biography provide a comprehensiveoverview of the vast scholarly and journalistic literature on Don Milani. For the variouseditions of his own writings, see the “Scheda bibliografica e tecnica” in Giorgio Pecorini,Don Milani! Chi era costui?, 2nd ed. (Milan, 1998).

Under pressure to remove Don Milani, the Church in 1954 sent thethirty-one-year-old priest on an exile assignment to the parish ofSant’Andrea in Barbiana. He wept at the sight of this desolate place,which was even more impoverished and backward than San Donato.Once again, he set up a school at no cost to the parents. Eventually,through the collaboration of visiting teachers, the school offered abroad range of courses. Quite remarkably for the time, a gynecologisttaught a course on sex education.Above all, though, these “pariahs ofItaly”—as he referred to the barbianesi—had to master the Italian lan-guage.20 They had to learn to communicate, along with the other poorpeople of the world, to defend their interests against the rich. Toaccomplish this pedagogical aim, he devoted much class time to a crit-ical reading of newspapers. In his vocabulary, journalism functioned asa synonym for lying. Many visitors to the school thought his methodsexcessively authoritarian and his language shockingly coarse, but hedefended his methods, claiming that they fit the real needs of theBarbiana students.The main criticism against him, however, as in SanDonato, had to do with his vituperative denunciation of the establish-ment Christian Democratic party.

Don Milani replied to his detractors in Esperienze pastorali (1958),a book of Savonarolian wrath that he wrote in Barbiana about his yearsin San Donato. He portrayed his parishioners as prisoners of both thepast and the present.The complete records of the community datedfrom 1674, and the archives revealed how the peasants had lived forcenturies in servitude to absentee elites. He thought that nothingessential had changed since the seventeenth century: the rich,with theblessing of the Church, still lorded over the poor.He could see nothingof the Church’s social justice tradition in the way the present-daysystem exploited the working-class people in San Donato. Such wasChristian Democracy Italian style. Referring to the paramount Catholicleaders of postwar Italy and Spain,he sensationally declared in the con-cluding section of the book that “we have fornicated with the liberal-ism of [Alcide] De Gasperi [and] the Eucharistic congresses of[General Francisco] Franco.”21

Italy’s American future filled Don Milani with dread. In American-style consumerism, which only had begun to taint the lives of the san-donatesi, he identified a completely sinister force.Already an endless

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20Cited in Fallaci, Vita del prete, p. 220.21Don Lorenzo Milani, Esperienze pastorali (Florence, 1958), p. 437.

succession of media entertainments, sporting events, and marketingploys had made society almost incapable of comprehending or engag-ing the spiritual questions of life.The cultural servitude of the massesactually had increased during the postwar period. People could readnow; they could ride motor scooters; and they had television, radio,and cinema, but twenty centuries of Christian civilization had not pre-pared them to understand that they were living in a culture aggres-sively at odds with the wisdom of the saints.

Esperienze pastorali produced a scandal in the Italian Catholicintellectual world and made Don Milani a notorious figure overnight.In general, the left hailed the book for its honesty and originality, butCatholic conservatives in particular deplored it.Writing for the influ-ential Jesuit Civiltà cattolica, Angelo Perego heatedly faulted DonMilani for his wild mischaracterization of Catholic culture. He thoughtthe book almost completely counterproductive. The author shouldperform penance for it “as reparation for the great evil that his bookcertainly will do to many restless and undisciplined spirits [animeirrequiete e poco formate].”22 The Patriarch of Venice and soon-to-bePope John XXIII, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, thought that Don Milani“must be a poor deranged unfortunate on the loose from the asylum.”23

Perego’s review and others by like-minded critics induced the Church,on December 15, 1958, to have the book withdrawn from sale and toprohibit its republication or translation. The official organ of theVatican, L’osservatore romano, then condemned Esperienze pastoralifor promoting class warfare in the manner of the Marxists, claiming asdecisive evidence for its judgment the widespread support for thebook in the Communist press.

Don Milani’s health began to fail in 1960 with the onset ofHodgkin’s disease.As the cancer inexorably destroyed his body, heatedcontroversy continued to swirl around him. In 1965, a group of mili-tary chaplains publicly attacked conscientious objectors for their lackof patriotism. In an open letter to the press, he replied that all warsresulted in a tragic waste of human life. There really were only twonations: the rich and the poor. He wanted the poor of the world todefend themselves against their exploiters, not to serve them by join-

BY RICHARD DRAKE 457

22Angelo Perego, S.J., “Le Esperienze Pastorali di Don Lorenzo Milani,” Civiltà cat-tolica, 1958, 3:quaderno 2598.

23Fallaci,Vita del prete,p.269.Pope John XXIII later came to value Don Milani’s workat Barbiana.

ing the armies of capitalism.24 This assertion sounded enough likeMarxism to elicit cries of outrage from conservatives.His troubles mul-tiplied when the Communist journal Rinascita republished his openletter with approving commentary. The Rinascita-Don Milani couplingseemed perfectly natural to conservatives: like unto like.Yet he had hissupporters. Among the most prominent of them, Ignazio Silonedefended the embattled priest for his nonconformist questioning of astatus quo ever inclined toward corruption because of the very natureof power.

Barraged by hate mail for his answer to the military chaplains, DonMilani next had to face legal proceedings,which began on October 30,1965, in Rome.Too ill to appear in court to answer the charges againsthim of inciting draft evasion,he wrote “Lettera ai giudici”(Letter to theJudges). Repeating his earlier arguments about the fundamental classdynamics of all wars, he added that obedience to the law is not thehighest virtue, as the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials should havemade clear to everyone. His letter of February 15, 1966, which per-suaded the court to drop all charges against him, also revealed thelarge influence on his thinking of Gandhi’s principles of nonviolence.

