Word: piras
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Italy has few more appealing public figures than Don Luigi Sturzo, the white-haired priest who founded the Christian Democratic Party, and Giorgio La Pira, the bustling little mayor of Florence. Both are ardent Roman Catholics who believe in infusing militant Christian principle into politics. Both are men of compassion and understanding. Both believe in putting into practice the words of the Gospels. But they emphatically disagree on one vital point: the role of the state in human affairs...
Last week readers of Rome's conservative Giornale d'ltalia were treated to a front-page debate between Don Luigi, venerable foe of statism and apostle of enlightened individualism (TIME. March 8), and Mayor La Pira, a man who insists that a man's job is as much a piece of property as a man's land, that it is the state's duty to help every citizen have "a job, a house and music...
...monastic political group which came to be known as "the little professors." Intense in their Catholicism and militant in their reformism, "the little professors" grew into what is now called the "Democratic Initiative." the anti-Communist left of the Christian Democratic Party. Another of "the little professors": Giorgio La Pira, the ascetic and popular mayor of Florence, who is godfather to the last of the Premier-designate's six children...
...Pignone workers refused to leave the plant. They slept and ate inside the factory, and some kept on working their machines. Mayor La Pira rushed to their aid. He attended Mass with them in the factory courtyard, talked strategy with the Communist-dominated union committee, and showed the workers that someone besides the Communists was active in their interests. Merchants donated meat, fish, pasta, bread, wine and cigarettes; the city and provincial councils scraped up 3,000,000 lire ($4,800) for the workers' families. La Pira fired off a letter to the Vatican, got a papal blessing...
Letter & Spirit. Last week Mayor La Pira was in Rome-where many officials in the Pella government affectionately call him "Giorgio"-trying to persuade the government to run Pignone and save 1,750 jobs. (The government-run Institute for Industrial Reconstruction, an inheritance from Mussolini, keeps several plants going at a loss rather than add their workers to Italy's unemployment rolls.) Fumed Giorgio La Pira: "This coldly calculated liquidation has offended the city of Florence. Seldom, as in this case, has the letter of the law served to cover so much inhumanity of spirit...