This year the Calendar of Lay Saints is also a book called “Lay Saints”. You read it like a breviary. Each name tells the story of an Italian hero. Every story, a lay prayer.

Introduction to Lay Saints 2012 by Beppe Grillo.

"A as in Ambrosoli, B as in Borsellino, C as in Chinnici, D as in Dalla Chiesa. In the alphabet of Lay Saints, no letter is without one or more names. People who have fallen to make a better Italy that has not yet come to light even thirty or forty years after their death. Characters who have been forgotten or who have become iconographies to be remembered only on their anniversaries, often by the ones that contributed to their isolation and their end. In Sicily, they say that the first bouquet of flowers at a funeral is from the mafia guy that had you killed, the same is true for many speeches delivered in Parliament to commemorate those who served the State on behalf of the ones who didn’t lift a finger to protect them. Italy is a great lay “Via Crucis”.
Every region, every city has its patron saints, magistrates, police officers and simple citizens. There are rarely streets, squares or statues dedicated to them. They live on in the memory of the honest people and maybe a few others. And yet their memory over time becomes stronger, like a light that shows the way through the lies and the evil-doing.
The locations where they fell have become part of the collective memory, modern memorials for the nation and for civil society. A journey through Italy can start from Piazza della Loggia in Brescia, continue to Piazza Fontana and then the Pac in Milano, get the train to the station in Bologna, visit the Torre dei Georgofili in Florence, then via Fani in Rome and go on to Capaci and via D'Amelio in Palermo. Every stop on the “Via Crucis” is a warning to the indifference of the Italians that believe, naively, that standing and watching will save them from a future in which democracy will be a word with no other meaning. Giulio Andreotti is a life senator. It was he who celebrated Sindona as the “saviour of the lira”. And yet Sindona the bankrupt was the one who sent the killer to murder Giorgio Ambrosoli. Those who formed part of the P2, the subversive Masonic lodge, whose leader, Licio Gelli, was convicted for having messed up the evidence concerning the slaughter that took place at Bologna station, is today the President of the Council, like Silvio Berlusconi, (card number 1816), or spokesperson for the Majority party, like Fabrizio Cicchitto, (card number 2232). Paolo Borsellino said that a trial or a verdict is not necessary for those who associate with mafia people and corrupt people to be kept at a distance from every public office. The moral judgement is sufficient, the ethics within the party. With this yardstick, Totò Cuffaro would never have become the President of the Region of Sicily and many politicians would never have entered Parliament.
In the face of this enormous slaughter, of thousands of people, that has happened in the last fifty years, fruit of a civil war that has never been declared between honesty and crime, it is legitimate to ask ourselves with the eyes of today’s devastated Italy, whether it was worth the trouble. Whether Cassarrà and Vassallo, Impastato and Scopelliti, Livatino and Rostagno have died for nothing. Perhaps Italy is a country that has no need for heroes because they are our bad conscience that we don’t want to live with. Or perhaps not, but I’m not sure about this.”

PS. Remember my dates for the regional elections in Molise:
- Wednesday 12 at 19.30 piazza Prefettura at Campobasso
- Thursday 13 at 17:00 piazza principale at Isernia
- Thursday 13 at 20:00 piazza principale at Termoli