Few of you will have the courage to buy and read this account of the life of an uncomfortable priest.
Few of you—based on the questions I've asked around me—know who he is.
With these few words of introduction, I want to spark your curiosity about him. I want you to discover how much good he did—in Italy and Latin America—how much real love he sowed, planted, and tended. His vocation sprang from something his mother said one day when he was eight years old. He had just witnessed a massacre in the town square and was deeply shaken. She told him: "What happened yesterday is very serious. Some people killed other people.
And do you know why this happens? Because people don't love one another. They can't live in peace with each other. They fight, they clash, they hurt each other, and in the end they even kill. We must work so that there is more love in the world, so that people learn to care for one another."
From that day forward, for eighty long years, Arturo Paoli worked—intelligently, concretely, without judgment—to obey the commandment of love. He brought "justice as charity" to all those regarded as second- or third-class human beings.
After so many struggles, so much effort, so much suffering and disappointment, he can tell us with humility: "We old people cannot give much advice to the young, because none of our lives can serve as a model. We can only say that the spiritual life is the story of a relationship that touches the extreme heights of joy and the depths of sorrow, and that at its end makes you cry out with a sincerity that reaches the root of your being: It was worth it."
M.B., 2011