“Today we really need Don Andrea Gallo: he would certainly have been furious in the face of this ultra-right government”. It is Father Alex Zanotelli, a Comboni missionary and life partner of the Genoese priest who remembers him eleven years after his death. The partisan, anarchist, street “don”, of the last, left on 22 May 2013 […]
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“Today we really needed Don Andrea Gallo: in front of this government of ultra right he would surely have been furious.” He’s a father Alex ZanotelliComboni missionary, life partner of the Genoese priest to remember him eleven years after his death.
The “don” partisananarchist, street, of the last, the May 22, 2013 he left leaving Genoa and Italy not only a memory but a precious legacy: the community of San Benedetto al Porto and a message that has not stopped walking on the legs of its children and of those who, like Father Zanotelli, work every day in the “Sanità” neighborhood of Naples for justice, dignity and peace.
“Don Andrea – says a ilfattoquotidiano.it the missionary – would be the perfect man for this historic moment. He would certainly have attacked without mincing words the choices of this majority where the ideology of the white supremacism. He himself taught us to welcome everyone without asking what religion they were or what side they were on.”
“I met Don Gallo – explains Father Alex – in a dramatic moment in my life. In 1978 I became editor of the magazine Nigrizia and in the mid-1980s I had set my sights on the arms trade, denouncing the interests of Italy and Western countries in the African wars. Giovanni Spadolini, then Minister of Defense, attacked me in a press conference, saying that I was inciting international terrorism. I was bombarded by the politicians of the time: from Giulio Andreottifrom Bettino Craxi. One day Don Gallo, who I had only heard about, phoned me and, giving me his full support, invited me to speak in Genoa.”
Father Zanotelli reached him in a Fiat Panda. “It was there that I felt all his affection and I understood his humanity, his extraordinary ability to enter into the other, to feel the other. I have always been struck by his ability to link faith with reality, the Gospel and the Constitution. This is what the priests and parish priests of today are missing: expressing faith in life. Pope francesco he is a prophet of our times but his message does not pass. The encyclical “Laudato si” is admired more by atheists than by Christians”.
The Comboni missionary and the Ligurian priest have never stopped meeting, sharing and fighting together for a more just world. Before 2013 Zanotelli spent a few days at the community of San Benedetto alongside the most fragile children that the “Gallo” welcomed and with Lillithe woman who has always helped the Genoese priest in his undertaking: “She took me through the alleys to meet her trans friends who had elected him president of one of their associations to the point of having the cardinal intervene – in vain – Angelo Bagnasco. Being with him, the choice he had made for the least, for the poorest, was clear to me. He has always been on their side but with rectitude, with fairness towards the Church of which he was critical, even though he loved it”.
This afternoon at 5pm in the parish of San Benedetto there will be a mass celebrated by Don Gianni Grondona in memory of the eleventh anniversary of Don Gallo’s passing.
