Igino Giordani Foco scuro

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"As I entered a new century and elementary school, precisely in 1901, my father hired me to work with him as a bricklayer in my free time and summer holidays. I remember earning 5 pennies a week, the equivalent of one Italian lira every four weeks. I liked the trade and I strongly desired to become autonomous. And I viewed all this from an ethical and heroic point of view."

This is how Igino Giordani (or “Foco” as he was called later) starts off relating an adventure that he lived with intensity of thought and ardour of ideals. He had his own personal way of fighting to reach great goals for humanity such as freedom, social justice and peace (at the service of the “need of love between peoples”, he wrote in 1919). To meet these goals he assumed precise cultural and political commitments... read more

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tappa 102Politics

It is not the citizen who gains value from the nation, but the nation that gains value from the citizens. Politics does not come first, followed by the rights of individuals. Politics aims to protect the rights of the individuals in the community.

Igino Giordani, Catholic revolt, Coletti, 1945, p. 39

Politics, as the art of governing the peoples for their good, authority that constitutes the service to the people, if often transformed to do evil to the population: authority that turns upside down in dominion, placing the service of the people for his own benefit. In reality, politics, in such totalitarian and imperialistic regimes and in certain phases of capitalism has become the art of wiping out people, consuming them and scattering them in a inhuman and badly paid labour or dragging them into a war adventure which are now nothing else but hunger and butchery.

Igino Giordani, Dehumanism, Morcelliana, 1948, p. 48-49

It is a heroic act of sanctity to descend to counter the advancing of madness in the political terrain: throwing the soul into the struggle for the health of our brothers, to serve our brothers, the most unfortunate. The effort of politics should be that of charity, and thus a pressure to overcome the division of parties and classes within external races and languages.

Igino Giordani, Dehumanism, cit., p. 50

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tappa 101Non-love

In the wound of non-love, we see an unconscious activity, to do evil. In the light of love, one laso sees the other poker like authority, honour, faithfulness and liberty, which are just ways of serving our brothers. If you love, you do not steal, give false witness, fornicate, you honor your father and mother, obey, work, and do good. If you don’t love, you are induced to throw yourself in adventures, which for centuries populations have done, making war, creating hunger, killing one another over the heaps of rubble, as if existence was given us to produce inexistence. If instead of losing time in hating one another and not in taking care of the others, if we had loved instead of the fall of empires, barbaric invasions, civil battles, fearful ruins, we would built, studies, pursued scientific and social progress:, we would have saved centuries of famine, plagues, fratricides. We would have brought down fortresses of ignorance… The lack of love leads to subdue harmless population and to justify racism and use torture and re-attempt to instate colonialism.

Igino Giordani, The only love, New City, Rome, 1974, p. 26

Sons of the same Father

If we put it in our heads that niggers and yellows are sons of the same Father, who loves them the way he loves us; and the others’ countries has to be respected the way we want ours to be respected, while awaiting for universal fraternity to recognise a sole country; and that those of the other party and another religion have been redeemed by the same blood of Jesus, and that facts worth the same infinite value of redemption, nationalism would no longer arise with the pennant of the heroes who have killed more “enemies,”  nazism will no longer be needed, the outburst of the rottenness of closed minds (non-love fertilises stupidity) and the Muslims would not invade Europe and the Christians would no longer kill their brothers, due to the Holy Speulchre, and there would no longer be holy wars and even less, evil wars: the lives of youths will not be thrown amid the rushes and the swamps in the mud and on stones, food for ravens and ants. The youth would the life for which they were created.

Igino Giordani, The only love, New City, Rome, 1974, p. 26-27

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tappa 100In Mary’s eyes

Mercy towards the weak, the sick, the defeated and the suffering, in the eyes of a pagan could seem like weakness. Instead, in the eyes of Mary, love and therefore compassion, heroic charity, indulgence, and renunciation out of love for our brother, were gestures of magnanimous strength, and values, meaning to say generosity which surpasses every earthly measure. And vile, weak and defeated is whoever does not have compassion, does not help his brother in need, and does not cry with him, sharing in his trials. And vile is the person who, in the face of the injured man on the road, runs away, and escapes in the face of human and divine duties. If someone slaps you, and you respond in the same way, it means you were unable to dominate yourself, and you did not have the strength to break the spiral of inhumanity. Instead, if you check yourself and do not take revenge, you are implementing an ideal of superior strength, which socially brings a benefit whereas revenge spurs a sequence of evil doings.

