Don Lorenzo Milani told us: «You must abandon the university»

When I was a student at the University of Florence, a controversy broke out in that city between Don Lorenzo Milani (exiled to Barbiana by Archbishop Florit) and the military chaplains, led by an Istrian refugee who was said to be close to the Italian Social Movement.

The priests with the stars had defined conscientious objection as "cowardice" , at the time punished without a doubt by prison, and had taken advantage, if I remember correctly, of the anniversary of the Lateran Concordat between Fascism and the Vatican to reconfirm their statist, patriotic vocation and support for the military hierarchy. Don Lorenzo Milani had responded to them in "Rinascita", earning himself and the editor-in-chief of the communist magazine a trial. Personally, I was strongly tempted by the idea of ​​conscientious objection, and at the same time frightened by the risk of prison that it would have entailed : in the meantime, I had solved the problem by deferring for study reasons.

Obviously the “Don Milani case” and his stance on obedience, which was no longer a virtue, deeply affected me and expressed a moral and existential position in which I also recognized myself. I wanted to know more about Don Lorenzo Milani , and I was informed of a book of his that had been published a few years earlier and removed from circulation by order of the ecclesiastical authority (always the same Florit, who succeeded the tolerant and far-sighted Cardinal Dalla Costa, who had been greatly venerated by Giorgio La Pira). I asked him how to get that “samizdat”: I had to go to the Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, in Via Ricasoli, find a certain bookseller and say to him with a knowing look: «I am one of Don Lorenzo's boys and I should take your book»; so I did, after which I duly received a copy of Pastoral Experiences, taken from the poison cabinet. It was a difficult book to read for me, because it was strongly anchored – even in its language – to the Tuscan reality, where for example the workers enjoyed a social prestige infinitely superior to that of the peasants: the complete opposite of South Tyrol, and therefore almost incomprehensible to me, like many of the words used in the book (“i pigionali”, for example).

But I had understood one crucial thing: that Don Lorenzo Milani had decided he wanted to speak “to the poor” and that in order to do so he had to first “give them the word” . So he had decided to teach, as an essential prerequisite for evangelization. Having fallen under the odor of pro-Communism, he had been removed from circulation, like his book: sending it to Barbiana meant making it mute and isolated. I went to visit him with a friend, after the controversy over conscientious objection broke out. He received us in his rectory, stealing a bit of time from the boys and from school. Two of the things he said have remained particularly impressed on me. « You must abandon the university . You do nothing but increase the distance between us and the great mass of uneducated people. Do something instead to bridge that distance. Bring others to the level at which you find yourselves today, and then all together we will take a step forward, and then another, and so on. But if you keep running, the others will never catch up with you. I know well that you will find others, even priests! who will tell you the opposite and who will find a thousand good reasons for you to continue your studies and to become good doctors or judges or scientists at the service of the people. But in reality you will only be at the service of your privilege to cure our illnesses and to decide cases in court. We have enough paid mercenaries, we don't need you". (We didn't leave the University. But we started an after-school program in Vingone, near Scandicci, based on the volunteer work of several university students, and attended mainly by children of southern immigrants).

«I know how it will go at the Last Judgement. The Lord God will call, together with me, before him the rector of the college… of the Jesuits in Milan. He will say to the rector: “See, you have always been with the rich. You have read the same books as them, you have shared their company, you have been their table companion, you have educated their children, you cannot but have become like them. You have done everything wrong, perhaps believing you were doing the right thing. You closed your eyes to those who represented me, and you identified with their oppressors. Look instead at Don Lorenzo who is here next to you: he chose unilaterally. He understood that you cannot concretely love more than 3-400 people, and he chose the poor, his countrymen. He took their side, he shared their world. This is what I had commanded you, and you did not want to listen”. But since the Lord is good, in the end he will kick him in the ass and let him enter paradise, while I will enter with all the honors. Do you understand? If you are with the rich, you cannot help but become like them, if you are not already."

At a certain point, Don Milani had forbidden access to Barbiana to anyone with a higher education qualification than the third year of middle school , unless they were explicitly called by him and for a specific function (it happened to me only once or twice). Among the rare exceptions was an elderly Bohemian Jew, a graduate in mathematics, who survived the Nazi period thanks to the help of Tuscan friends who had kept her hidden in the mountains. Marianne Andre would arrive at Barbiana on foot, with her backpack, and would listen with great modesty, speaking only when invited to express herself. We became friends and I discovered that she had known my father. After Don Milani's death, I decided to translate Letter to a Teacher into German and to look for a publisher (which I found in Wagenbach), associating Marianne Andre in particular with the revision of the German text, who was very happy about it. The reason for her privilege in Barbiana had a simple explanation: she was a persecuted woman, who had already lost all her other privileges linked to her education and social status.

Two things had always intrigued me and not convinced me about Don Milani, but I never found the courage and the opportunity to ask him why . I had tried to ask, after his death, his mother (who had survived him, and who had never been baptized), but I had then stopped on the threshold of these two questions, which therefore remain unanswered. I would have liked to understand what legacy Don Milani had received and preserved from Judaism, which he had abandoned to convert to a rigorous Catholicism. And I would have liked to ask him the reason for his (excessive, in my opinion) trust in large groups (the church, the DC, the communists, the unions...), and for his distrust and perhaps contempt for minorities (the "pro-Chinese", the PSIUP of the time, the "extremists", the secular-radical minorities...). I had understood that he believed very much in large popular cultures and in the need for strong ideas to make their way in a non-elitist way among the great masses. But I have always suspected that this approach somehow did violence to his own history, all of it : from his origins, to his journey in the Florentine church, up to his exile in Barbiana and to that last desperate wait for a sign of recognition and appreciation from his bishop and persecutor, Cardinal Florit.

Perhaps the first question is implicitly answered by the second, and by the formal law of the church, lived with the tenacity of the "people of the law" and with the stubbornness of a prophet who wants to induce the courts and the high priests to change their path.

Every day until July 3, you will find on this site a selection of texts by Alex Langer, chosen from the archive of the Alexander Langer Foundation, to whom we extend our thanks for their availability. The texts already published: “ Decalogue for inter-ethnic coexistence “; Europe dies or is reborn in Sarajevo .

“Don Lorenzo Milani told us: you must abandon the University” was first published in the magazine “Azione nonviolenta” in June 1987.

Photo credit Alex Langer Foundation