Alex Zanotelli

His sermons denounced injustices while exposing the responsibilities of corrupt government and administration officials who filled their pockets with both international and local aid funds.

Over the next decade, in his magazine Zanotelli took more specific stands on weapons dealing, on the cooperation for development having turned into an entangled business, on South African apartheid.

At that time Zanotelli faced continuous attacks, but the goal was to undermine the growth and diffusion of the recently born movement he had inspired.

He denounced publicly the senior Italian political leadership of the time, including Giulio Andreotti, Giovanni Spadolini, Bettino Craxi and Flaminio Piccoli.

In January 1985 he published in the magazine an editorial titled "The Italian face of African famine", an open and cutting exposure of the system around Third World aid.

Spadolini on the Espresso magazine, attacked heavily the so-called red priests, to the point of accusing him of incitement to political delinquency and international terrorism.

In Korogocho human degradation was frightful and Zanotelli's assumption "Maybe God is sick" became the title of a book on Africa, written by Walter Veltroni, former secretary of the Italian DS party (Democratici di Sinistra, Democrats of the Left), former mayor of Rome and the only political leader (besides the American pastor and activist Jesse Jackson) who ever visited the place.

This forum confirmed the supremacy of the non-violent policy of the movement on a relatively small minority which (after the violence exploded during the Genoa G8 meeting in July 2001) was tempted to stand for a more violent manifestation of dissent.