Lorenzo Milani

Lorenzo Milani Comparetti (27 May 1923 – 26 June 1967) was an Italian Roman Catholic priest. He is best known as an educator of poor children and an advocate of conscientious objection.

Lorenzo Milani was born in Florence in 1923 to a rich middle-class family (see the excellent biography by Neera Fallaci, 1993). His father, Albano Milani, and his mother, Alice Weiss, were staunch secularists. Alice Weiss was Jewish and a cousin of Edoardo Weiss, one of Sigmund Freud's earliest disciples and the founder of the Italian Psychoanalytic Association. Milani's paternal grandfather was Domenico Comparetti, a leading nineteenth-century philologist, and it is no accident that, as an educationist, Milani was a firm believer in the importance of learning how to use words effectively.

In June 1943, after a period of study at the Brera Academy, Milani converted to Roman Catholicism. A chance conversation with Don Raffaele Bensi, who later became his spiritual director, appears to have played an important part in this. Milani's was a conversion both from agnosticism to religious faith and from well-off complacency to solidarity with the poor and despised. Ordained a priest in 1947, he was sent to assist Don Daniele Pugi, the old parish priest of San Donato in Calenzano, where he set up his first "school of the people" (scuola popolare) (see the excellent study on this period by Domenico Simeone,1996), open to children from both believing and non-believing families. This scandalized conservative Catholic circles. After Pugi's death in 1954, Milani was sent "into exile" at Barbiana, a small, remote village in the Mugello region.

At Barbiana, despite both clerical and lay opposition, Milani continued his radical educational activities. In the spring of 1958, he published his first book, Pastoral Experiences (Esperienze pastorali). In December the Holy Office, despite failing to find in it any errors of doctrine or breaches of ecclesiastical discipline (see Corzo, 2011, often referred to as Corzo Toral, on the theological underpinnings of Milani's writings), ordered its withdrawal from circulation as "inopportune". Milani never publicly vented his anger against the Church since he believed in obedience to it (Gesualdi, 2011), even though he would have expected its support for his actions dictated by his conscience (see parallels with Socrates in Centro Formazione e Ricerca Don Milani e Scuola di Barbiana,2008). In 1965, Milani was put on trial for advocating conscientious objection in his "Letter to Military Chaplains" ("Lettera ai cappellani militari" see Burtchaell, 1988). The right to say No' is emphasised throughout this letter and the one to the judges (Grech and Mayo, 2014). The text is relevant for a contemporary anti-militaristic pedagogy (Batini, Mayo, Surian, 2014; Grech and Mayo, 2014; Mayo, 2013, 2015).

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