With my heart on the globe
Don Carlo Leoni between Mother Teresa and Berlinguer
LIVORNO. "I red priest? Blame the Telegraph that I stuck with that label on a full-page headline. Well, in that situation a bit 'was right. Agosto'68: I was with my boys trapped in torn Prague invasion of USSR tanks. If it were not for the direct intervention of Berlinguer, maybe I was not here to tell ...». Go and see that it turns out that the birth of the Global mutual development, flowering exactly 30 years ago on more fertile ground of the church Leghorn, has left his mark even the most beloved former Communist Party secretaries. Don Carlo Leoni, the founder, drain all the questions: "What do you mean, if anything, has given me the insight throughout Mother Teresa of Calcutta."
Sister disarming simplicity Today Don Carlo is on the threshold of 80 springtime
king and a wheelchair, forcing him to travel only between a few square meters of his house, but in India, with the heart and mind, we check back often. It was the turning point of the trip. "I met Mother Teresa in Calcutta in Christmas '78: a journey through the slums of humanity together with Don Alfredo Nesi. She was disarming in its simplicity: a concentration of light that can illuminate the army of one faith hellish abyss of poverty. For me it was the decisive turning. Experiences so you distort the perspective. I refused to travel between the world were the best school that I proposed to my youth. " So even a year after October 27, 1979, Bishop Alberto Ablondi inaugurated the Centre in the former headquarters of the former church of the Armenians because of Madonna. Since then, the center has become an NGO at international level: dozens of projects for cooperation between Tanzania, Costa Rica, Cuba, Mozambique, twenty parties of missionaries around the world. 
Berlinguer loves us Berlinguer But the episode is also a one-stage highlights that led Don Leoni has a way of being a priest. One that has never been afraid of freedom: "Freedom to speak, freedom to act, freedom to dare." It is no coincidence that the then Bishop Emilio Guano in '68 that the hopes of the Prague Spring he thought of him for an experience that breached the Iron Curtain. It was the primate of Czechoslovakia Josef Beran in person, then exiled by the communists in Rome, Guano ask if there was a group of young people who might come into contact with young people of Prague Spring "to give them courage. "And Guano - Don Leoni revealed - immediately thought of my youth group at St. Pius X. I had not by chance called "open door". With the young Czech was a very good dialogue. Them during the '68 were guests of families in Livorno in the parish of sources and we reciprocate the invitation in August of that year. " It was there that surprised them the repression of the Soviets: "I was a guest of Bishop Tomasek, the six young people from St. Pius X, however, were guests of the family. On the night of August 20 we woke up the shots of the tanks. For three days I was with the bishop, imprisoned in the archbishop's palace. From my youth I did not know anything then Tomasek asked if he could get in contact with the Vatican to talk to Berlinguer. So he did. The next day they came to the door the Soviets who escorted us to the border with Austria. Berlinguer to convince them said, "are of us." And from there arose the legend of the Red Priest. " Beyond the Iron Curtain Since then Don Carlo went on most all of the curtains. "When I had the insight to include the word" global community "in the name of our center more than a jumped on the chair. It was 1979: Mondial was a word that did not exist. That could not exist. The world divided into two blocks. And that wall in Berlin, so high that it took the wings of Providence to override it. " Intuition Don Leoni in Livorno globalization has arrived twenty years earlier. 'The "mutual development" thirty years ago was perhaps even more surprising of the larger world. The Third World was helped. He had to teach us? And now they see these issues as a culture has been turned inside out ".-
of Gianluca Maggiore
(published in" Il Tirreno ", a chronicle of Livorno, 25 October 2009)
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