As Commonweal’s centennial year comes to a close, I’ve been thinking about how the magazine has played a part in my life. I have what I think is a unique perspective, given that I’m probably the only kid from the University of Bologna in Italy to grow up and come to identify with “Commonweal Catholicism.” 

In Italian Catholicism, the expression “lay theologian” was always an oxymoron. So one can understand why my parents were so nervous about my interest in theology and Church history. Both practicing Catholics, they were typical of a mainstream post–Vatican II Italian Catholic bourgeoisie that had lowered its expectations of the Church, in a healthy way. Their commitments to institutional and social Catholicism were limited: in both my father and mother’s families, women were more practicing than men, no one voted for the (already, at that time) corrupt Christian-Democratic Party, nobody ever went to a Catholic school, and no one ever joined the priesthood or a religious order. No militantism please: we’re Italian Catholics.

Nevertheless, the year I made my first communion, they decided to send me to AGESCI (the Association of Italian Catholic Guides and Scouts)—the largest Catholic youth organization in Italy. That’s where I’d spend most of the Sunday mornings of my youth, as well as many summers, at the AGESCI camp, sleeping in tents and washing in the river. It played a big part in my life right up until I left Italy to study for a PhD in theology at Tübingen. Largely independent and often critical of the institutional Church, the lay-run AGESCI had among its foundational values three especially clear ones: criticize models of behavior that debase and exploit the human person; express a preferential option for the marginalized; and decisively reject, in accordance with democratic and anti-fascist ethos, all forms of violence, both overt and covert, meant to suppress freedom and encourage authoritarianism. That third one was particularly important in 1970s Italy, ravaged by “the years of lead” terrorism—but also in my hometown in the north of Italy, Ferrara. In the 1920s, it was one of the cradles of the Fascist movement, and its Jewish community, one of the most prominent in the peninsula since early modern times, was almost completely wiped out during the Holocaust.

I’d go on to spend twenty years in AGESCI. At the midway point, I began to minister as a group leader and catechist in the association, just as I entered my freshman year at the University of Bologna. Those early weeks of school in November 1989 saw the fall of the Berlin Wall, which of course dominated discussion in the university’s school of political science. But UniBo was also known for its strong tradition of studies in the history of Christianity and the Church. Its investment in these disciplines was a reflection of how in Bologna (“the red city”) and that part of Italy in general there was a confluence of three “cultures” usually thought unable to coexist: Catholicism, Marxism, and American-style liberalism. For each, the memory of Vatican II was still vivid—extending far beyond the academic record—and also part of a civil pact. Giuseppe Dossetti, founder in 1953 of what would become the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Studies, believed that work in academia, service in the civitas, and ministry to the ecclesia were inseparable. Indeed, as an academic, a father of the anti-Fascist Italian Constitution and MP, and then as a priest and finally a monk in occupied Palestine, he practically embodied all three areas of emphasis. In order to address the civil and political crisis of a post-Christendom Italy, one had to address the theological and ecclesial crisis first.

This call to a vocation in academia, the civitas, and the ecclesia appealed to me, especially given national and world events. In 1970s Italy, Vatican II had inspired a new civil pact against domestic terrorism and threats of a fall into a Pinochet-like neo-fascist order. In the post–Cold War 1990s and early 2000s, there was a new world order to build, and the need to save Italy from the Mafia's car bombings in the streets of Rome, Florence, and Palermo. The 9/11 attacks offered more evidence for the necessity of the theology of Vatican II, ad extra as well as ad intra, as a response against calls for a “clash of civilizations.” My call to this vocation only grew stronger by the failure of my two attempts at a monastic vocation (the Benedictines in 1992–1993 and an ecumenical monastic community in 2001–2002)

Coming to the United States was not in my original plans, but it turned out to be providential. It gave me the freedom to remain faithful to my commitment to the ecclesia and the civitas, which for a Catholic theologian in the Italian academic system—divided between state-run and Church-run institutions—would not have been possible. It’s a commitment that I had seen embodied in Commonweal even before I moved to this country, when I had the good fortune to do research at the Jesuit Institute at Boston College on a one-year fellowship in 2008. I took a slightly different path from previous and more eminent Italian Catholics who found intellectual refuge in America (Fr. Luigi Sturzo in the 1920–40s, Fr. Luigi Giussani in the late 1960s) by getting married and raising a family here. But that has helped me stay alert to the opposing, mirror-like challenges for émigrés: the risk of a rootless break with the past, and the unconscious adoption of the culture of origin as a non-negotiable part of “identity.” Paradoxically, as Catholicism becomes truly global, the latter is a greater risk.

Since 2008, my professional life owes more to American than Italian Catholicism. While I maintain multiple attachments, American Catholicism has by this point shaped me not less, but likely more, than the old continent. America exposed me to and gave me a perspective on global Catholicism that Italy would not have been able to. What I have learned from American Catholicism, and particularly from the intellectual community around Commonweal over its first 100 years, is not just the possibility of linking the life of the mind to an ecclesial vocation, but the necessity of doing so, as a way to contribute to the common good.