THE FATHER OF EUROPE

 

Catholic veneration of the saints is rooted in this loving reverence we accord to those who have allowed themselves to be transformed by Christ’s love. The saints are the embodiments of grace triumphing over the forces of mediocrity and evil within the spirit of man. They show the possibility of holiness, becoming models to imitate in our own lives, and inspirations to light up the darkness which surrounds us all. When we study their lives, we take courage in the knowledge that other human beings succeeded in loving even though they had to face external difficulties and internal obstacles similar to our own.                    Ronda Chervin                                                                                                                                                           

Since I have missed almost a month doing this Blog, I want to consider holy people who made a difference in the world order, during their lifetime. The first of these, and perhaps the most well known, more for his politics than his holiness is, SERVANT of GOD ALCIDE DE GASPERI. 

After the Second World War Alcide De Gasperi was one of the promoters of the project for a united Europe along with the former French minister of foreign affairs, Robert Schuman, (already declared venerable by Pope Francis- see Blog 5/18/21), and the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. They were inspired by the values ​​of Christian humanism. Alcide De Gaspari was a man who acted in the interests of the patria, not for self-serving reasons, or from personal egoism. 

 Alcide De Gasperi was born in Pieve Tesino in Tyrol, which at that time belonged to Austria-Hungary, now part of the province of Trento in Italy. His father was a local police officer of limited financial means. From his adolescence Alcide was active in the Social Christian Movement. At 19, he joined the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy in Vienna, where he played an important role in the foundation of the Christian student movement.

 After his degree in Philology, he started to work as a journalist and politician. In 1911 he became a congressman for the Popular Political Union of Trentino in the Austrian Parliament, a post he held for six years. When his home region was transferred to Italy in the post-war settlement, he accepted Italian citizenship. He however never tried to hide his love for Austria and the German culture and often preferred speaking German to his family, many of whom spoke German as their first language.

 
In 1919, he was among one of the founders of the Italian People’s Party. He served as a deputy in the Italian Parliament from 1921 to 1924, a period marked by the rise of Fascism. As Mussolini’s hold on the Italian government grew stronger, he soon diverged with the Fascists. In November 1926, in a climate of overt violence and intimidation by the Fascists, the People’s Party was dissolved.

 Alcide De Gasperi married Francesca in 1922, after a courtship during which he wrote very passionate love letters. They had four daughters. The eldest, Maria Romana, is his biographer.  (Photo with wife)

Alcide De Gasperi was arrested in March 1927 and sentenced to four years in prison. The Vatican negotiated his release. A year and a half in prison nearly broke his health. After his release in July 1928, he was unemployed and in serious financial hardship, until in 1929 his ecclesiastical contacts secured him a job as a cataloguer in the Vatican Library, where he spent the next fourteen years until the collapse of Fascism in July 1943.

During the reconstruction years, De Gasperi was the undisputed head of the Christian Democrats, the party that dominated Parliament for decades. From 1945 to 1953, he was the prime minister of eight successive Christian Democratic governments.

 Although he could have formed an exclusively Christian Democratic government, he instead formed a “centrist” coalition with Liberals, Republicans and Social Democrats. “De Gasperi’s policy is patience,” according to the foreign news correspondent for the New York Times, Anne McCormick. “He seems to be feeling his way among the explosive problems he has to deal with, but perhaps this wary mine-detecting method is the stabilizing force that holds the country in balance.”

In domestic policy, a number of social security reforms were carried out by various ministers of De Gasperi’s cabinets in the areas of rents and social housing, health and unemployment, insurance and pensions. He directed the Italian economic boom to the advantage of the many and contributed to create Italy’s successful welfare state.

 The Holy See actively supported Christian Democracy, declaring that it would be a mortal sin for a Catholic to vote for the Communist Party and excommunicating all its supporters. In practice, however, many Communists remained religious. 

In August 1953, the seventh government led by De Gasperi was forced to resign by Parliament. He consequently retired from active politics and gave his last year to the European cause.

Alcide De Gasperi used to speak of “Our homeland Europe”. He wrote: “At the origin of our European civilization, as stated by Toynbee, there is Christianity. I only want to mention our common heritage, that moral vision which enhances the responsibility of the human person, with its ferment of Christian fraternity, with its cult for beauty inherited from our forefathers, with its will for justice sharpened by the experience of two thousand years.”

Alcide De Gasperi certainly  knew how to embody the Christian faith into the complex socio-political realities of his time. He was passionately fond of the Church’s Social Doctrine with its ideals of putting into society the salt and yeast of the Bible’s integral humanism and the centrality of the human person so that the “City of Man” might be the vanguard of the “City of God”.

Politics was for him the highest form of charity in as much as it was the translation of the parable of the Good Samaritan in institutionalized reforms that respond to the needs of the poorest.  For Alcide De Gasperi politics and spirituality were inextricably intertwined so that the former was offering reasons to the latter.

 He wrote: “The first commandment of God in the Bible is a social and cultural commandment: ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and conquer it’ (Genesis 1:26). Conquer the earth with progress, work, arts and sciences. Do not close yourselves in your individual microcosm, says the Creator, but live a social life and dedicate your energies to the earth and the community of men. God has entrusted the world with all its riches to human beings, to their disputes, their efforts for progress, and their search for goodness and truth.”

 On August 19, 1954, he died in Sella di Valsugana, in Trentino. It is said that he had to be given a State funeral as he had died with almost no means of his own. He is buried in the basilica of San Lorenzo, in Rome.

 Conrad Adenauer wrote: “After the war, it was a true blessing for Italy to have entrusted the politics of the country to such a valid person as Alcide De Gasperi. My many encounters with him remain in my memory for the moral and spiritual seriousness of a man to whom I am still very grateful. He has been not only a great Italian but a European of high conscience and as such he will enter world history.”  

(Photos:  with Winston Churchhill, Konrad Adenauer, and daughter Maria Romana)