Don Dossetti and the Shoah

Giambattista Zampieri, an Italian journalist has published a new book , "Giuseppe Dossetti – History, the Cross and the Shoah" (Aliberti, 2012), which examines the life and thought of Giuseppe Dossetti, a renown figure in the Catholic Church in Italy in the 20th century.

Giuseppe Dossetti was born in Genoa in 1913. He received a law degree and was active in the anti-Fascist opposition but remained a firm supporter on non-violence. When Fascism was defeated in Italy, he became a professor of Church Law at the University of Modena.

In 1945, he became the deputy-secretary of the Christian Democratic Party and in 1946 was elected to the political body in charge of drafting the new Italian constitution. He was strongly supported in his political activism by Cardinal Montini (the future Pope Paul VI). Later he also served as mayor of Bologna.

In 1956, he took vows within a community he founded, "Little Family of the Annunciation", based on "silence, prayer, work and poverty". Three years he was ordained a priest. This community is present in the Holy Land, in the parishes of Ein Arik (Palestinian Territories) and Ma'in (Jordan).

Don Dossetti played an important role during the Second Vatican Council.

He died in 1996.

Next year, 2013, is the centenary of his birth. In preparation for this celebration Zampieri has published his new book. He sent us the following summary:

"In the year of the centenary of his birth, a study that "searches out the heart" of Giuseppe Dosseti is how Don Athos Righi, Dossetti's first successor as superior of the masculine branch of the Little Family of the Annunciation, describes this book. The monk lived the final years of his life at Monte Sole, location of the Nazi massacres in the autumn of 1944, and in the presence of these events, he did much deep soul searching about the Shoah, the silence of God at Auschwitz and the presence of Christ crucified in history. The analysis of the author takes this as his point of departure, as he seeks to deepen the attitude of Dossetti to Judaism and to the "mystery of Israel" (also in its political expressions), on the one hand, and to understand the continuing references to Christ's self-emptying "until death on the Cross". It is this self sacrifice for love that constitutes for Dossetti not only the horizon of the disciple but also that of the Church and all of Catholicism, called to follow Christ on his way of poverty and to overcome, as he wrote in 1953, the tendency "to attribute to human initiative a grade of 9 out of 10 in relationship to grace".