Aldo Moro with Padre Pio
Photo: Public domain – Wikicommons
By Gianluca Giorgio
ROME, December 01, 2022 / 6:00 PM (ACI Press).-
Aldo Moro – statesman killed by the Red Brigades on May 9, 1978, professor of criminal law – was in love with the gospel. This strong adherence emerges in all his activity as a politician and jurist.
Reading his writings, he filters his own way of understanding legal principles, in the light of his beliefs and his position in relation to spirituality. This also appears to be confirmed by joining the Dominican Third Order.
Enrolled in the Order of Preachers as a layman who lives in the world, his affiliation to the Dominican family was born in 1939 in Bari. Friend of many Dominicans, he knows their charism by choosing to adhere to it with conviction and authenticity.
He completed his novitiate and in 1940 made his solemn profession. The commitments of the member of the Third Order of St. Dominic are love of study, the diffusion of the gospel and truth, personal prayer, the life of fraternity and a filial devotion to Mary.
The existence of the tertiary sector flows throughout the world, as the place of action preferred by Guzman’s saint, and takes place in the ordinary practices of daily life. Preaching represents the central point of the spirituality of the tertiary sector with the meaning, however, of bearing witness in daily life to those values which are part of his being and of his profession in the Order.
Fra Gregorio – the name chosen by Moro – was faithful to these principles throughout his journey, living them in his own life as a Catholic and in political action. Blessed Bartolo Longo, venerable Giorgio La Pira, Luisa Piccaretta these and many other names were part of the Order, faithfully living the Dominican charism.
By opening the rich bibliography of the statesman, who also belongs to the Federation of Catholic University students, one learns how the sense of one’s juridical expression of these values lies in the attention to the concept of a person inserted within the state system.
This aspect emerges both in the subjectivation of the norm and in the essay on criminal juridical capacity – two writings by Moro. This is even more evident in a course on the philosophy of law that he held at the University of Bari in 1942, dedicated in part to the concept of the state-institution.
Without this, one cannot speak of a sense of the legal system, if it is not placed as a bulwark of those principles which are at the basis of the republican constitution.
Professor Moro participated in the Constituent Assembly together with Giuseppe Dossetti, Giorgio La Pira, Giovanni Leone. Catholic jurists close to tele sensibility and inserted in Italian history for professionalism and competence. Article 2 of the constitutional provision concerning the full recognition of the inviolable rights of the person confirms this: a lucid and coherent thought, deepened both in the work of Jacques Maritain, in Integral Humanism (1936) and in the theology of Saint Thomas of Aquino who puts the person at the center of one’s journey to reach God.
Aldo Moro, a Dominican tertiary, lived his Christian vocation in his family, in university teaching and in politics. Finally, those who knew him remember him as belonging to the community of Santa Maria della Minerva, where he went to attend community meetings.