Although accused by many of being a Marxist, Don Milani tran-scended party labels in his politics. Indeed, he often criticized theCommunist party.On one occasion,at about the time of the Rome trial,he blasted the Communist hierarch Pietro Ingrao in front of theBarbiana students for his party’s immoral substitution of politicalmachinations for the real work of social justice. He believed that, aswith all parties in Italy, the Communist party helped to maintain theevil status quo. Also, as with all political parties, university-educated,middle-class elites controlled it completely. Such a party could talkabout the workers and revolution only in the rhetorical way that madeItalian Communism a completely unthreatening presence in the coun-try’s political life. On this point, his rhetoric echoed that of the emerg-ing extraparliamentary left movement. The Communists’ much-publicized interest in him,he insisted,opportunistically concerned themagnification of stresses within the Church, not with doing anything

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24In her essay on the historic conflict within Christianity over the true meaning ofthe scriptural text on the blessedness of peacemakers, Mariateresa Fumagalli BeonioBrocchieri writes, “In the Catholic world [of the 1960s], the clearest and most impas-sioned voice in favor of peace was without doubt that of Don Lorenzo Milani, the parishpriest of Barbiana. . . ,” in Cristiani in armi, pp. 149–50. She highlights the enormousimpact that he made with his statement against the military chaplains.

in a serious way about the tragedy of poverty in Italy. He wanted noth-ing to do with parties, and politics interested him only to the extent oftheir influence on the spiritual life of the poor.

Don Milani passed the last two years of his life in a Calvary of radi-ation treatments and blood transfusions. In early 1967, he left Barbianato live in Florence with his mother. Six weeks before his death on June26 of that year at the age of forty-four, Lettera a una professoressaappeared. Some of his students had failed an official examination, andDon Milani began to compose a letter of protest to the examiningteacher. He turned the letter into a school project, which quickly grewto the length of a short book. Ostensibly the work of eight students,the book presented an analysis of the examination failure as a symp-tom of the malfunctioning capitalist class system.They called for thecomplete overhaul of Italy’s schools. Citing the Italian Constitution,they demanded that “the obstacles of the economic and social order”be removed.25

Barbiana amounted to no more than a speck in the vast desert madeby capitalism:“In Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, in the Italian South, inthe mountains, in the fields, and even in the great cities millions of chil-dren wait for equality.”26 Poverty had created academic disadvantagesimpossible for these children to overcome. Such students should notbe failed, but given compassionate understanding and additionalschool time. Even more important, the socioeconomic order, of whichthe educational system functioned as an integral part, had to be com-pletely changed in favor of the justice and equality now completelymissing from the world.

The reactions to Lettera a una professoressa split along party lines.Conservatives viewed it as a monstrous attack on the standards of qual-ity in education,as a Marxist polemic against a free society,and as a dia-bolical perversion of Christianity.27 For the left, above all the extra-

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25Scuola di Barbiana, Lettera a una professoressa (Florence, 1972), p. 61.26Ibid., p. 80.27In “Lettera a una professoressa”: Un mito degli anni Sessanta (Milan, 1992),

Roberto Berardi charged that Don Milani “boasted of liberating his students from theenslavement of the capitalist system. In reality, he only made them uncivil, with an inex-pressive and dogmatic aggressiveness of the small-time political propagandist,” p. 41.Berardi, who had been the central inspector for the Ministry of Public Instruction and afrequent critic of Don Milani, also made the case for the priest’s exclusive authorship ofLettera a una professoressa. The claim for the students’ authorship of this book was “anevident fiction,” p. 17.

parliamentary left, the book became a sacred text, worthy of compari-son with Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth.28 Nuovo impegnohailed it as the Catholic left’s coming of age.The journal, encouragedby the “authentic revolutionary violence” in Don Milani’s denunciationof the capitalist status quo, attempted to foster a dialogue withCatholic radicals.29 They hoped to compile an inventory of exactlywhat the country’s radical Catholic groups aspired to achieve.

The Nuovo Impegno Survey

The Nuovo impegno survey was by no means an isolated or unprece-dented initiative. Since 1964, Marxists and Christians across Europe hadbegun to engage in dialogue. The Second Vatican Council, which hadbegun two years earlier, and de-Stalinization had created the necessarypreconditions for this exchange.30 Il dialogo alla prova, a landmarkbook of the dialogue in Italy,had appeared in 1964 under the editorshipof Lucio Lombardo Radice, a Marxist, and Mario Gozzini, a Christian.

In 1965, more than two hundred scholars from sixteen Europeancountries, including five from Iron Curtain nations, attended a seminalconference in Salzburg, called by Germany’s Catholic PaulusGesselschaft and devoted to the theme of “Christianity and Marxism—Today.”31 Among the major Catholic theologians and philosophers at

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28Giovanni Giudici,“Tre interventi sul libro di Don Milani,” Quaderni piacentini, no.31 (July, 1967).

29“Inchiesta sui gruppi minoritari della sinistra cattolica,” Nuovo impegno (August,1967–January, 1968). Other publications of the extraparliamentary left made numerousinquiries into the relationship between Marxists and Catholics in these years—for exam-ple, Quaderni piacentini,April, 1971 and Giovane critica,Autumn, 1971.

30Leonard Swidler,“Christian-Marxist Dialogue:A Historical Overview and Analysis,” inCatholic-Communist Collaboration in Italy, ed. Leonard Swidler and Edward JamesGrace (Lanham, MD, 1988), pp. 7–26. See also Manfred Spieker, “Eurocommunism andChristianity: On the Limits of the Dialogue,” The Review of Politics, 45, no. 1 (January,1983), 3–19, and Dorothee Solle,“The Christian-Marxist Dialogue of the 1960s,” MonthlyReview, 36 (July–August, 1984), 20–26. Spieker’s article is especially valuable for itsinsights into the important differences in Italy between the mainstream left of the PCIand the extraparliamentary left: the party looked to the institutional Church for politicallyeffective contacts within the status quo, whereas the movement gravitated to the theolo-gians of liberation for the fierceness of their anticapitalism as a step toward revolution.

31The papers and a transcript of the papers at the Salzburg conference were pub-lished in Erich Kellner, ed., Christentum und Marxismus—Heute (Vienna, 1966). For adiscussion of the exchanges at the conference, see Emanuel de Kadt, “Christians andMarxists in a Changing World,” International Affairs [Royal Institute of InternationalAffairs 1944–], 44, no. 1 (January, 1968), 63–69.

the conference were Karl Rahner and Giulio Girardi. Roger Garaudyand Cesare Luporini, two leading Marxist thinkers, also attended.32

Italian Catholics and Marxists played key roles at the conference.Girardi, who in the following year would publish Marxismo e cris-tianesimo and become one of the most important left-wing Catholicthinkers of his generation, praised Western communist parties,“in thebosom of which individual thinkers, in terms of theory, had gonebeyond [Marxist] integralism,” thereby pairing up in spirit with theecumenicalism espoused by the post-Vatican II Church.33 Luporini, aprofessor of philosophy at the University of Florence, spoke about theneed to overcome past differences for the purpose of bringing abouta humane society free of the capitalist exploitation that ravaged thecontemporary world. He called for Catholics and Marxists to show “asincere desire of mutual comprehension.”34 Following the confer-ence,Marxist and left-wing Catholic journals returned again and againto the theme of how these two traditions together could heal anafflicted world.35

The survey of Nuovo impegno reveals the thinking of late-1960sCatholic radicals in the words of their own intellectual leaders.Essentially, the journal wanted to know what left-wing Catholicsthought about the prospects of a socialist revolution against theAmerican-dominated capitalist status quo.The survey then was sent tothe leading Catholic groups on the left: Aggiornamenti sociali inMilan, Alternative in Reggio Emilia, Note di cultura in Florence, the

BY RICHARD DRAKE 461

32Garaudy’s lecture at the conference appeared later that year in a greatly expandedform as a book, De l’anathème au dialogue. Director of the Center for Marxist Studyand Research in Paris, French Communist Party hierarch, and professor of philosophy atthe University Institute of Poitiers, he more than anyone else led the Marxist side in itsdialogue with Christians.Also in 1965, he lectured at the Catholic University of Louvainand at St. Michael’s College of the University of Toronto on the meaning of the dialogue.

33Rocco Baione,“Un saggio di dialogo tra cristiani e marxisti,”Aggiornamenti sociali,nos. 7–8 (July–August, 1966). Girardi, often criticized by the church hierarchy, receivedthe support of Michele Pellegrino,the archbishop of Turin from 1965 to 1977.The authorof the pastoral letter “Camminare insieme”—the foremost document of cattocomu-nismo—he made a practice of welcoming left-wing Catholics.

34Ibid.35The Jesuit Aggiornamenti sociali played an especially prominent role on the

Catholic side. See especially the articles of Don Girardi,“Cristiani e marxisti a confrontodella pace,” pts. 1–2, nos. 1–2 (January–February, 1967), and “Dialogo e rivoluzione,” pts.1–2, nos. 11–12 (November–December, 1968); Oswald von Nell-Breuning, “Chiesa cat-tolica e critica marxiana del capitalismo,” no. 5 (May, 1968); and José Ramos-Regidor,“Sviluppo dei popoli e rivoluzione, pts. 1–2, nos. 7–8 (July–August, 1968 andSeptember–October, 1968).

Circolo Maritain in Rome, Il gallo in Genoa, Potere sociale in Cesena,and Vita sociale in Pistoia.

Their extremely diverse answers, ranging from an enthusiasticacceptance of revolution to a basically reformist outlook,appeared ver-batim in the August 1967–January 1968 issue of Nuovo impegno.TheAggiornamenti sociali group regarded the questionnaire as ambigu-ous and devoted its decidedly tepid response to a clarification of con-cepts. Potere sociale went even further in its refusal to express anysympathy for the cause of proletarian violence by pointing to the man-ifest failure of the Cultural Revolution to produce any observable ben-efits for China. Vita sociale thought that no Christian ever couldchoose violence except as a last resort, for Christ’s victory could onlybe brought about through love and forgiveness: “Blessed are thepeacemakers” was the only moral foundation for a Christian society.

Conversely, Alternative declared itself to be in complete sympathywith the class war against the exploitative status quo. Note di culturaand the Circolo Maritain essentially expressed the same revolutionarysentiments. Il gallo, the most radical of the respondents, cited Marxapprovingly about the need for proletarian revolution to end the inhu-man capitalist exploitation of the world’s poor, who have the right, asChe Guevara justly asserted, to react violently to the violence that theexploiters use against them.

On the whole, Nuovo impegno expressed disappointment with theCatholic responses to the questionnaire. Il gallo alone showed anyappreciation for Marxist class theory, although it did so with the usualrigmarole of the Catholic left about the compatibility, despite appear-ances, of the Sermon on the Mount and The Communist Manifesto.The other groups all addressed their appeals not to the proletariat butto “civil society.” Nuovo impegno did not, however, dismiss theCatholic left. Clearly, its shared aversion to capitalist consumer societygave Catholics and Marxists some immediate political goals incommon. Indeed, the journal declared that a great hope of the futurelay in the Catholic students and workers who were fighting as alliesbeside the Communists and “unambiguously choosing the path of sub-versive and illegal action.”36 Experiences of this kind would causethem to jettison the unwanted baggage of the Sermon on the Mount,leaving Marxists as the real revolutionary mentors of the Catholics.

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36“Alcune considerazioni sui risultati dell’inchiesta,” Nuovo impegno (August,1967–January, 1968).

Help was on the way from the theology of liberation, a Catholicmovement in Latin America, then in its early stages, that aspired notmerely to have dialogue with Communists but also to assimilate theMarxist social analysis, minus its atheistic philosophy, and to bringabout full-scale collaboration with them.37 Camilo Torres, an activistColombian priest who would become an iconic figure of this move-ment, had burst into the consciousness of the Italian extraparliamen-tary left in 1967, with the translation and publication of his “Appeal”for revolutionary violence as the only possible way that the poor couldobtain justice in the world.38 He had been killed the previous year ina guerrilla action.As the incarnation for that generation of the revolu-tionary priest/martyr who had given soaring expression to the causeof uniting Catholicism and Marxism against the capitalist oppressors ofmankind and then had died in battle against them, no foreign intellec-tual influenced the extraparliamentary Catholic left as much as he did.

