Igino Giordani

Igino Giordani in the 1970s

Igino Giordani (Hyginus Giordani; 24 September 1894 – 18 April 1980) was an Italian politician, writer and journalist, born at Tivoli. He was also a significant figure in the Focolare Movement.

Quotes

• [Freedom of thought] It is the freedom to think what one wants and to express everything one thinks, within the limits of truth and morality: without these, it could become an insult, slander, or perversion.

• Quoted in La Fiera Letteraria, Che cos'è la libertà di pensiero, n. 14, April 1973.

• Freedom of thought, like any activity of the mind, is valid if it respects the freedom of thought of others: it must therefore not offend the thoughts of others.

• Quoted in La Fiera Letteraria, Che cos'è la libertà di pensiero, n. 14, April 1973.

• This too is not a limitation, it is a defence of freedom itself.

• Quoted in La Fiera Letteraria, Che cos'è la libertà di pensiero, n. 14, April 1973.

• Lacordaire accepted Lammenais' invitation to collaborate on L'Avenir, but he was never a disciple of that abbot, having arrived at the clarification of his ideas as a "penitent Catholic and unrepentant liberal", through an autonomous spiritual process, which evolved, even later, within margins different from those in which Lammenais's thought was contained. Indeed, there was never much harmony of ideas and affections between the two: they were two strong wills, two solidified characters, who controlled each other, but did not influence each other. In the spiritual duel to win over the generous soul of Montalambert, Lacordaire's straightforward tenacity won. And if the young layman, in the early years, oscillated in his formation between the two priests, subjugated by admiration for the master and attracted by the affection of the friend, and if Lamennais, in the inner process of his ideologies, allowed himself to be dominated by a strong individualism, which took him out of the communion of the faithful, Lacordaire was able to compress the impulses of nature within the framework of Catholic discipline and tradition, outside of which he did not see any useful social initiative, succeeding in enhancing the common programme within the scope of orthodoxy.

• Quoted in Pionieri cristiani della democrazia, edited by Alberto Lo Presti, foreword by Paolo Armellini, Città Nuova, Roma, 2008, p. 122. ISBN 978-88-311-5801-5.

Books

Il Santo della Carità ospedaliera

Igino Giordani, Il Santo della Carità ospedaliera, Fatebenefratelli, 1965

Incipit

Between the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, the readers of Italy, having discovered the classical world like a new world, sailed the seas of humanistic culture as if they were the waters of a magnificent archipelago. Some then flew among the ghosts of chivalry as if they were touching the edges of a malevolent firmament. They all escaped  from the reality of mediocre politics and a languishing economy. At the same time, Portuguese, Spanish and English navigators, with the help of the last pioneers of Genoa, discovered new lands, sailing in unknown seas in search of spectacular wealth, eager to escape poverty.

Quotes

• He sought God on those stony mule tracks, which skirted and ended in fords: he had now shown that he could only belong to Him: he could only be a John of God (p. 49)
• Because he was hungry for holiness – because he was holy – his modest faults as a soldier loomed in his conscience like crimes; and this happens to saints. (p. 50)
• A man who had never cared for his own economic interests, who indeed, as can be seen from all his actions, had never considered the economic side of his existence, that profession for him was nothing but an apostolate: a lay priesthood. (p. 63)
• The world produces evil: and the greatest evil is the social wickedness that fills the streets with wretched people without bread and without a roof over their heads.
• Giovanni will fight the world directly by throwing back its wickedness, by raising up its victims from the rubble. (p. 88)

Existence is battle and work. (p. 88)

• [Ref. to the Milanese Senavra Asylum] Even the calm lunatics or the slightly deranged in that environment became completely insane; it was an environment more suited to driving the sane mad than to bringing the insane to their senses. (p. 89)
• In serving one's neighbour, the soul is immersed, as if immersed in the love of God: in the sea, one is afraid. (p. 99)
• He who assists the poor assists Christ: and he does not so much good for them as he does for himself: for the Eternal Judge judges us on the basis of our service to the needy. (p. 126)
• Charity is like a fire that feeds itself by spreading [...]. (p. 134)
• As much as St Francis of Assisi had loved poverty, so much did St John of God love the poor; he loved them so much that, as the poet Lope de Vega was to note at the end of his "Song to the Exalted and Patriarch St John of God", "if he had met an angel and a poor man together, he would have left the angel and embraced the poor man" (p. 137)

Le encicliche sociali dei papi

Igino Giordani (editor), Le encicliche sociali dei papi, Editrice Studium, Roma 1948

• History is a teacher who has no pupils; [...]. (p. VI)
• Since their time, Dostoevsky had posed the dilemma: either God or suicide; and Nietzsche had given Europe the choice of either returning to Catholicism or disappearing.

And in our time Peter Wust spoke of the agony of the world and Berdyaev of the end of our era and Benda of the end of the Eternal and Daniel-Rops of a world without soul...; all diagnoses that agree in admitting that the vital principle has been detached from social life: namely God, the Absolute, religion. (p. VII)

• The Protestant Reformation was an individualistic revolt in which the sociality composed by the Church in the Middle Ages disintegrated. (p. XIII)
• Without the resistance of the Papacy and its recovery, perhaps what happened to the ancient world under the onslaught of barbarism would have happened to modern Europe – and still could happen. (p. XXVIII)
• In the encyclical Quanta cura, Pius IX organically addresses all the main errors of his time, which, from rationalism to liberalism, undermined Christian doctrine and corrupted customs, causing upheaval in consciences and communities.