Ernesto Balducci

[1] When he was twelve, his father was laid off and the Scolopi, a Catholic religious order dedicated to the education of the poor, offered him a free place in seminary.

[3] The foundation of the Centro d'Impegno Cristiano "Cenacolo" (Centre for Christian Commitment) in 1952 gave him the chance to intensify both his friendship with the charismatic mayor of Florence Giorgio La Pira, and his relationship with the author-priest Lorenzo Milani and the disciples of Jacques Maritain, known as the 'Little Brothers'.

Despite the isolation of the abbey, he had less and less time for his studies, as most of his days were taken up by the magazine Testimonianze, by the publishing house "Cultura della pace", ("Peace culture"), by his cooperation with daily papers and other periodical and by his direct and unflagging attendance at dozens of demonstrations and debates all over Italy.

The most modern themes of the Protestant theology come together in this reflection, from Karl Barth to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, with their intention of dividing religion and faith and overturning the point of view focused on God for showing up the human, instead.

According to Balducci, the reclamation of religious identities has to be based on a lay approach to the peace question in order to bring into play each of the various memories of mankind.

By taking the suggestions of Ernesto de Martino, Balducci believes that the long "prehistory" of narrow communication among cultural "islands", in which the fear of the different has been a reflex that has cemented the tribe, is over.

This is the sense that Balducci catches in various cultural itineraries: the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the "ecology of mind" of Gregory Bateson, the generative grammar of Noam Chomsky.

Balducci recognized in the declining freedom of action of states and in the growth of the cosmopolitan right an element deeply rooted in the evolutionary laws of human species.

The faith in Man (a Pierre Teilhard de Chardin concept), the consideration that our species has always creatively got over many severe and extreme challenges, the chance of the "planetary human": all this things make sense to Balducci if the sense of belonging with a supranational community will generate a planetary political project.

The former momentum is identified in view of the anthropologic pacifism, which horizon is a society that is made compact by relationships of spontaneous reciprocity and by the preferential option for non-violence.