Igino Giordani, The only love, New City, Roma, 1974, p. 68

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God who is Love

God exists because there is love. Love exists because there is God. God in fact is love. He lives because he gives life. You breathe: you have a physical existence. You love: you have a spiritual existence. If you don’t love, it would tappa 99 2be as if you don’t breathe: you are dead in your soul. But – they say – we can’t see God. That’s true. We cannot see him with the eyes of the body because he is a pure spirit. However, once he became man in Christ, he appeared to a whole population. But we contemplate him with the eyes of the spirit, because he is love and love is a spirit, and we experience him as such. The experience is prolonged by our relationship with people purified. When we are with children, their eyes issue a light which resembles that of the other constellations. Likewise when we approach apostles, servers of humanity, priests who live only of their ideal, and virgins totally dedicated to God, and workers of every type driven by the sense of integrity, another atmosphere issues, enveloping the material world.  In it we easily meet creatures linked to  the other type of love, which prolongs the innocence of Mary and the sacrifice of Christ. 

Igino Giordani, The only love, New City, Rome, 1974, p. 9

The dark night

God’s revelation to the soul resembles the education with which parents raise their sons, using caresses and scolding, amid smiles and tears. This is what the Eternal Father does. Intimacy with him grows, if the purification grows in us.  We feel him according to how much we love him. In this experience, some mystics at the height of the consolations, passed through phases of desolation: the dark night. It happens often during the period of existence in which we expect more comprehension. And instead, it is precisely then that man is confused and fears that he is misunderstood. It is the purification, due to which the relationship becomes a crystalline divine gift. And it results in a serene certainty of one who coexists with Love incarnate, from which a happiness ensues and which not even the most bitter earthly betrayal can upset.

Igino Giordani, The only love, cit., p. 10-11

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16 marzo2«When we start to dialogue again with people of the past, the first question we ask is: why do we do this? Every life conceals a mystery and something unresolved that would never allow us to say the word, “end,” if negligence does not intervene.
It is the daily experience with those we care for most, so one can imagine how natural the oblivion is of the unknown who now belongs to history. (This is what Giovanni Santambrogio wrote about Igino Giordani in the newspaper, “Corriere della Sera.”)
These are thoughts that are very touching for those who have known Igino Giordani, and had spoken to him; those who met him daily in his writings – always perceived his lively presence up to the point of observing with admiration, that with each passing day Igino Giordani was really not subject to that merciless law of “oblivion” like the other companions of his: Fr. Luigi Sturzo, Alcide De Gasperi, Giorgio La Pira, and Giuseppe Donati.
And history punctually offers us various occasions in which to discover the traces he left in the life of the Church, of Italy, of Politics....
Like that on 16 March 1949.

Speech of Igino Giordani in the Parliamentary session of 16 March 1949

In April 1949, 12 European countries stipulated the Atlantic Pact, an agreement for mutual defense in case one of the signing countries is attacked from outside. What urged this Atlantic Pact were the fears of a possible military action16 marzo1 of the Soviet Union in Europe. The discussions, therefore, naturally assumed a strong ideological characteristic. Also in Italy the Parliament was a stage of vehement political oppositions. Let us recall the speech of Igino Giordani with regard to the Atlantic Pact and the war, which even got to the point of conceiving a completely new idea like the “International Europe” – worthy to be revived and studied – and which could have undertaken the role of being a source of unity.
«I would start from a principle: every war is failure of Christians … you very well wrote on the walls of the offices of the Italian Prime Minister: “no to war.”  And we agree with this. And you also wrote: “land, not war.” We perfectly agree to this too. Too much land has already been assigned as war cemeteries: it would be good to save it and give it to our workers as farmland.

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The Gospel sites

Getting to know the places in the Gospel is a way of getting closer to the evangelizer, and acquiring a deeper understanding of the allusions of his discourses and the geographic and historical ambience in which his drama came tappa 97about. And Bishop Piero Rossano acknowledged, in commenting on the book of Wolfango E. Pax, “Where He passed”: «the reader is put in the condition of becoming a contemporary of Jesus and tracing his earthly life step by step».
One reviews and better understands Jerusalem, the city of David, perpetual centre of peace and war, with its alleys and streets pulsing with masses, as when Jesus mixed with the people to free it. Diggings, ruins, new buildings, Christian temples, and ancient walls help to revive the Messiah’s mission in modern times.
All around are signs of the destructions of war and struggling reconstructions, amid which people who have come from afar (if we thought of the Crusades and their varieties and succession) recall the existence of the Saviour in the external aspects of cities and countrysides, so much so that he reappears not only in the event that culminated in Calvary, but also in the history of the centuries which confirmed “the sign of contradiction.”

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Igino Giordani Center

Via Frascati, 306
00040 Rocca di Papa (Rm)
Tel.: +39-06-94 798 152
Fax: +39-06-94 749 320
> write us

Igino Giordani Center

Igino Giordani Center

Via Frascati, 306 - 00040 Rocca di Papa (Rm) - Italy
Tel.: +390694798314 / Fax: +390694749320
> Write Us

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