Don Tonino Bello. Laborer of the "conviviality of differences"

Article by Giacomo Gambassi published on the Catholic Avvenire website of 25 February 2015

"Do not judge: rather spread your soul to understand the problems of others." Again: "Share, communicate with people who live in the suburbs". And then: "The Church, the parish, as a missionary element, has become a conservation structure". And continuing: "To buy credibility, we should give authentic and generous proof of wanting to be on the side of the poor, without demagogy and without exclusions". And also: "The instability of work, the uncertainty of finding it even when required, the petty salary disadvantage in its most fundamental rights in its most fundamental rights". Phrases, expressions and warnings of Pope Francis? No, interventions, homilies and writings of Don Tonino Bello. They go from 1954 to 1982. Years in which the future bishop of Molfetta-Ruvina-Giovinazzo -terizzi-whose diocesan phase of the beatification process ended-was seminarian at the Armmo of Bologna, and then vice-rector of the seminary in his diocese, Ugento, and then parish priest in Ugento and Tricase.

It had happened in the past decades that someone had banned or exploited the words of the Apulian shepherd and president of Pax Christi who died on April 20, 1993 (which for all remains Don Tonino Bello). Perhaps too prophetic words for the period in which the brother "on the pass of the last" and the "conviviality of the differences" pronounced them. Today they can also be resumed in light of the magisterium of Pope Bergoglio. «The saints are the great dreamers of the Church. And to this category belongs Don Tonino », says the bishop of Ugento-San Maria di Leuca, Vito Angiuli. It is he who with Renato Brucoli collected the Ugentini writings (in part remained unpublished) of this "tireless manufacturer of peace" in the volume The land of my dreams (and together, pages 680, € 25).
He is twenty -one years old and is about to be ordained priest when in 1957 Tonino explains on the periodical of the Santa Cristina college in Bologna: "In the small carpenter's shop, on the edge of a remote village of Palestine, a man convened with his divine sweat the dignity of work".
He would return to the diocese of Ugento the following year to devote himself to the formation of new priests. They who "will be the Christ who passes through men doing good", notes in the seminary cyclostylato. He lives the council that marks it deeply. "The liturgy became life of our faithful," he urged in 1964 by the diocesan bulletin. And commenting on the encyclical Humanae Vitae clarifies in some notes of 1968 that "the Church is not moralist" and "a responsible paternity must be exercised".

They called it "inspired writer". And it's true. "The desire to say that the civilization of consumption, if something positive has to suggest on a spiritual level, should stimulate us to a lesser nanny with the Lord. "Confess at least once a year and communicate at least at Easter". How much melancholy in that ally ... », he punges in 1971. And at the funeral of his aunt Assunta he puts:" Do not "live and let live". But "live and help to live" ». As a parish priest he warns that the pastoral council is not "a tactical device with which the Church wants to paint its facade by resorting to democratic colors" and there is a need for "everyone's responsibility". From the pulpit he says: «Seeing a church tired of people can constitute the supreme aspiration of a parish priest? If we were the impresaries of liturgical pumps, yes. But the purpose we have is another: to create a community of believers ». Faced with the risk of the underworld, it warns: «The work of an honest laborer is more worth the work of a dishonest surgeon. It seems to me that I see the pride in the face of my poor ».

A "prophet" also has the courage of the complaint. And in 1968 Don Bello blames a faith made of "many small devotions that immerse us in a closed, womb, selfish and without momentum". In the contribution for the Synod of the bishops of 1974 he underlines that the religious language is "theoretical, abstract, incomprehensible, of poor grip". When he is assigned the title of Monsignor, he admits he feels "hunted by the mortgage lies of the Monsignorato". And in 1980 he renounced the episcopal appointment for "insufficiency" and "unworthiness", he wrote to the congregation for the bishops.
He will accept in 1982 and ask in his first message to share "bread and curtain". «We need to open the window of the future by designing together, daring together, sacrificing together. Alone you don't walk anymore, "reads the lamprale in the poetic text. It is the leave from his land before moving to Molfetta. And they are the verses that today welcome in his birthplace of Alessano transformed into a museum by the Don Tonino Bello Foundation.