About Igino Giordani

[suesch]

"As I entered a new century and elementary school, precisely in 1901, my father hired me to work with him as a bricklayer in my free time and summer holidays. I remember earning 5 pennies a week, the equivalent of one Italian lira every four weeks. I liked the trade and I strongly desired to become autonomous. And I viewed all this from an ethical and heroic point of view."

This is how Igino Giordani (or “Foco” as he was called later) starts off relating an adventure that he lived with intensity of thought and ardour of ideals. He had his own personal way of fighting to reach great goals for humanity such as freedom, social justice and peace (at the service of the “need of love between peoples”, he wrote in 1919). To meet these goals he assumed precise cultural and political commitments during the crisis of the old liberal State, in the anguish of the totalitarian regime, and then in the rising Italian democracy. He also gave witness with his life and proclaimed with his pen ecclesial realities that preceded some of the contents of the Second Vatican Council.

Thanks to the aid of a benefactor he had been able to continue his studies. Called to the arms in 1915, he refused to fire against others (“no enemies did I see”), but in opening a passage through a barricade at great personal risk earned a silver medal and was left with a permanent disability.

He later received a Bachelor of Arts degree and undertook various professional activities. As political restraints prevented him from teaching, he went to the United States where he studied library science and later was employed as such in the Vatican library. To support his family, a wife and four children, but also for an irrepressible vocation to write, he was an extremely productive author and journalist, producing thousands of articles, a few hundred booklets and essays, more than a hundred books. He wrote about the Fathers of the Church, apologetics, asceticism, hagiography, ecclesiology, and politics and he wrote fiction as well.

He became well-known both in Italy and abroad, as can be seen by the number of his books that have been published in various Italian editions and that have also been translated in Belgium, France, the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Serbia, Portugal, India, Japan and China. Some of his books continue to be translated today, even in Arabic.

http://www.iginogiordani.info/