In 1968, Nuovo impegno extravagantly praised a book by Torres,Liberazione o morte, which had just appeared in Italian translationunder the imprint of the radical left-wing Feltrinelli publishinghouse.39 To Torres belonged the honor of having thoroughly resolvedthe contradictions of Catholics on the subject of revolutionary vio-lence.Their original confusion, in the telling of Nuovo impegno, hadarisen from the Bible itself,with the Old Testament God-ordained geno-cidal massacres standing in the sharpest possible contrast with theNew Testament gospel of love. Yet, even the lofty ideals of the NewTestament had not prevented the Church from engaging in repressionand violence.The emergence of Christian nonviolence in recent timesas a dominant strain of belief had added more confusion to theCatholic political tradition. Sprinkling holy water on the legacy of

BY RICHARD DRAKE 463

37For an overview of this movement, see Phillip Berryman, Liberation Theology:Essential Facts about the Revolutionary Movement in Latin America and Beyond(New York, 1987). He mounts a spirited defense of liberation theology as “an interpreta-tion of Christian faith out of the experience of the poor”(p.4).He presents Torres as oneof the movement’s icons (pp. 17–19).

38“Appello di Camillo Torres,” Quaderni piacentini, no. 31 (July, 1967). This docu-ment appeared in a special issue devoted to “Imperialismo e Rivoluzione in AmericaLatina,” on which Quaderni piacentini had collaborated with Quaderni rossi andClasse e stato.

39In 1968, the Feltrinelli firm published other revolutionary books by Latin Americanauthors, including the huge bestseller by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cent’anni di solitu-dine, as well as Che Guevara’s Diario in Bolivia and three volumes of Opere, his col-lected works. Giangiacomo Feltrinelli soon would be trying to spark a communist revo-lution in Italy. He was killed in 1972 near Milan while trying to blow up a power line.

Gandhi and King had served not to liberate the masses, but to shacklethem more securely to the capitalist status quo that through economicexploitation and unemployment lived and breathed violence.Christiannonviolence ruled out revolutionary class struggle, which meant thatmultinational capitalism could have its way with the world undis-turbed. In the passionate writings of Torres, Catholics would findguideposts to Marxist revolution, which alone sufficed as an effectivemeans of reaching a just society. For his straightforward proposal ofmarriage between Catholicism and Communism—not the Togliattianreformist kind of Franco Rodano,but something brand new that wouldbring about a genuine revolution—he stood out as much as Milani did,although in a way made unique by his heroic death, among theCatholic-Communist intellectuals of the day.

Camilo Torres (1929–66)

Like Milani, Torres came from an upper-class background. Born inBogotá, Colombia, on February 3, 1929, he moved with his family toBelgium at the age of three when his pediatrician father began work-ing as a consultant to the League of Nations. The family returned toColombia in 1935.Torres had something else in common with Milani:he grew up in a completely secular family and showed no sign in hisyouth of a priestly vocation or even of any particular interest in reli-gion.Tall, good-looking, and popular, he graduated from high school in1947 and studied law at the National University in Bogotá.Accordingto his biographer,Walter J.Broderick,at this time “he blithely continuedto enjoy his own little bogotano version of the dolce vita.”40 Thequickening of his intellectual life at the university, however, soon drewhim to deeper purposes. From an initial abstract intellectual concernabout social betterment, he developed an interest in the plight of thepoor in Bogotá. He began to attend lectures given by visiting FrenchDominicans, who inspired him with a message of commitment andwitness to the poor as the privileged of God.They recruited him to thepriesthood. His friend and future biographer German Guzman onceasked him why he had gone to the seminary. He answered that afterfinding God, the priesthood “seemed to me a total solution.”41 Therefollowed family scenes that recall the bitter disappointment of DonMilani’s parents regarding their son’s decision to enter the seminary.

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40Walter J. Broderick, Camilo Torres: A Biography of the Priest-Guerrillero (NewYork, 1975), p. 27.

41German Guzman, Camilo Torres, trans. John D. Ring (New York, 1969), p. 14.

Torres compromised with his parents, deciding in late 1947 to enterthe diocesan seminary instead of the Dominican monastery.

Torres would remain in the seminary for seven years. He wastreated in the beginning like a new convert, much in the way DonMilani had been. Both young men arrived at the seminary with littleor no standard Catholic culture. Much more fully than Don Milanidid,Torres came to view that culture as the hard external shell con-cealing Catholicism’s precious moral treasure: the Church’s socialjustice tradition. He received high marks in all of his subjects at theseminary and during free study time steeped himself in the papalsocial justice encyclicals. Rerum novarum and Quadragesimo annoconstituted for him the supreme glory of modern Catholicism.Whilestill a seminarian, he sought to implement their teachings by minis-tering to the poor.

Ordained on August 29, 1954,Torres left a few weeks later for grad-uate work in sociology at the University of Louvain in Belgium.Therehe helped to found the Colombian Team of Socio-EconomicInvestigation, a group of Colombian students who shared his concernfor the country’s social problems. Although much of his time wentinto extracurricular social justice activities, he generally did well ingraduate school and particularly appreciated his encounters with theuniversity’s numerous disciples of Jacques Maritain. The ideas ofIntegral Humanism (1934) about the evils of capitalism and thenecessity of dialogue with Communists shaped the Catholic politicsof Torres. Maritain had written: “The temporal task of the Christianworld is to work on earth for a socio-temporal realization of theGospel truths.”42 He repeatedly warned against the manifold moraldefects and political excesses of Marxism, above all its “pitiless hard-ness,” but “Marx had a profound intuition—an intuition that I believeto be the great flash of truth running through his work”: the alien-ation to which capitalism condemned all mankind.43 Maritain’s ideas,as well as the priest-worker movement then thriving in France andBelgium, thrilled the young Colombian.

After receiving a master’s degree in 1958, Torres returned toColombia as a lecturer and chaplain at Bogotá’s National University.Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution in Cuba increased his respect for

BY RICHARD DRAKE 465

42Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism:Temporal and Spiritual Problems of a NewChristendom (New York, 1968), p. 42.

43Ibid., p. 46.

