Reporting of Federici Studies Center
Everyone at Don Milani's school. But if these are his students…
Bitter Christmas for Forteto, the Tuscan agricultural community to which the Florence juvenile court entrusted young people “difficult” to be returned to a peaceful life. Rodolfo Fiesoli, 76 years, founder e “prophet” of this community, was arrested on the morning of 23 December, a few hours after the Court of Cassation had definitively confirmed his sentence to 14 years in prison.
The chilling history of Forteto has been anticipated by Settimo Cielo since 2013, when the community's fame was still skyrocketing among the progressive intelligentsia, Catholic and secular, which gave credence to Fiesoli's assertions of wanting to reproduce “better and bigger” the educational experience of Don Lorenzo Milani (1923-1967), the Florentine priest on whose tomb, in Barbiana, Francis himself visited.
Fiesoli was a member of the Don Lorenzo Milani Foundation, and the connection between the two realities had also been confirmed and exalted by the sociologists Giuseppe Fornari and Nicola Casanova, in the essay “The virtuous contradiction. The educational problem, Don Milani and Forteto”, (1) printed in 2008 from the prestigious publisher “The Mill”, as well as the constant proximity to Fiesoli of the president of the juvenile court of Florence, Gian Paolo Meucci (1919-1986), great friend of Don Milani and a leading figure of progressive Florentine Catholicism.
But what really happened inside the Forteto was terrifying. And the more than a thousand pages of the sentence of 17 June 2015, now confirmed by the Supreme Court, they document it in detail, in the depositions of the defendants, of witnesses, of the victims.
In Forteto there was a regime of forced separation between males and females, even if engaged or married, ban on heterosexual relationships, of homosexual practices encouraged and often imposed, of breaking away from their families of origin, of public trials and humiliating punishments of the disobedient, of cult of personality of the founder, of sexual abuse systematically carried out by Fiesoli on his subordinates.
But the appeal of Forteto extended far beyond the boundaries of the farm and Tuscany.. Among the witnesses heard by the judges is a priest from the archdiocese of Bologna, don Stefano Benuzzi, whose testimony occupies six pages of the sentence and impressively documents the ideological drift from which he too had allowed himself to be gripped.
Don Benuzzi, 47 years, graduate in engineering, at the time of the trial he taught religion in a high school in Bologna and celebrated mass in a suburban parish. He had met Fiesoli at a march in memory of Don Milani, in Barbiana, In the 2001, and continued to frequent him until 2008, more and more “fascinated”. He also created a small commune of young people around himself, to imitate and increase the guests of Forteto. And in the meantime he had a romantic relationship with a woman, report of which Fiesoli and his men were aware, publicly mocking her.
Questioned by the judges, Don Benuzzi did not clarify why at a certain point he stopped visiting Fiesoli. In recounting the last meeting he had with the founder of the community he said:
“I stayed in his room for a while’ and there were outpourings. Rodolfo hugged and kissed me. On the hands, Yes, and then also in the mouth, but there was nothing violent or voluptuous on his part. That kiss was incredibly pure, from a person who wanted to dedicate himself to sincere relationships with others, transparent”.
In the Fort “the Greek model is followed”, Don Benuzzi said again to the judges. It was there “a deep friendship, engaging”, Why “in the man-to-man relationship, woman with woman, it is possible to reach peaks of understanding and involvement higher than those typical of a heterosexual relationship”.
Of the absolute powers exercised by Fiesoli over the community, Don Benuzzi said:
“When there is someone who questions his choices, cuts him off. Rodolfo has no interlocutor above him. After him there is God”.
Da Fiesoli admitted that he still felt it “fascinated”, despite – write the judges referring to the head of Forteto – “his foul language, the blasphemies against the Madonna, the sexualization of every situation”.
And the judges write again at the end of the priest's interrogation:
“It is a deposition on which any comment appears superfluous. Although characterized in the most 'sensitive' parts’ by an evident reticence, However, it confirmed what Forteto really was and how Rodolfo Fiesoli managed to gain an impact on subjects with particular psychological profiles, with internal difficulties, conflicts and fears, without a solid capacity for criticism and discernment”.
Today Don Benuzzi is parish priest in Badi, in the upper Rhine valley, on the Bolognese Apennines.
Gone are the glorious times when his name appeared, as “teacher at the Copernico scientific high school in Bologna”, as speaker at a learned conference at the University of Florence entitled: “Education crisis or crisis education?”.
It was the 2005 and Luigi Goffredi promoted and coordinated that conference, number two and ideologist of Forteto, today he escaped prison due to the statute of limitations for the facts charged to him. Among the speakers there was also Massimo Toschi, councilor for international cooperation and peace of the Tuscany region, also a Forteto fan and member of the Giovanni XXIII Foundation for Religious Sciences of Bologna directed by Alberto Melloni.
Not only that. The main speaker of the conference was none other than René Girard (1923-2015), came from Stanford University, the world-famous anthropologist whom Fiesoli and Goffredi acclaimed together with Don Milani as the supreme master of their educational method. “Completely misrepresenting his teaching”, the judges write in the sentence, after reporting Don Benuzzi's statements, also enthusiastic about Girard, that he had “met in Paris during a visit made together with some members of Forteto”, the inevitable Fiesoli and Goffredi.
“The evidence - the judges write again - Benuzzi had found in Forteto and his guide, Fiesoli, the strong figure he needed to support and encourage him in the face of internal problems, of conflicts, insecurities, fears, and a consistent confusion that afflicted him, the choice of priestly life made is also awaited, in those years, in a rather 'original' form”.
Last April, shortly before Francis' visit to Barbiana, a passage from a letter written by Don Lorenzo Milani to his journalist friend Giorgio Pecorini made noise, collected in the priest's opus omnia, published by Mondadori edited by Alberto Melloni:
“Those two priests asked me if my final aim in teaching was to bring them to the Church or not and what else in the world could interest me in teaching if not this. And how could I explain to them, so pious and so clean, that I love my children, that I lost my head for them, that I only live to make them grow, to make them open, to make them blossom, to make them fruitful? How could I explain that I love my parishioners more than the Church and the Pope? And I know that if I run a risk for my soul it is certainly not that I have loved little, rather than loving too much (that is, to also bring them to bed!)”.
And a little further on:
“And who can love boys to the bone without finishing putting it in their ass too, if not a teacher who, together with them, also loves God and fears hell and desires heaven?”.
Don Milani was also accused of homosexual practices during his lifetime. But it was the dedication to him that put it back into circulation, don Milani, of the latest novel by an established Italian writer, Walter Siti, starring a pedophile priest, and the subsequent justifications given by Siti for this dedication.
Disdainful replies came from Don Milani's followers.
But regarding a possible beatification of the priest, the archbishop of Florence, Cardinal Giuseppe Betori, on which the start of the canonical process depends, he decisively excluded it: “Absolutely not, at least as long as I'm around. I don't believe in the sanctity of Don Lorenzo”.
(1) Note from the Federici Study Center: Nicola Casanova had already published in 2003, always published by the Mill, a book on Forteto “La Strada narrow. The history of Forteto”, with preface by Franco Cardini, while Rodolfo Fiesole had already been arrested on 30 November 1978 for sexual abuse.
