scuole pie fiorentine

FATHER BALDUCCI'S PLACES

Scuole Pie Fiorentine

BIOGRAPHY

THE STUDIES

In 1945 he sustained his high school graduation from Michelangelo High School and enrolled in the Faculty of Arts at the university. On August 26 of the same year he received priestly ordination. In the early years of his Florentine life, literary interests continued to occupy wide space, partly because of the stimuli that came from his university studies and his frequentation of illustrious men of letters, such as Giovanni Papini, Piero Bargellini, Nicola Lisi, and more generally of the environment of the magazine Frontespizio.

CULTURAL ACTIVITY

He also tried to carry out, together with some brethren or alumni of Scolopian schools, cultural animation projects aimed both within the order and, more broadly, at the city, through the foundation of circles or magazines. In February 1945 he sketched an initial outline of the Humanist Circle, which he conceived as a place for reflection and debate to build a "Christian humanism" (Balducci, 2009, p. 187). Although it attracted the attention of Florentine intellectuals and artists (Mario Donadoni, Mario Casella, Francesco Bernardino Cicala, among others), it was short-lived and from the spring of 1946 Balducci participated in the activity of a similar circle, the "Chiostro nuovo". In 1947 he became assistant to Catholic Action of the Florentine Pious Schools and head of a University Catholic Group that was based in the premises of the Alfa 48 University Cultural Recreational Club.

THE ACTIVISM

He took part in the internal debate within the order about the aims of its apostolate (traditionally those of education and spiritual direction of young people) in a context in which public schools and the absorption of most Catholic students into GIAC (Gioventù italiana di azione cattolica, Italian Youth for Catholic Action) seemed to delegitimize its existence. In a paper on The Scolopian Priest in the New Times at the national study conference on Scolopian formation and activities held in Rome in 1948, he argued for the need to strengthen, on the one hand, the internal youth associations of the Pious Schools and, on the other, the order's commitment to the apostolate among young people even beyond the strictly school environment. He thus came to outline a kind of Scolopian primacy in the religious assistance of all Catholic youth associations.

QUOTE

E. Balducci, “The politics of Faith”

"Faith must live in reference to the Word of God which, certainly, must be proclaimed in the Christian community, but increasingly in the spaces of secular living."

MUST-SEE

LIBRARY

The tabernacle

Note on the right of the doorway at number 9 a small tabernacle with a Madonna and Child, a marble bas-relief formerly approached in the manner of Bernardo Rossellino and now traced to a master conventionally named by this very work "Master of Via Martelli" (restored in 1999).