Igino Giordani

Biography

Igino was the first of six children of Mariano and Ursula Antonelli. In 1900 he began elementary school, on completion of which he became a stone mason or worker in stone, in the footsteps of his father.

After attending the Diocesan Seminary at Tivoli, on the eve of the World War I he did his baccalaureate and attended the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Rome.

He participated in the war as second lieutenant, on the Isonzo River in the 111th Infantry Regiment and in 1916 was severely injured and rushed to the hospital from where he resigned only after the end of the war.

Upon gaining his Bachelor in letters degree, he started to teach and at the same time began the first collaborations and contributions to reviews, magazines and newspapers.

On February 2, 1920, he married, at Tivoli, Mya Salvati and moved to Rome. His wife had four children: Mario, Sergio, Brando and Bonizza (Ganjawala Aragno). In the autumn, he met Luigi Sturzo and joined the Italian People's Party. In October he wrote his first political articles for Il Populo Nuovo , a weekly newspaper of the Italian People's Party of which he was the editor in 1924.

After a specialization course in Bibliography and Library Studies in the United States, where he became a Tertiary of the Dominican Order in 1928, he was hired as a Librarian at the Vatican Library. He was the editor of one of the first organic manuals of cataloguing of its printed works and handwritten manuscripts. In that same year, he took special care to take on and take care of Alcide De Gasperi who had been recently released from prison and to remove the harassment by the police. Igino Giordani recalled his intervention with Benito Mussolini:

I remember that I went from Jesuit Father Tacchi Venturi, who enjoyed considerable credit with Il Duce, and begged him to intervene and subsequently De Gasperi was left in peace. I was told that, working on the conscience of Mussolini, he was surprised and that even De Gasperi had been astonished; However, Mussolini had given the order to leave him in peace.

On 2 June 1946, he was elected to the constituent Assembly of Italy for the district of Rome, and in August succeeded Guido Gonella in the management of the magazine Il Populo (1946-1947). In November of the same year he was elected to the City Council (or Commune) of Rome.

On 17 September 1948, at Montecitorio he met Chiara Lubich and thereafter shared the ideals of the Focolare Movement, which she founded in 1943. Igino Giordani was the first married layman to take the promises of consecration to God in the Focolare Movement. He greatly appealed to the founder Chiara Lubich with all of his experience in the political and Christian sphere, with his familiarity with the realities of married life, being a family man, as well as an educator. She says that she "saw in him all of humanity”; she regarded him as 'a seed for all the lay vocations’ within the Focolare Movement, beginning with him the ‘Gen’ (a young people movement, the "new generation"), but "saw" in his figure even the priests, religious and young seminaries and novices who were to join the Movement. She saw in him "this very humanity summed up and renewed by the ideal of unity'; He was 'Foco', the ‘Fire' of the movement for she considered him invested with a real charism for the movement. For all this, shortly after the death of Igino, Chiara declared him 'co-founder' of the movement along with the priest Pasquale Foresi and the German Bishop, Klaus Hemmerle.

He was one of the authors of the first Bill on conscientious objectors, in 1949. Then, in 1953 he resigned from politics, and was an employee of the Osservatore Romano and Il Populo. He was engaged in intense cultural activity during this period.

Through his books and his various activities as a journalist, he anticipated in the years before the Second Vatican Council some topics on the spirituality of the family and the role of the laity in the Church. For this reason, he is often remembered as a precursor of the Conciliar renewal.

He continued as an important worker in the Focolare Movement:

After the death of this wife, and with the consent of his children, he lived the last seven years of his life in a "Focolare" community.

His work and his ideals are perpetuated by many associations that are named in his honor.

His cause for canonization is currently being promoted and his cause was completed in its Diocesan phase on September 27, 2009.

Works

The bibliographic entry written by Thomas Sally and published in Giordani segno dei tempi nuovi, Rome, 1994, pp. 175–192, contains 104 titles including essays and translations in addition to a listing of minor essays published as pamphlets or serials and the originals are preserved in the Archives of the Igino Giordani Center at Rocca di Papa. We list here some of the most important titles: