READINGS/ Popular Movement, a revolution (from below) of changed people
"Movimento Popolare. Materiali per una storia" by R. Casadei, R. Formigoni and GF Lucini traces the vicissitudes of a highly original political reality
Two emblematic events. On May 6, 1976, and again on September 11 and 15 of the same year, 77 municipalities in the Upper Friuli region were struck by a devastating earthquake, causing extensive damage and more than a thousand deaths. After the first devastating tremors, hundreds of volunteers from all over Italy arrived on site, including CL youth, primarily from Friuli itself and Lombardy, who dedicated themselves to the children with educational and recreational activities: 2,500 volunteers took turns until the end of the summer.
Once the emergency phase is over, all the volunteers (all of them!) leave – starting with the militants of extra-parliamentary groups – except for those boys, who remain to keep company with the few men remaining in the villages, after the great exodus of displaced people to the seaside resorts on the coast.
They will be there throughout 1977, in particular activating a dozen summer camps run by 500 university students, teachers and workers.
Let's change the scenario. Around the same time, the experience of the "La Zolla" free school began, with difficulty but with extreme courage, in a cultural and political context dominated by the totem of the state school, also revered by a large part of the Catholic world.
Worthy of note is the successful appeal before the Lombardy Regional Administrative Court (TAR) to annul a provision by the Socialist-Communist-led Municipality of Milan that, without justified reason, excluded "Zolla" from, albeit modest, funding related to the right to education.
In the first case, the Friuli earthquake, the principle of subsidiarity was fully applied in an emergency situation; in the second case, support for the "Zolla" project, the battle for freedom of education took shape, against the rise of a radical-Marxist all-encompassing vision.
Two examples highlight the novelty of "a network of Christians engaged in a civic and public presence that, in the Italy of the Years of Lead and the Historic Compromise," revived the "prominence of Catholics" on the national scene that had emerged at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. This organization, after a period of preparation, officially emerged in Milan in December 1975 as something unexpected and unexpected by ecclesiastical and secular "thinkers," involving dozens of intellectuals from Catholic and non-Catholic circles, DC politicians, trade unionists, and ordinary people of all backgrounds.
In just a few years, it would launch hundreds of social projects in every field and across the country. It was called the Popular Movement, and over nearly twenty years, it would shape the country's history at a delicate time of transition, shifting votes and contributing to the election of a significant number of city and regional councilors, aldermen, mayors, and MPs in local, parliamentary, and European elections. A true grassroots revolution.
MP was dissolved after almost twenty years, in 1993, but many of its members continued to carry on their commitment to democratic institutions at various levels.
Among the works inspired by the Popular Movement we remember the Rimini Meeting, now in its 46th edition, the most important summer political-cultural event in Europe, the weekly Il Sabato , a free and nonconformist voice in the dull Italian publishing panorama, the presence of the Popular Catholics in the universities, and the Compagnia delle Opere.
Three protagonists of that extraordinary season have tried to explain what the Popular Movement represented in twenty years of Italian public life : the journalist and writer Rodolfo Casadei , the governor of Lombardy for four legislatures and Italian and European parliamentarian Roberto Formigoni and the professor, city councilor in Milan, and current president of Europa Civiltà, Gian Franco Lucini .
They co-authored the book Movimento Popolare. Materiali per una storia (Cantagalli, 2025), which is enriched with detailed documentation and numerous testimonies.
A goldmine of facts, information, and insights. These pages not only describe the origins and development of a unique phenomenon, which deserves careful study because it still has much to teach us, but also accurately reconstruct the challenging historical context of the time.
MP had many enemies, from the Catholic communists, who did not accept that there was a movement of believers not subordinate to the PCI, to the extra-parliamentarians of the left, but also of the right, who launched dozens of attacks on the offices of the newborn formation.
For the first time, fifty years after the birth of MP, those who experienced it on the front lines are sharing the ideas and stories that underpinned it, both to ensure what happened is not forgotten and to discuss and debate the relevance of that model of active Catholic participation in Italian public life. Can it be revived today, more than thirty years after its abandonment?
The book features prominent figures such as Francesco Botturi , Rocco Buttiglione , Giancarlo Cesana , Robi Ronza , Giorgio Vittadini , and many others. Thanks to their contributions, significant documents, and original interventions from local communities (from Chiavari in Liguria to Catania, passing through Turin, Padua, Cesena, Rimini, Pesaro, and Rome), exemplifying experiences spread throughout the country, a period of great ideals asserted decisively amid strong social tensions emerges in all its depth.
For Formigoni , national president of the Popular Movement from its foundation until 1987, "it was a question of bringing out in Italian society the cultural, social and political relevance of the Christian event [...] calling on Catholics as much as possible to awaken and create a united presence".
An urgency that has not been lost, on the contrary. Because we have moved from a historical era "extremely troubled from various points of view" to a scenario in which, rather than an inhumane ideology seeking to impose itself, the total loss of humanity seems to prevail.
In an interview with Robi Ronza in late 1975—the very days MP was born— Fr. Luigi Giussani clarified that "an authentic Christian community lives in constant relationship with the rest of humanity, fully sharing their needs and experiencing their problems." But "because of the profound fraternal experience that develops within it, the Christian community cannot help but tend to have its own understanding and method of addressing common problems, both practical and theoretical, to offer as its specific collaboration to the rest of the society in which it exists." Are we still aware of this?
"Movimento Popolare. Materiali per una storia" will be available in the Meeting Bookstore starting August 22nd.
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