Pope upholds legacy of Don Milani, a “restless and disturbing” priest

By Lisa Zengarini

Fr. Milani’s testimony and message invites us “not to remain indifferent, to identify the new poor,” and to reach out “to all the excluded," Pope Francis said on Monday, as he addressed members of the Committee for the Centenary of the Birth of this pioneering Italian priest.

Born in Florence in 1923 to a well-off, non-believing middle-class family, Don Lorenzo Milani was an educator of the poor who, in the Fifties and Sixties,  developed innovative methods of critical pedagogy, centred around social justice, in the school he founded in the rural hamlet of Barbiana, in Tuscany.

Though less known internationally, he holds an important position in the history of open education.

In his address, Pope Francis thanked the Committee for its commitment to keeping Don Milani’s testimony and message alive, and to making it known to all, "especially to younger generations."

Don Milani's battle for social justice

He then shared some reflections on Don Milani's life, from his conversion to Catholicism and ordination to priesthood, to his staunch battle for social justice through the education of the poor.

Recalling that his decision to become a priest  happened at the same time as his conversion, Pope Francis remarked that conversion is at the heart of Don Milani's entire human and spiritual experience, which, he said, “makes him a believer, a priest in love with the Church, a faithful servant of the Gospel in the poor.”

Indeed, “Don Lorenzo lived the evangelical Beatitudes of poverty and humility to the full, leaving his bourgeois privileges, his wealth, his comforts, and his elitist culture to become poor among the poor.”

He “also experienced this bliss with his people and his students" at Barbiana, continued the Pope. “The school was the context in which he worked for a great purpose: that of restoring dignity to the least ones, respect, rights, and citizenship, but, above all, the recognition of the sonship of God’s children, which includes us all.”

A witness of Italy's social and economic transformation

Pope Francis further noted that Don Milani was a “witness and interpreter” of the social and economic transformation taking place in then rural Italy with its industrialization.

“With his enlightened mind and an open heart," the Pope said, Don Milani understood “that even public school in that context was discriminatory for his children.” 

The public schools of the time, he said, were "not a place of social promotion, but of selection, and it was not functional to evangelization because injustice distanced the poor from the Gospel, and peasants and workers from the faith and the Church.”

This prompted Don Lorenzo to dedicate his entire life to the education of the poor in his school in Barbiana.

"I care about you"

His motto, noted Pope Francis, was not a generic ‘I care’, but a heartfelt ‘I care about you’, an “explicit declaration of love for his small community.”

“That message invites us not to remain indifferent, to interpret reality, to identify the new poor and the new poverty, to get closer to all the excluded and take them to heart. Every Christian should do their part in this," the Pope insisted.

A “restless and disturbing priest”

Concluding, Pope Francis reiterated his gratitude to this “restless and disturbing priest," faithful to the Lord and his Church, “for the testimony he left us as a challenging legacy.”

He also thanked the committee for organizing the centenary celebrations “to make Don Milani known and listened to.”