Giorgio La Pira

Giorgio La Pira was born on 9 January 1904 in Pozzallo, in the province of Ragusa on the southern coast of Sicily, then part of the Kingdom of Italy. He came from a family of modest means and received a Catholic upbringing typical of early twentieth-century Sicily. After schooling in Sicily he moved north to complete his legal studies, took a degree in law, and specialized in Roman law. He was appointed to the faculty of the University of Florence, where he taught Roman law for decades and formed students in a jurisprudence shaped by natural-law and Thomistic categories. Florence, and in particular the Dominican convent and basilica of San Marco, became the spiritual and intellectual center of his adult life.

In the 1930s La Pira developed a public Catholic voice at odds with Fascist ideology. He wrote for Catholic reviews and in 1939 launched the journal Principi, which defended the primacy of the person, the family, and divine law against the totalitarian state; the publication was soon suppressed by the regime. A professed tertiary of the Dominican Order, he found both a rule of life and, later, physical protection among the friars of San Marco. During the German occupation of Florence in 1943–1944 he lived in hiding in that convent. After the city’s liberation he joined the Christian Democracy party and was elected in 1946 to the Constituent Assembly that drafted the Constitution of the Italian Republic. There he worked especially on the social articles concerning the rights of labor, the social function of private property, and the constitutional protection of the family and of work.

La Pira was twice mayor of Florence, serving in the 1950s and again in the early 1960s. His administrations became known for an uncompromising option for the poor: he halted evictions, promoted public housing, intervened to prevent the closure of the Pignone engineering works, and opened municipal buildings to the homeless and to those displaced by war and poverty. He described his politics as a theology of history, in which the city was an instrument of Providence for peace and for the elevation of the working class. He governed with a mixture of legal argument, prayer, and highly visible public gestures that made him a national and international figure, admired by many Catholics and social reformers and criticized by those who found his methods unorthodox or his approach to communism insufficiently hard-line.

Throughout the Cold War he pursued a personal diplomacy of peace. He convened Mediterranean and international colloquia of mayors and of believers in Florence, traveled to the Soviet Union, sought openings toward the People’s Republic of China, and appealed for negotiations over Vietnam, insisting that cities, universities, and the baptized had a duty to build bridges across ideological blocs. He was received by Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI and understood his work as a lay implementation of the Church’s social teaching and of the Dominican preaching of peace. He never married and had no children. He lived in personal austerity, often residing at San Marco, and combined academic, political, and contemplative activity in a single vocation as a consecrated layman.

La Pira died in Florence on 5 November 1977. The Archdiocese of Florence introduced his cause of beatification in 1986. He was named a Servant of God, and on 5 July 2018 Pope Francis recognized his heroic virtues, conferring on him the title of Venerable. He is buried in the Basilica of San Marco in Florence, the Dominican church with which his spiritual life had been bound for decades.