Giorgio La Pira, TOSD (Raimondo in religious life; 9 January 1904 – 5 November 1977) was an Italian Catholic politician who served as the Mayor of Florence.

[1] He also served as a deputy for Christian Democracy and participated in the assembly that wrote the Italian Constitution following World War II.

In his public and private life he was a tireless champion of peace and human rights who worked for the betterment of the poor and disenfranchised.

La Pira was a staunch advocate for peace and made several trips to the East to places such as China and the Soviet Union which were sometimes deemed to be controversial in the Cold War era.

Those trips were undertaken to discuss peace ventures and ends to conflict with La Pira also prioritizing ecumenism as a reason for visiting Moscow where he often met with members of the Russian Orthodox Church.

La Pira attended the Giacinto Pandolfi school from 1909 to 1913 as part of his education and entered the Antonello Technical-Commercial College from 1914 until 1917.

His Catholic upbringing and in particular the teachings of Saint Francis of Assisi had a vital role in shaping his political and philosophical beliefs.

La Pira often used legal loopholes as a means of requisitioning vacant villas for the poor or evicted people and he also designed low-cost housing.

[2] In 1949 the Prime Minister Alcide de Gasperi appointed him as the undersecretary for labor in his cabinet alongside La Pira's old friend Amintore Fanfani.

When Florence's oldest industrial plant "Pignone" threatened to close due to a slump in demand, he persuaded Enrico Mattei – the President and CEO of ENI – to take it over, thus saving more than a thousand jobs (about 1750 workers).

He visited the cardinal often to exchange views and opinions on current affairs and it was Dalla Costa who inspired his love of the Bible for interpreting historical occurrences.

Despite sometimes intense criticism, La Pira paid several visits to Moscow and China and even Hanoi throughout the Cold War era.

He hosted five Conferences for Peace and Christian Civilization in the Palazzo Vecchio from 1952 until 1956 and later in 1967 was elected as the President of the World Federation of United Cities.

[4] He also spoke with Metropolitan Nikolai and told him that he visited as a "Marian bridge of prayer between Fátima and Moscow – the Churches of East and West".

On 24 January 1960 he was en route back from Cairo and made a stopover in Istanbul where he met with the Patriarch of Constantinople Athenagoras, who gave him a box of sweetmeats to give to John XXIII.

Cardinal Giovanni Benelli blessed his remains not long after La Pira had died and a Mass was later said in the death room.

His good friend Giulio Andreotti learned on 5 February that his health had worsened and so set off at once for Florence to be with La Pira.

[2] Cardinal Stanisław Ryłko hailed La Pira for his courage to express and show witness to his faith in the exercise of a public office.

[6] Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – future Pope Benedict XVI – hailed La Pira in an address to the National Association of Italian Local Authorities on 26 April 2004 as "an eminent figure in politics" who "worked for the cause of fraternal existence among nations" and attempted to promote the "basic good in various spheres" of life whether it be politics or culture.

La Pira's close friend Paul VI characterized him as "the example every Christian ought to keep firmly in mind during his earthly passage towards the kingdom of God", in his General Audience address on 9 November 1977.

While Oizerman acknowledged that it was György Lukács and Jean Hyppolite who popularised the identification of Marxism with Hegelianism, he charged La Pira with spreading the anti-Communist notion that Marx's scientific work did not represent proletarian interests and with "falsifying" Marxism by denying that Marx surpassed Hegel in any way.

This diocesan process was charged with hearing witness testimonies – which included Hassan II of Morocco – and collecting documents relating to La Pira's life and works.