Teramo. Don Luigi Ciotti will be awarded the honor of the Order of Merit of the “Guido II degli Aprutini” University, during the solemn ceremony scheduled for Thursday 13 June, at 10.30 am, in the Aula Magna Benedetto Croce.
The ceremony will open with greetings from the rector Dino Mastrocola. Speeches will follow Fiammetta Riccicoordinator of the School of Legality and Justice of the University of Teramo, and the Lectio Magistralis of Don Ciotti. The ceremony will close with the reading of the motivation and the awarding of the “Guido II degli Aprutini” Order of Merit.
The first Order of Merit from the University of Teramo dates back to 28 February 2015 and was assigned to Giovanni Legnini, vice president of the Superior Council of the Judiciary. The honor was subsequently awarded to MEP Paolo De Castro on 25 May 2018, to Emma Bonino and Edith Bruck on 27 October 2018, to the prefect Luigi Savina on 8 May 2019 and to the scientist Antonino Zichichi on 3 July 2021.
«Luigi Ciotti was born in 1945 in Pieve di Cadore (BL), in the Dolomites. Having emigrated with his family to Turin in the 1950s, he founded Gruppo Abele in 1965, an association that promotes inclusion and social justice through a commitment that combines hospitality and culture, an educational dimension and a political proposal. He was ordained a priest in 1972 by Father Michele Pellegrino, who assigned him “the street” as his parish, a place of poverty and fragility, of questions and provocations from which to learn.
With the Abele Group, in 59 years, he has built opportunities and projects for drug addicts, for prostituted women and girls, for AIDS sufferers, for immigrants and all people marked by poverty and existential fragility. Added to this was a commitment to research, information and training through the creation of a Study Center (1975), the “University of the Road” (1978), a publishing house (1983), a bookshop (1994), and magazines “Animazione Sociale” (1971) and “Narcomafie” (1993) which since 2019 has been transformed into the editorial project “Lavialibera”, a bimonthly magazine for information and analysis on mafias, corruption, the environment and migration founded with the Libera association.
The Abele Group has always been involved in development cooperation projects in the poorest areas of the world (now in the Ivory Coast) and social cooperation to give dignity and work to people with difficult histories.
In 2019 he created “Casacomune”, an association dedicated to the scientific, cultural and ethical promotion of the values expressed by Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’.
Convinced of the importance of “we”, Don Luigi contributed to the construction of networks such as the National Coordination of Reception Communities (CNCA), which he presided over for over 10 years, and the Italian League for the Fight against AIDS (LILA) , of which he was also president.
During the 90s, his commitment expanded to denouncing and combating mafia power, giving life to Libera – Associations, names and numbers against the mafia.
Today Libera, which is also present in Europe, Africa and Latin America, coordinates over 1,600 associations and groups that promote activities in schools and universities, curate information tools, offer themselves as a point of reference for the families of the victims, operate and they provide work in the assets confiscated from the mafias through the agricultural cooperatives of the “Libera Terra” circuit. The fight against the mafia is currently linked to the commitment against inequalities and poverty (with the “Numeri Pari” network) and against corruption.»