Marxism,but the pontificate of John XXIII gave him ample opportunityto present his progressive political arguments in Catholic terms. Hecited Mater et Magistra in a 1962 denunciation of the inexorable lossof “human and Christian criteria” under capitalism.44 In his early politi-cal statements, he expressed the hope that Colombia would evolvetoward socialism without violence, but he saw nothing in capitalismworth saving.He faulted the Church hierarchy for its obstructionist rolein the reform of Colombian politics. Echoing, in effect, Don Milani, hethought that the masses of poor people, who lay dying in horrifyingpoverty, should be the uppermost concern of the Church. Tragically,however,“the ecclesiastical power in our country is united to the finan-cial and political powers because they possess interests in common.”45

Torres, succeeding no more than Don Milani in avoiding conflictwith Church authorities, soon lost his university chaplaincy and teach-ing post. Reassigned to parish duties and to the deanship of a govern-ment school for training public servants, he continued to work withthe poor and to deepen his commitment to the renewal of the Churchas the champion of social justice. Like Don Milani, he became an invet-erate organizer of schooling projects for poor people.As a governmentschool dean, moreover, he could travel throughout the country andreach a far larger audience than Don Milani was able to do in SanDonato and Barbiana.Torres gave speeches and attended conferencesall over Latin America. In August 1962, he met in Buenos Aires withother progressive Catholics, including the future author of the seminalTheology of Liberation (1971), Gustavo Gutiérrez, whom he hadknown since their student days together at the University of Louvain.Torres argued passionately for Catholic alliances with Communists.

Returning to Louvain for a conference in 1964,Torres presented apaper whose title revealed the growing radicalization of his politics:“Revolution:Christian Imperative.”What is the essence of the Christianapostolate, he began, if not “to establish and extend the kingdom ofGod.”46 The concept of justice defined the Christian’s duties on earth.The current socioeconomic arrangements of the world did not meetthis definition of the Christian apostolate. John XXIII’s Pacem inTerris, he thought, should inspire Catholics to condemn the blood-sucking exploitation of the poor by the world’s vampire investing

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44Camilo Torres, “Urbanization and Urban Reform,” December, 1962, in Torres,Revolutionary Writings (New York, 1969), p. 107.

45Torres,“How Pressure Groups Influence the Government,” p. 185.46Torres,“Revolution: Christian Imperative,” p. 197.

class.He thought of the United States as the head vampire.47 The SovietUnion, by contrast, elicited his praise for utilizing “almost in its totalityand in a progressive manner the profits of national production forcommon purposes.”48 While often criticizing Marxists for their dogma-tism, he thought their philosophy better suited than capitalism to arealistic explanation of the way the world worked and should work.Christians should join with the Communists and uplift them with thesuperior morality of Christianity.49 He specifically cited the ItalianCommunist leader Palmiro Togliatti as an example of how Marxistscould learn to think of Catholics as allies and brothers. Such coopera-tion would lead to “a better world that will continually draw closer toits ideal of universal love.”50

The growing opposition to Torres inside and outside the Churchcaused him to request laic status. On June 24, 1965, he wrote to LuísConcha Córdoba: “When circumstances impede men from devotingthemselves to Christ, the priest’s proper duty is to combat these cir-cumstances, even at the cost of being able to celebrate the Eucharisticrite.”51 He added,“I feel that the revolutionary struggle is a Christianand priestly struggle.” He spent the summer months agitating nation-wide.To Fabio Vásquez Castano, the guerrilla leader of the Fidel Castroand Che Guevara-inspired Army of National Liberation (ELN), he wroteon July 6:“The popular fervor is extraordinary, and it is necessary totake advantage of it in a truly revolutionary way.”52 Two weeks laterTorres told him:“The revolution continues to go forward in a truly stu-pendous way.”53 Father Guzman asked him at this time if he were goingto join the guerrillas. He answered:“No. . . . But if it comes, it comes.”54

BY RICHARD DRAKE 467

47Torres later observed that the relationship between Colombia and the United Statesperfectly illustrated the way the American empire worked in Latin America: “NorthAmerica dominates our economy, and our oligarchy is content to act as its agent and ser-vant,” in “Message to the Unemployed,” n.d. but believed to be late 1965, in ibid., p. 349.

49Torres,“Revolution: Christian Imperative,” p. 206.49In a 1965 interview published in La Hora on May 27–28, 1965,Torres conceded

Marxism’s incompatibilities with Christianity, but he insisted that “in their socio-economic aspirations the majority of Communists hold precepts not opposed to theChristian faith,” in Revolutionary Priest: The Complete Writings and Messages ofCamilo Torres, ed. John Gerassi (New York, 1971), p. 313.

50Torres,“Revolution: Christian Imperative,” p. 231.51Camilo Torres to Luís Concha Córdoba, June 24, 1965, ibid., p. 264.52“Alfredo Castro” (Camilo Torres) to “Helio” (Fabio Vásquez Castano), July 6, 1965,

ibid., p. 297.53“Alfredo Castro” to “Helio,” July 22, 1965, ibid., p. 298.54Guzman, Camilo Torres, p. 228.

Torres spoke to university students later that summer, calling uponthem to help organize the masses for the seizure of power and to light“the spark of revolution and apply it where it should be.”55 In an edi-torial that fall for his revolutionary newspaper Frente Unido, heclaimed that “John XXIII authorizes me to join in unity of action withthe Communists when he says in his encyclical Pacem in Terris ‘. . . itmay sometimes happen that certain contacts in the political order,which heretofore were considered entirely useless, today may on thecontrary be advantageous or could become so.’”56 In his last editorial,he announced his decision to join the Army of National Liberation:“Iplan to continue the struggle from the Colombian mountains with aweapon in my hand until power has been won for the people.”57 Hewould devote himself to the revolution “even at the risk of death.” OnFebruary 15, 1966, he died in a gun battle with government troops. Hehad just turned thirty-seven.

Nuovo impegno hailed Torres’s theology of liberation ideas as adecisive breakthrough in Catholic thought. Catholics always hadaccepted the concept of a just war. Now they should regard as equallyvalid from a moral point of view the concept of a just revolution.Torreshad written,“I believe that I am dedicated to the Revolution out of lovefor my fellow man.”58 Nuovo impegno thought that this whollyadmirable sentiment inevitably had brought Torres into conflict withthe Catholic Church, the entire institutional and political weight ofwhich lay on the side of the ruling classes.The journal hoped that thetheology of liberation would radicalize Catholics and prepare them fortheir real mission of class war.

