The clear gaze of Don Luigi Ciotti always points forward, he does so while he speaks in public, but also while telling himself in front of the remains of the shared table of a lunch prepared for collaborators and guests by him, in person, just returned to Turin from Bolzano. 2025 marks 30 years of Libera and 60 of the Abele groupexperiences united in his person by the urgency of returning a voice, a name, a role to forgotten. He always seems to see further. Sometimes you say it lost behind thoughts and instead it is always very present, wherever it is the here and now, with an impressive memory for each, with an amazing attention to the individual, which explains many things including that list of names of innocent victims, not one less, which always stretches a little: “The bureaucracy”, reflects with regret, “calls cases, numbers, when they do not emerge. depersonalize everything. And instead the name is the first right of the person “».
Here the spirit of the Abele group are welded, which deals with welcome, dependencies of all kinds – substances, gambling, boys closed in digital, that of Libera, the association of anti -mafia associations announced for the first time on December 14 30 years ago, and that of March 21st day of memory and commitment for the innocent victims of all the mafias. TRE Round figures meet in 2025, the year of the crossed anniversaries: the 60 years of the Abele group, the 30 of Libera and the 80s of Don Luigi, founder of everything, which shields himself: “I am a small thing, everything is the result of a” we “”.
In the end, the meaning is still all there in that name Abele: “At the beginning I had chosen youth engaged, I was not yet a priest, but it was a presumptuous name, when it was to formalize I thought back to the title of a Zavoli documentary dedicated to the Basaglia revolution in Gorizia, the Abele gardens: it is not to divide good and bad, indeed in our communities Cain and Abele meet. It is that to us, like in Cain, God asks “Where is your brother?”. We cannot answer “I don’t know”, not in a world where technology tells us everything about neighbors and distant “.
Don Luigi Ciotti gets up for a moment, detaches from the wall of his study – colored environment and lived the much that is enough to make it plastically the incessant activity of which he witnesses – a photo hanging in a open frame and reads the dedication to Black Marm on the back: “To Luigi by Roberto who met Cain and wants to be here with Abel, Turin 21-10-95”, the allusion is at the ABELE group. General in Turin is also home to Libera: “Saveria Antioch, Roberto’s mother (escort agent who died at 23 years of age, wrote it in Ninni Cassarà to whom he tried to shield ed)”. Without the trigger of a “why” launched to Don Luigi by the mother of Antonio Montinaro, escort agent by Giovanni Falcone, torn to Capaci, and without the commitment of Saveria Antiochia perhaps there would be no day of memory and commitment in memory of the innocent victims of all the mafias and free of which the thirty years recur this year.
More than one has passed since we said to each other, on the sidelines of a Milanese evening, that this chat would have had to happen: “Okay, but let’s talk about the present and the future, not only of the past”. The meeting took place in late November 2024, in time to tell it on the number of Christian family On newsstands in coincidence with the thirty years of the announcement of the birth of Libera, on December 14, 1994, a few months before the official foundation: “Tonino Belino was right,” Don Luigi reflects with a very low voice as if speaking to himself, “we must not become professionals of the complaint, but there are moments in life in which to keep silent becomes a fault and speak a moral obligation, a civil liability, an ethical imperative, we cannot be silent. But you have to do it in a clean, documented, serious way: The complaint is not enough, a project is needed: for example, for five years, here we have opened a laudato school yes, laudate here, for teachers, educators, citizens, priests, young people, adults with scientists, researchers, Italians and foreigners are formed on the theme of the common house, school and action, otherwise they become slogans. There are weekends full of people who come to form and then multiply this consciousness. Parades are not enough, it serves culture, forming trainers ».
How many kilometers has traveled in 30 years of free? Was this that if he imagined it when his bishop orders her assigned her as the parish the road?
«Father Michele Pellegrino sent me on the road to learn from people’s labors and take the most suffering. And the road was really for me a teacher of life, through the encounter with the poverty, the needs and hopes of the people. A way to live in and then also to go: thousands of km to accompany the path of many others towards truth and justice. Libera is a coordination of associations, and keeping the ranks of a plural commitment also means going there where that commitment tenaciously happens ».
He started 60 years ago with the Abele group, how has he changed since then? When exactly did you understand that the mafia was an important theme for the whole country?
«From the first years of commitment to the problem of drugs, prostitution, of juvenile criminal justice. The help we offered to people sometimes annoyed, we suffered threats and acts of intimidation by the small local crime, of which we disturbed the business. But it was clear that this was only the tip of the iceberg. Let’s not forget that the Turin prosecutor Bruno Caccia was killed by the ‘Ndrangheta in 1983! Even then it was known that the mafias dominated everywhere and not surprisingly our first concrete step to expose ourselves on that theme was the foundation of the monthly in -depth Narcomafie (Today The green lighted.). We said then that every drug dead was a mafia dead. Isn’t it yet true? In sixty years the scenarios have changed a lot, but the terrible impact of mafia crime on people’s lives remains tragically current “.
