* Presentation of "Diary of Don Olivo Bolzon
What we have in our hands and we are presenting tonight looks like a thin book, the cover changes, as they say in one of those books that almost disappear in a shelf full of books by the covers coated colors and gleaming with alluring titles.
In this small and simple object pages occupied by the "Diary of Don Olivo is a rock that strikes the conscience of every man and woman who is not indifferent to this evidence of life in the recent history of humanity and the Church. A strange stone, however, that strikes and compresses but at the same time an obligation to ask ourselves, to stand up and be recognized as a pressing current and how much you can read in the experience of Don Olivo, sweeper for two months in Cologne in 1964.
At the end of the reading, I had a strong feeling of a sort of descent into the underworld, illuminated, I must add, from glimpses of an extraordinary human being and - although it seems a paradox, but I do not think it is - a inner strength that only a faith nourished by the encounter with men, no matter what origin or nationality does not matter what culture, moral quality, but still men, with their stories, their passions, their deep and often strange sense of family, but, most importantly, their rights and their mandatory dignity of people.
Men that Don Olivo meets in Cologne are the same men we meet in the Gospels, the same men who met Christ, not choosing between right and prostitutes, between lazy and men of the temple.
This, I believe, for the most brief, was the challenge or better the mission of Don Olivo in Cologne. As well Restello Marisa wrote in the large and indispensable introduction that of Don Olivo was the mission of a priest-worker sprouted within a path that the Church, first in France and then in Italy, after World War II, but in particular following the opening of Vatican II, had felt essential, indeed central to its size genuinely missionary no longer, as Marisa Restello writes, "the Church as a hierarchical pyramid, but a community [...] no longer a church that raises a predetermined wall between mental and manual labor, but who has a deeper respect for the person who works and creativity. "
To fully understand this new vision of the Church was necessary to go to the men in their world, and not wait for the arrival in their enclosures; was necessary before any announcement, bring a message of true freedom, inner freedom, a message of human and moral values, dignity the person. A message and a testimony that will discuss the plans of those who lived their experience of separation from their land, their families, a message and a testimony of apparent materiality of men met in the ground: the ground work, the money earned , the sense of family, the value of sexuality, respect for others.
Everything happened for a simple reason that I believe is the foundation of history and of the pastoral Don Olivo, as complex and challenging here in the Veneto, and in half the world, in which a fundamental change had the 'meeting with the auxiliary bishop of Lyon, Mgr. Ancel. This simple reason I seem to see it in the knowledge that every man and woman, before Christians and believers are human beings, are people and not individuals, and as such can accept and live the Christian message if they experience, in depth, their capacity as thinking beings, with free and critical thinking skills of those responsible and not passive objects in relations social and economic issues. These people went to meet Don Olivo in Cologne. Don Olivo consignee of that, yet Marisa Restello, calls "the legacy of the troubled and beautiful story of the priest-workers in France to the growing need for evangelization in the social reality of a big change in Italy." In Cologne, Don Olivo went as migrant workers and, to live with other immigrants and workers, Sicilian or Moroccans, no matter, to share with them the many hardships and humiliations of everyday life, to share with them one of the more humble imaginable: sweeping the streets. Humiliated, Don Olivo, even in his being a priest, in not being able to celebrate every day Mass at seeing close the door of the vicarage of Cologne, yet nourished by prayer and the letters of St. Paul.
In Cologne Don Olivo has lived the terrible experience of the distance that separated, he priest and the Church a few decades ago, the world of work, the work of the past, the last in every sense, migrants and lost , herded into a building inhabited by 130 people, poor people in poor and sometimes physically.
"Pretty poor for the poor and the poor", this was Don Olivo in the long and endless weeks in Cologne. Writes Don Olivo of the goals that led to this experience: "I wanted long live intensely prayer, my union with Christ [...] in full of humanity, especially the most poor and abandoned of mankind. "
"Living with the men - says Don Olivo - suffer with the same difficulties, take as much as possible to their concerns, not away from prayer, not detached from Christ, makes life even thicker, more concrete, more committed not only in the intellectual but also emotional and existential. " In the "Diary" then there is a passage that clarifies even more the spirit of the mission of Don Olivo: "And 'no doubt that this is not action, is direct evidence, it is not evangelization, but pre-evangelization, not seed, but seed preparation [...] is simply to make it clear that the heart of the Church actually beats to the rhythm of the heart of the poorest, the most abandoned that the Church does not like the privilege of power, but the honor of service. "
These are words written more than forty years ago but whose deafening sound propagates more strongly than ever today. I recall the words of Paul VI on the night of Christmas 1968 at the Taranto steelworks, remembered and recorded by Charles Imprint Silvano in the book, unfortunately prophetic words in their extraordinary News: "We find it hard talking - Paul VI said, addressing the workers of Taranto - we feel the difficulty to make ourselves understood by you. Or perhaps we do not quite understand? [...] We think that between you and us there is a common language. You are immersed in a world that is foreign to the world in which we, men of the Church, however we live. You think and work in a manner so different from what he thinks and operates the Church! [...] Because we all feel this obvious fact: the work and religion in our modern world, two things are separate and disconnected, and often even opposite [...]. We, the Pope of the Catholic Church - Paul VI concludes - as poor, but authentic representative of the Christ, whose birth we celebrate the memory of this night, even the spiritual renewal, we came here among you to tell you that this separation between your working life and religious, Christian, does not exist, or rather there should be '.
Aware expressed by Pope Paul VI and hope combined with the desire to overcome the separation between church and world of work, the path is canalization of Don Olivo. What we had to ask ourselves today, and in this sense this book is a clear message of surprising news, is whether, after Cologne, after many other experiences of Don Olivo and many other worker-priests, the Church may now speak to the workers, know if you speak with new forms of work, with infinite uncertainty, if young and old to recognize the hard work, how to identify if the new poverty, and not only those materials, as if to acknowledge the Sicilian brothers and Moroccans in Cologne immigrants of many nationalities, languages, cultures and religions, who live and work among us, in short, if the Church, do not feel the need to rethink what Don Olivo and witnessed by other colleagues and update those experiences really languages \u200b\u200bwith new and authentic evidence, in the many colonies that, more than forty years later, are present in our contemporary society, here in the so-called North-East and Italy whole.
Giacinto Cecchetto
director of the Biblioteca Comunale di Castelfranco Veneto
* Academic Theatre of Castelfranco Veneto, 8 November 2007 - 20.30.
2. in the second photo: the speakers at the book presentation. From left to right: Luisa Bordignon (poet), Charles Silvano (curator of the series "Questions of identity"), Maria Gomiero (Mayor of Castelfranco Veneto), Olivo Bolzon (author) and Giacinto Cecchetto (Library Director town of Castelfranco Veneto).
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