In the months that followed, Nuovo impegno published reactionsto its investigation of Catholics and revolution. Luigi Manconi, a lead-ing Catholic student radical, expressed wholehearted agreement withthe journal’s position. In his letter, he wrote:“The task ahead is . . . thatof creating an authentic revolutionary consciousness for the Catholicproletariat.”59 Marxism, which lucidly analyzed “the reality of imperial-

468 CATHOLICS AND THE ITALIAN REVOLUTIONARY LEFT OF THE 1960S

55Torres,“Advice to Students to Join the Workers,”September 12,1965,RevolutionaryWritings, p. 310.

56Torres,“Message to the Communists,” September 2, 1965, ibid., p. 316.57Torres,“Call to the Colombian People,” published posthumously on September 21,

1966, ibid., p. 361.58Paolo Cristofolini, “Considerazioni sui cristiani e la violenza,” Nuovo impegno

(February–April, 1968).59Luigi Manconi to Nuovo impegno, ibid. (May–October, 1968).

ism,”would be the means to this end. According to Manconi,“my posi-tion is shared by many Catholic comrades who together with me havetaken part in the recent struggles of the workers and students.”

“For a Theology of Revolution,” a previously published article byManconi, appeared alongside his letter. He began,“I am not a violentperson.”60 Nevertheless, a world revolution against consumer capital-ism had become morally obligatory. He claimed to have reached thisconclusion by following the principles set forth in the Second VaticanCouncil, which had completed its deliberations in 1965.The Councilhad declared:“It is one thing to avail oneself of arms in order to defendthe just rights of peoples and another thing to impose one’s dominionover other nations.” In other words, Catholics had to make distinctionsabout violence. Just-war theory should have its moral counterpart injust-revolutionary theory. He specifically cited Don Milani and CamiloTorres as Catholics who had championed just-revolution theory.Stokely Carmichael, Che Guevara, and Mao Zedong were saying thesame thing from Marxist viewpoints. Manconi thought that all revolu-tionaries, Marxist and Catholic, had to join forces against the capitalisttormentors of mankind.

Despite Manconi’s arguments, the Marxist radicals of Nuovoimpegno scoffed at the idea that the Catholic Church ever could beanything but what it always had been: a bulwark of the status quo.Catholic radicals of one kind or another always had existed, but theynever had counted for anything in the institutional Church. No intel-lectually honest person could conclude that the men responsible forVatican II seriously wanted a revolution. Pope Paul VI’s repeated callsfor social peace revealed the true temper of the Catholic Church, hisconcern in Populorum Progressio (1967) about the “internationalimperialism of money”notwithstanding.61 Nuovo impegno asked thefollowing question of Catholic radicals: “up to which point wouldthey continue to interpret the words of the Pope in the most chari-

BY RICHARD DRAKE 469

60Manconi,“Per una ‘Teologia della Rivoluzione,’” ibid.61Pope Paul VI quoted this phrase from Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno (1931) in

making his own case against “the private ownership of the means of production as anabsolute right, having no limits nor concomitant social obligation,” in PopulorumProgressio, Section 26, “Unbridled Liberalism.” In this same encyclical, he expressed astrong preference for reform over revolution, “except where there is manifest, long-standing tyranny which would do great damage to fundamental personal rights and dan-gerous harm to the common good of the country. . . ,” Section 30, “Reform notRevolution,” http://www.Vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/ documents/hf_p-vi_enc.

table way without noticing the real impact of those words on theclass struggle?”62

Lotta Continua

The history of Lotta continua founded in 1969, reveals the mostextreme practical consequences of the theoretical dialogue betweenCatholics and Marxists in Italy. With more than two hundred branchoffices honeycombing the country by 1973 and a well-documentedpresence in the schools, factories, neighborhoods, barracks, and pris-ons, it rapidly emerged as the most important of the many groups tothe left of the PCI. A large component of Catholics joined with AdrianoSofri in launching the movement from which an enormously success-ful newspaper of the same name, dedicated to the revolutionary over-throw of capitalism, sprang.63 Marco Boato, Paolo Sorbi, Luciano Pero,Francesco Schianchi, and Luigi Manconi all came to Lotta continuawith long experience as Catholic leaders in the student movement.The Catholics thought that Lotta continua would offer them an oppor-tunity to implement the revolutionary word that activists such as DonMilani and Camilo Torres said was implicit in Christianity.

In 1989, the police arrested Sofri as a co-conspirator along withtwo other former members of Lotta continua, Giorgio Pietrostefaniand Ovidio Bompressi, in the 1972 murder of Luigi Calabresi—apolice inspector then employed in the government’s war on nascentterrorism in Italy. Amidst furious controversy in Italy, Sofri today isserving a sentence of twenty-two and a half years for his role as themastermind of the Calabresi slaying.64 Although admitting that hewrote the Lotta continua article celebrating the death of the policecommissioner, Sofri has always protested his innocence in the case.Interviewed in 1998, he explained that “the line between that whichwas admissible and that which was not became clear slowly, by way

470 CATHOLICS AND THE ITALIAN REVOLUTIONARY LEFT OF THE 1960S

62“Ancora su ‘I cristiani e la violenza,’” Nuovo impegno (May–October, 1968).63Patrizia Violi analyzes the historical background and journalistic style of Lotta con-

tinua, in I giornali della estrema sinistra. See “Lotta continua.” See also Vettori, La sin-istra extraparlamentare in Italia, chap. 5, “L’altra ipotesi: il Potere operaio pisano; ildibattito sull’organizzazione.” For a detailed analysis of the origins of Lotta continua byan insider, see Romano Luperini,“Da Potere operaio a Lotta continua: note di cronaca eappunti per un bilancio critico,”Nuovo impegno (August,1969–January,1970).From thesame insider viewpoint, Luigi Bobbio examines the entire history of Lotta continua, inLotta continua: storia di una organizzazione rivoluzionaria (Rome, 1979).

64A life-threatening illness in late November 2005 entitled Sofri to be released fromprison, but his sentence still stands.

of experience, errors, danger, the discovery of the evil effects thatbetrayed good intentions.”65

Following Sofri’s arrest, many of the Catholic alumni of Lotta con-tinua came forward in defense of their former colleague.Manconi,nowa senator from the Democratic Left party and an undersecretary in theJustice ministry of the Romano Prodi government, has defended Sofrithroughout his ordeal, and he continues to do so today.66 In a 1998interview, he denied that Lotta continua ever had been a terroristorganization:“our conception of armed struggle, instead, originated inthe idea that a gradual radicalization of the struggle would bring abouta progressive arming of the popular masses. . . .”67 Schianchi, whobecame a director of a major Milanese bank, has taken the same posi-tion, arguing that Lotta continua only had employed rhetorical vio-lence. Moreover, he claimed that the Catholic component on the staffalways had spoken out forcefully against any proposals for terrorism.68

The record of the Lotta continua newspaper on terrorism abun-dantly confirms the recollections of Schianchi about rhetorical vio-lence, but in the bloody context of that time, the adverb only is a mis-placed modifier. In defending the March 3, 1972, Red Brigadekidnapping of business executive Idalgo Macchiarini, the newspaperdeclared,“We hold that this action belongs properly to the generalizeddesire of the masses to conduct the class struggle onto the terrain ofviolence and illegality.”69 The proletariat enjoyed a fundamental right“to exercise their justice against class enemies.”Lotta continua wouldthereafter oppose most Red Brigade actions, but only as a tacticalmatter, not on the basis of moral principle. Moreover, as Guido Vialenoted in a 1998 interview, unanimity did not prevail in Lotta continua

BY RICHARD DRAKE 471

65Cited in Aldo Cazzullo, I ragazzi che volevano fare la rivoluzione 1968–1978:Storia di Lotta continua (Milan, 1998), p. 205.This book contains invaluable interviewsof all the principal Lotta continua figures. Sperling and Kupfer reissued it in 2006.Cazzullo, a journalist for the Corriere della sera, is even “more severe” in his judgmentof Lotta continua now than when he originally wrote the book; Cazzullo, “Violenzapolitica,” Corriere della sera (November 4, 2006).

66Giovanni Bianconi,“L’ex Lc e l’ex missino, i due nemici,” Corriere della sera (June2, 2006).The Prodi government lost a vote of confidence in the Senate on January 24,2008 and fell from power.

67Cited in Aldo Cazzullo, I ragazzi che volevano fare la rivoluzione 1968–1978,p. 204.

68Roberto Beretta,“Una croce su Lotta continua,” Avvenire (January 29, 1997).69Comunicato di Lotta Continua: il sequestro di Macchiarini, dirigente alla Sit-

Siemens,” Lotta continua (March 9, 1972).

discussions about Red Brigade terrorism. Some members openlyrooted on the Red Brigades.70 The real differences arising from thesetactical considerations became sharper as Red Brigade violence surgedin the mid-1970s, but Luigi Bobbio—a member of Lotta continua and aleading historian of the group—observes that he and his colleagueshad “close ties of origin, history, and common effort”with the militantsof the terrorist underground.71 Both groups believed in revolutionaryviolence,but in different ways.The Red Brigades saw themselves as theclandestine vanguard of the proletariat in a Leninist sense, whereasLotta continua sought to inspire and encourage proletarian violencerather than to lead it. Such distinctions meant less at the time than theyare made to appear today. Of the many left-wing groups that clashedwith the police in the protest demonstrations of these terrible years inItaly, according to journalist Michele Brambilla, Lotta continua was“one of the most violent and pitiless.”72

The coverage that Lotta continua gave to the Luigi Calabresi killingraises even more serious questions about the group’s attitude towardterrorism. Blaming Calabresi for the death of a left-wing suspect in thePiazza Fontana explosion of December 1969, Lotta continua pub-lished inflammatory stories about him and plainly called for his physi-cal elimination:“we have said unmistakably that the proletariat knowswho is responsible [for the death of Giuseppe Pinelli] and will knowhow to exact revenge.”73 The proletariat’s threat against him belongedto “the violence that for every revolutionary struggle is a necessarycondition.”74 The day after his murder, Lotta continua announced thatit did not view political homicide as the decisive event in the emanci-pation of the masses: “But these considerations absolutely cannotinduce us to deplore the killing of Calabresi, an act in which theexploited recognize their own desire for justice.”75

The murder and maiming of capitalist exploiters abroad broughtjubilation to the newsroom of Lotta continua, particularly when thevictims were American government officials. Just as black slaverycould only be abolished and not reformed, so should the capitalist

472 CATHOLICS AND THE ITALIAN REVOLUTIONARY LEFT OF THE 1960S

70Cited in Cazzullo, I ragazzi che volevano fare la rivoluzione 1968–1978, p. 195.71Luigi Bobbio, Lotta continua, p. 103.72Michele Brambilla, Dieci anni di illusioni, storia del sessantotto (Milan, 1994), pt.

4,“Arriva l’ideologia.”73Calabresi, sei tu l’accusato,” Lotta continua (May 14, 1970).74“La violenza e il terrorismo,” ibid. (November 12, 1970).75“La posizione di Lotta continua,” ibid. (May 18, 1972).

system with its headquarters in Washington, D.C., be treated. Slaveowners had to be put in their graves prematurely and their vile systemovercome and destroyed. Arguing by this kind of historical analogy,Lotta continua reacted to the August 1970 kidnapping and murder ofU.S. government agent Dan.A. Mitrione in Uruguay by Tupamaros rev-olutionaries as a legitimate outcome of “a popular revolutionary tribu-nal.”76 About the wounding of presidential candidate and Alabama gov-ernor George Wallace in the spring of 1972, Lotta continua declaredthat it would be a shame if he survived. Perhaps a heavier caliberweapon could be used next time. Lotta continua did not want toappear bloodthirsty, but “when someone like Calabresi or Wallace ishit, we can only hope and wish that we are nearing the end of thisbrutal society.”77 The August 1974 murder of U.S. ambassador RogerDavies in Nicosia, Cypress, brought this reaction:“Of all the bullets andgunshots of the last month in Cypress, this one has been withoutdoubt the best aimed.”78 All the servants of capitalism deservedDavies’s fate as well.

