After completing the first part of his schooling, he moved to Milan where, having won a scholarship, he enrolled in the Faculty of Law of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (then run by Father Agostino Gemelli), where he achieved in the years following the Second World War, the degree.

Ruffini actively participated in the Resistance, cooperating with the partisans of the Catholic Brigades of the Green Flames and being part of the National Liberation Committee (C.L.N.).

On 13 December 1944, he was subjected to the last interrogation, conducted personally by the commander of the S.S. Germans in Italy, General Karl Wolff.

He began the forensic activity in Mantua at the office of the lawyer Ennio Avanzini, already a member of the Constituent Assembly and the Chamber of Deputies.

In the meantime he became provincial secretary of the Christian Democracy until in 1955 he moved to Palermo, where from 1946 his uncle Cardinal Ernesto Ruffini exercised his pastoral activity.

He continued to practice the profession of lawyer until 1963, the year in which, having been elected to the Chamber of Deputies, he renounced all professional duties.