Antonio Bello

Antonio Bello, widely known in Italy as Don Tonino Bello, was a Roman Catholic bishop of the late twentieth century whose ministry joined ordinary pastoral care with a public commitment to peace and to the poor. He was born on 18 March 1935 in Alessano, a town in the province of Lecce on the Salento peninsula of Apulia in southern Italy, into a family of modest means. He entered the seminary of the Diocese of Ugento and was ordained a priest on 8 December 1957. His early priesthood coincided with the Second Vatican Council and its aftermath; he took up the Council’s emphasis on the Church as the people of God and on closeness to the poor, and he worked as a pastor and seminary educator in a region marked by agricultural labor, emigration, and economic hardship.

In 1982 Pope John Paul II appointed him bishop of Molfetta-Ruvo-Giovinazzo-Terlizzi, a diocese on the Adriatic coast of Apulia. He received episcopal consecration the same year and made his residence in Molfetta. As bishop he lived simply and preferred the familiar title Don Tonino to more formal styles of address. He wrote pastoral letters, homilies, and short spiritual texts that mixed biblical meditation with attention to unemployment in the Italian South, the dignity of labor, migration, and the duty of the Church to stand with the last and the least. He spoke of a Church of the apron, a church that serves rather than dominates, taking the image from Christ’s washing of the disciples’ feet.

From 1985 until his death he was president of the Italian section of Pax Christi, the international Catholic peace movement. In that office he became one of Italy’s most visible Catholic advocates of nonviolence and a critic of the arms race and of war. He promoted peace education, public prayer, and marches, and he linked peace to justice for the poor rather than treating it as a merely political slogan. During the wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s he supported humanitarian and peace initiatives and insisted that Christians could not remain indifferent to civilian suffering. His witness was theological as well as activist, rooted in the Beatitudes and in the person of Jesus.

Bello died of cancer in Molfetta on 20 April 1993, at the age of fifty-eight. His funeral drew large numbers of clergy and lay people, a sign of the affection he had inspired in Apulia and beyond. After his death his writings continued to be read, and he remained a reference point for Catholics engaged in peace work and social pastoral ministry. A cause for beatification was later introduced; he is popularly remembered as Don Tonino. The Catholic Church has not beatified or canonized him. His memory is especially strong in the dioceses he served and within Pax Christi.