This postwar Catholic mayor of Florence was a nonpartisan firebrand. We need leaders like him today.

In living out Christian citizenship, one might feel caught between the Scylla of partisanship and the Charybdis of political disengagement. But if the Gospel is meant to be lived out in every aspect of life, then surely there are examples of Christian fullness in the political realm, citizens who can serve as antidotes to partisanship and apathy. 

We might look to Giorgio La Pira (1904-77), the remarkable mayor of Florence, Italy, during the 1950s and ’60s. A legal scholar and figure on the world scene as well as a municipal official, he was declared venerable by Pope Francis in 2018. His perspective has never been more relevant than it is today. This is no doubt why Pope Leo XIV cited him by name in his recent social encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” extolling his “culture of negotiation” over a “culture of power” in solving conflicts (No. 221).

La Pira, a thoroughgoing Christian disciple, managed to flout party politics while carving out a career of political effectiveness. Early on, he focused on forging a political future for a post-World War II Italy. An anti-fascist, he also shunned the socialist camp, discerning instead a vision based on the Gospel and the great papal social encyclicals. Seeing public service as his vocation, he wrote: “Do not pronounce that usual sentence so devoid of serious meaning: ‘Politics are ugly’! No! Political commitment, that is, first person commitment to a Christian-inspired construction of society…is a commitment of humanity and holiness.” 

During the war he secretly met with like-minded thinkers to plan for life after Mussolini. He became a fugitive and was given refuge in Vatican City, thanks to his friend Msgr. Giovanni Battista Montini, later Pope St. Paul VI. After the war, he helped to write the Italian constitution and became a member of Parliament. His hope for Italy was a middle way between statist repression and excessive individualism. A member of what was then called the Third Order of St. Dominic, who lived at the Priory of San Marco while mayor, he was a student of St. Thomas Aquinas and friend of the philosopher Jacques Maritain. Yet he always showed a penchant for dialogue with politicians of all stripes. He sought common ground with the Communists,, who made up part of Italy’s body politic. He himself was embraced by the Christian Democrats but never formally joined that party. He said his only “party card” was his baptismal certificate.

He had grown up in Sicily, then moved to Florence to study and teach law. The heart of his political career comprised his two stints as mayor of Florence, from 1951 to 1957 and 1961 to 1965. He was an effective politician, focusing on infrastructure, especially in light of Italy’s recovery from wartime economic struggles. But imbued with Catholic social doctrine, he saw homelessness and joblessness as offensive to human dignity. He joined strikers occupying the Pignone textile plant to prevent its closing and the loss of over 2,000 jobs. (He negotiated a refit of the factory into an energy plant, and it is still open today, called Nuovo Pignone.) His political enemies labeled him a “sacristy Communist,” but as the social changes of the 1960s took hold, he opposed liberalizing divorce laws and spoke out against proposals to legalize abortion. “Abortion is not an act that liberates women,” he said bluntly, “but rather, in a certain sense, a form of inner slavery.”

Both during and after his mayoralty, he was a tireless campaigner for peace in the world. He was welcomed in Moscow in August 1959, glad to meet with members of the Supreme Soviet but also challenging them on the issue of state-imposed atheism. Deeply troubled by the Vietnam War, he met with Ho Chi Minh in 1965 and came away with a peace proposal that resembled the eventual Paris Peace Accords that ended U.S. involvement in the war in 1973. 

He hosted the Mediterranean Colloquia, a series of meetings of political figures from around the great inland sea that has played such an enormous part in world history and is still a cultural nexus. He thought it should be a place that united rather than divided the regions’ inhabitants. To La Pira, all human beings—Palestinians and Israelis, Christians and Muslims, Europeans and Africans—were brothers who can resolve differences in a peaceful way.

La Pira was from a different place and time than ours. But his approach inspires and challenges. He had strong ideas but was no ideologue. He was motivated by the simple principles of human dignity and the common good. “If there is someone who is suffering,” he wrote, “ I have a specific duty: to intervene in every way possible, with all the measures that love suggests and the law provides, so that that suffering may be reduced or alleviated. There is no other rule of conduct for a mayor in general, and for a Christian mayor in particular.”

He knew that politicians ought to reach across boundaries of party and culture to strive for the unity and happiness of all. Even when his ideas seemed not to fit the prevailing political options, he had the confidence to enter the arena. May the United States and all countries have more La Piras to bring the wisdom and love of the Gospel to bear on the world’s problems.