17	CATHOLIC ACTION

So there you have my Catholic roots. In 1954, when I finished high school, I was already the diocesan student delegate.

It was summertime, and I had finished high school with excellent results. I set out for the Falzarego Pass with a group of Catholic students, of whom I was the leader, for ten days of school camp at one of the numerous former fascist youth organization colonies, some of which had been handed over to the Communists and others to the Catholics. A fine band of individuals, some smarter than me. Like Michele Straniero, for example.

And there we started a fronde. We used the evening transmission over the camp radio to advertise “Clerodont toothpaste. Anticurial, the toothpaste of the clerical hierarchy.” Bad jokes, really, but they hit the mark because they derided the new national presidency of the Catholic youth association ferociously. After three days they sent all of us from Turin home, seventeen individuals out of 150. I don’t have to tell you how proud we were of having been chased out.

After they threw us out of Azione Cattolica, too, in 1955, Michele Straniero and I and a number of others—including Franco Bolgiani and Eugenio Corsini, who were already university lecturers—founded the Mounier Group.

That’s the background against which I began to read Mounier.

Emmanuel Mounier had invented what in Italy was called the “community movement,” a communitarianism that was also a way of multiplying society’s intermediate bodies: the family, the neighborhood community, the cooperative. The periodical Terza Generazione was being published at this time by Bartolo Ciccardini and Gianni Baget Bozzo, and to some extent also by Augusto Del Noce, although he didn’t actually write for it. It lasted only a year, but Elio Vittorini was greatly intrigued by it, and Natalia Ginzburg published there at least once. And the Terza Generazione group, who lived between Turin and Moncalieri, had formed consumer cooperatives modeled on Mounier’s communitarianism.

I had taken a few ideas from that journal for my final high-school essay, the usual thing: there is Soviet communism and there is liberal capitalism, but we are different from either.

In sum, Azione Cattolica was a lively place at that time. The struggle between the progressives and the conservatives was fierce: Luigi Gedda versus Carlo Carretto (who later became Brother Carlo in the monastery at Spello, near Perugia), Carretto versus Gedda. . . .

At a certain point Carlo Carretto, the national president, was replaced by Mario Rossi, who seemed to be readier to accept discipline. In fact, he soon went over to the “bad guys” (that is, us). The next national president was entirely reliable. He was called Enrico Vinci, and he was so reliable that nobody has heard of him for a long time.

Another member of Azione Cattolica nationally at that time was Don Arturo Paoli, who later became a “little brother” in Brazil, the author of some really beautiful books. I was tremendously moved the day he came to visit me at home in the afternoon, while I was studying. All he said was, “I was passing by.”

I saw him last year, a combative ninety-three-year-old.