Father Sorge, the Jesuit of the “Palermo spring”, died – Corriere.it

Father Bartolomeo Sorge, Jesuit, died at the age of 91, was born in 1929 in Portoferraio, on the island of Elba, of Sicilian parents. The biographical passage that at the end of the eighties and nineties of the last century had seen him as the protagonist of current politics and had also made him known to the general public was linked to Sicily. At the age of ten, he moved with his family to Castelfranco Veneto, another circumstance that will determine a new union in his biography. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1946 and was ordained a priest in 1958., training in social disciplines together with theological studies and acquisition of a specific competence in the social doctrine of the Catholic Church. In 1966 he was called to be part of the editorial board of the Jesuit magazine Catholic civilization that in those years, under the guidance of Fr. Roberto Tucci, it went from a rigid conservative position, hostile to the most characteristic aspects of the modern world, to a more open and dialogical attitude, driven by the pastoral and theological turn carried out by the Second Vatican Council, which ended the previous year.

Father Sorge collaborated in the writing of the encyclical Eighteen, issued by Paul VI in 1971 on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Of the new things of Leo XIII, who had marked the birth of the social doctrine of the Church. In 1973 he became director of The Civilt Cattolica, magazine of the Jesuits, and in this capacity played a prominent role in the events of the Italian Church. In the hot climate of the 1970s, when requests for ecclesial renewal promoted by the Council met and collided with the political and social dynamics of the country, Father Sorge was protagonist of the first conference of the Italian Church on evangelization and human promotion of 1976, called to address the changes that were taking place, in particular the secularization processes that had affected the traditional relationship of Italians with the Church, as indicated by the result of the 1974 referendum on divorce. In that circumstance, Father Sorge aligned himself in favor of the pluralism, although conditioned, of the political options of Catholics and resolutely against neo-fundamentalist tendencies. which would soon lead to an even more thunderous defeat in the 1981 abortion referendum. This step earned Father Sorge criticism for excess opening to the left, which in 1978 would have prevented his appointment as Patriarch of Venice, initially wanted by Pope John Paul I, also because of the links that the Jesuit maintains with the environment of his youth.

In those years, Father Sorge undertook to give continuity to the spirit of evangelization and human promotion, in an attempt to favor the recomposition of the Catholic area in Italy, as the title of one of his books from 1979 says, or to reconstruct a way of unity. pre-politics of Italian Catholics, since the exclusive monopoly of the Catholic vote by the Christian Democrats was now considered to have ended. The advent to the papal throne of John paul ii it oriented the attitude of the Italian Church in a different direction. In 1985, Father Sorge left the leadership of The Civilt Cattolica and moved to Palermo, where, together with Father Ennio Pintacuda, he founded the “Pedro Arrupe” Institute of Political Education, the first of a long series of “political schools” promoted by the Italian dioceses to try, something unreal, to contain the degradation of the class Christian Democratic politics, culminating in the early 1990s with the tangentopoli scandals. Thus was born the experience of the so-called “Palermo spring”, when, in the city marked by mafia warfare, Mayor Leoluca Orlando gave birth to a council that included part of the Christian Democrats, the Greens, a civic list and later also the Communist Party. These years represented the moment of greatest notoriety for Sorge, who, without repudiating Orlando after his departure from DC and the founding of the “La Rete” movement, he avoided taking an open side to his side, unlike Pintacuda. From 1997 to 2004, Father Sorge was in Milan as director of the Centro San Fedele and until 2009 director of the magazine “Social Updates”. Many of his publications, especially on the subject of the social doctrine of the Church, including the testimony collected by Paolo Giuntella, Get out of the temple. Autobiographical interview (Rizzoli 1991).