His wandering the door often in old and new mafia lands: is he ever afraid of finding himself unconsciously to shake wrong hands?
«There have been embarrassments, sometimes. And not only in the “mafia lands” that one could imagine, because as we said the mafias are everywhere, and wherever they manage to infiltrate the so -called “unsuspected” environments: high bourgeoisie, public offices, the world of business and even that of social commitment “.
In cooperatives, in solidarity, even in the anti -mafia we saw crime infiltrate, what does it feel when it happens?
«More disdain than surprise. Many years ago the Parliamentary Anti -Mafia Commission, at the time led by Rosy Bindi, witnessed the existence of anti -mafia associations … managed as a coverage by mafia exponents. This mimicry obliges us to always pay the utmost attention, and to smell where there is an authentic activism and where instead an empty emphasis that bends words as “legality” for exactly opposite purpose “.
Compared to when free the mafias were born, they sinked, they note less, Alessandra Dolci chief of the DDA of Milan often tells her that they reply: “Mafiosi we? But we do business”. Is it more difficult to involve civil society in the absence of striking actions?
“Unfortunately it seems yes. The most despair data are those that we elaborate every year together with Demos, on the perception of the mafia phenomenon on a social level. These data speak to us of an organized crime that becomes more and more “normalized crime” in the head of many Italians. Something with whom he touches live together, and that basically does not scare. The problem is that citizens do not take as much as the enormous theft of a common good perpetrated by the mafia and their supporters and imitators – yes, now a certain way of doing business, making finance, it is openly inspired by criminal methods! – Negatively impacts on their lives. We are talking about the general impoverishment and the indirect deaths: the deaths of drugs, of medical malpractice, insecurity at work and, elsewhere, of weapons trafficking or deals with human beings. How can you remain indifferent to all this? ».
To a boy who wonders what I can do, little, against this crime that continues to expand his boundaries what do you feel like answering?
«You can learn to recognize it, meanwhile. To understand how it moves, what facilitates it. You can recognize the mafia behaviors around you and, as a very young victim of the mafia, Rita Atria wrote, even “inside” of you. You can choose to clean up from those behaviors, and fight for a cleaner company, starting from the worlds that are close to you: friends, family, school. You can openly say no to everything that seems to be trampling on the dignity of people, taking advantage of their weaknesses, putting the environment or health at risk … you can be a sentinel of justice, against those who believe that injustice is inevitable and winning “.
Does a priest have one more responsibility?
«The task of a priest is to look at the sky, to God, without ever forgetting the responsibilities to which the earth calls us. Jesus has commissioned us to give hope to the poor, the last, and the challenge is to make his Gospel dialogue with today’s history. A weld between faith in its spiritual and ethical dimension is then always necessary, which also calls us priests to a political commitment understood in a broad sense as a service to the common good. Any Christian should live justice as an aspiration not only individual, but social. However, the priest plays a role of testimony: he cannot hide, he must be clear in words and transparent in the documents ».
On the thresholds of the 80s after so much peregrin, do you ever feel overwhelmed by all the pain of mothers, fathers, children of which he witnessed?
«Of course, the sufferings of others remain inside you. Dig you, they move you many doubts. But then you see that precisely those who have suffered the most serious mourning are sometimes able to get up to give strength to others. I think of many families of innocent victims of the mafias, who have been able to feed the memory and commitment of their loved ones killed, engaging in turn. I see them at the manifestations, in schools, in juvenile prisons: tireless witnesses, which instead endure pain as a weight, carry it around like a message of life ».
What does justice do in this world?
«To make justice to the world is as always the commitment of those who, that justice, try to affirm it in the concreteness of history. A commitment that cannot remain of a few, but must be increasingly transversal and collective. We must become aware that it is necessary to combine our forces, to become a proactive force of change together. We must build the common good together, that is, the good of all, a good that does not exclude but includes and embraces everyone’s hopes. It is necessary to stop the ethical avalanche of a piece of the world that abandons the poorest and most fragile humanity, the hungry, discriminated, oppressed, migrants. People who are not free, because freedom is precisely the daughter of justice ».
What gives you hope?
«These are them: all those who do not resign themselves to the injustices and evils of this world. The faces, the stories of people are the headlights of our journey and the stars of change, the one that gives us the coordinates of the commitment and indicates the path to follow to build a world where hope will return to be common good. Because hope is of everyone or is not hope. Today, he gives me hope to know that this road will continue after me, and perhaps someone will be directed on his journey also by the footsteps that has left mine ».
Leaving a blackboard, old manner, with plaster, the round writing of Don Ciotti that we have seen in so many notes – and sometimes even in some interview (not this) with answers sent to the flight from handwritten sheets and photographed -, has traced a phrase that keeps everything together: “Hope either is everyone or is not hope, Luigi”.