In 1972, Lotta continua praised Communist revolutionaries inArgentina for murdering the capitalist Oberdan Sallustro, the directorof Fiat operations there:“To approve now the execution of this type ofperson, as we have done in the past . . . has a concrete importance.”79

The value of all human life would only become sacred under socialism.In the meantime,class war imposed this rule on revolutionaries:“Whenan exploiter croaks, we are not moved.”80 The death by dynamite ofAdmiral Luis Carrero Blanco, carried out by ETA in Madrid inDecember 1973, inspired some trademark derisive humor by Lottacontinua:“No prime minister was ever raised so high.”81 Sofri and hiscolleagues could only hope that such acts of violence signaled thecoming revolution against capitalism.

The revolution, however, did not come. Lotta continua remained inexistence for several more years,but it suffered increasingly from inter-nal divisions. The Calabresi killing disillusioned many Lotta continuamoderates, such as Luciano Pero, who had entered the organizationafter a long period of militancy at the Catholic University of Milan.

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76“L’estate dei revisionisti e dei rivoluzionari,” ibid. (September 2, 1970).77“Decine di lettere sull’uccisione di Calabresi,” ibid. (May 28, 1972).78“Ucciso dai dimostranti l’ambasciatore USA,” ibid. (August 20, 1974).79“Padroni in lutto per Sallustro giustiziato,” ibid. (April 12,1972).80“Sallustro in Italia e la guerra di classe,” ibid. (April 14, 1972).81“La morte di Carrero Blanco,” ibid. (December 23, 1973).

Taking the pseudonym of Giancarlo Abbiati, he wrote in the Quadernipiacentini that groups such as the Red Brigades did not represent themasses.The kidnapping of businessman Macchiarini, for example, con-tradicted Marxist specifications for revolution, which depended for itssuccess entirely on “a clear willingness on the part of the mass of theproletariat to take up arms and to smash the bourgeois state.”82 Theplots and violence of “a few bourgeois intellectuals”could not be inter-preted as the equivalent of an authentic revolutionary consciousnessand readiness in the working class as a whole. It offended him evenmore to read in Lotta continua that “the murder of Calabresi rendersjustice to the proletariat.” He then left the organization.83

Gradually,Lotta continua lost its Marxist-Leninist revolutionary iden-tity, settling instead for increasingly generic left-wing positions on thesocial questions of the day: divorce, abortion, homosexual rights,school reform, and aid for the South. It is this later progressive andnonviolent image that Lotta continua adherents are presenting to thepublic today. As one journalist noted in 1988, Sofri had shut off thelight in the room of revolution, and when he flipped the switch onagain, it appeared as if a portrait of Montesquieu had been hanging onthe wall all along.84 No one who reads the first years of Lotta continuacan be deceived by such amnesiac protestations.

When Lotta continua disbanded in 1976 amidst bitter internal dis-sensions following a dismal showing in the elections of that year,manyof its most extreme members found a home in Prima Linea, thenumber-two terrorist group in Italy after the Red Brigades during themid-1970s.85 In 1979, a Prima Linea command composed entirely ofLotta continua alumni perpetrated one of the most shocking terroristattacks of that infernal decade—the slaying of the widely admired,reform-minded socialist judge Emilio Alessandrini. Even earlier, prison-

474 CATHOLICS AND THE ITALIAN REVOLUTIONARY LEFT OF THE 1960S

82Giancarlo Abbiati,“Contro il terrorismo,” Quaderni piacentini, no. 47 (July, 1972).83Quaderni piacentini then published a rebuttal to Pero, written by Marcello

Manconi, and its own reaction to the problem of terrorism:“Il terrorismo oggi: la letteradi un compagno e la nostra risposta,” Quaderni piacentini, no. 48–49 (January, 1973).Manconi objected that every revolution is preceded and accompanied by diffuse “formsof clandestine struggle, of partisan and [military] actions, of work by informal groups ofworkers, sub-proletarians, and peasants or of cells of revolutionary organizations.”Genuine revolutionaries should not be wringing their hands over the killing of Calabresi.

84Marina Terragni,“Gioventù bruciata,” Europeo (August 12, 1988).85Cazzullo, I ragazzi che volevano fare la rivoluzione 1968–1978, pp. 287–91. See

also Corrado Stajno, L’Italia nichilista: Il caso di Marco Donat Cattin, la rivolta, ilpotere (Milan, 1982), chap. 8.

ers politicized by Lotta continua joined another major terrorist group,the Nuclei Armati Proletari (NAP). Radical groups within Lotta con-tinua peeled away from the organization as it became more moderate,with some members ending up in the Red Brigades. Later investiga-tions revealed, moreover, that doctors with a Lotta continua back-ground had many Red Brigadists and their sympathizers as patients.86

The Italian case confirms the rule about terrorism: to mount a seriouslong-term threat, terrorist groups must find a satisfactory political con-nection in their societies. In Italy, Lotta continua alumni provideddirect aid to terrorists in the form of recruits and indirect aid in theform of support networks.

Schianchi’s itinerary, leading ultimately to position and influence,was more representative of the post-Lotta continua experience for thegroup’s key leaders. In his 1997 interview, he celebrated the idealismto which Catholic radicals had made vital contributions in the 1960s.Yet this is not all that they did. In 1987, four principal members of theRed Brigades made a public declaration about their terrorist past.Theyincluded founder and one-time ardent Catholic Renato Curcio andMario Moretti, who, in 1978, had engineered the kidnapping of formerprime minister Aldo Moro and then had shot him to death.They saidthat many thousands of people had belonged to the “movement” inwhich Red Brigadism constituted one variation.Although spokesmenfor the movement’s other variations now wanted to give the RedBrigades “another history, a ‘separate’ history,” the group had been, infact,“entirely within ‘the critical practice’ of that state of things [quellostato di cose] that vast and varied class strata had developed in a thou-sand forms.”87 The progression from Don Milani and Camilo Torres toLuigi Manconi and Lotta continua illustrates how Catholic radicalismcould in particular cases and in different ways become one of theseforms in the large gray zone of the Italian extraparliamentary left.

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86Cazzullo, I ragazzi che volevano fare la rivoluzione 1968–1978, pp. 292–93.87Piero Bertolazzi, Renato Curcio, Maurizio Ianelli, and Mario Moretti,“Occorre una

soluzione per tutti,” Il manifesto (April 5–6, 1987).