“By now the idea is spreading that revolutions so far are not enough and we must develop a revolution which will remedy their faults and go a step forward. This new revolution is the open revolution.” Aldo Capitini Hymn Idea
““Continuous attention must be directed to the behaviour of others and ourselves, trying to pinpoint the creative aspect, the contribution towards the good, the opening towards a greater value, the courage of having decided against the majority. It will seem to us that the moral contribution of the ones who have made themselves the instruments of prejudice and privileges is small, and instead it is great the contribution of those who try to awaken the conscience of everyone, even with their own personal sacrifice.” Aldo Capitini Hymn Courage , Personality
“And you mother still close to me,you know that it is not enough to live an ordered and honest life.You have been faithful for years to bring order into our house.As soon as the dawn appeared in the night sky,you rose towards the tasks awaiting you –in the silence of a mental prayer.Perhaps it is not enough even the overwhelming love,to which you gave the sober expression of concrete acts.The sacred wool, the steaming milk and the bedcomposed with inimitable care by your hands.Going back in time you recounted to your children their births,and the birthdays have slowly vanished.The beginning is now found from a thousand beginnings,with the ancient, with the unknown, with Christ.A present act includes them all,opening after the events have passed.And there is a severe duty for struggle,something in our own life could be wrenched away by it.The guards will soon appear,and they will take me to my cell with the high window.You will still be with me,as mother and inexhaustible human presence.Giving freely of your love, you still knew that your son is freedom.You were a nearness, that always found something to do.I have watched you unflinching under hardness and spite,always moving, and acting,holding back your inner rebellion you had pity on rage.Now we are together to work and open all around.In the loving gift to the world which ever crucifies usis our fulfilment.Seeing its limitations, still to treasure everythingis the gesture of infinite miracle,and you were right: order comes from this principle,the earthly goods, as our brothers the prophets tell us,will be given unto us.” Aldo Capitini Love , Life , Children , World
“I wanted to go away, in the midst of something entirely different,I had been there, in the house of torture,I have seen people being kicked, men’s bodies scorched,nails pulled out with pliers.Armed with flame and cudgels, grinning men in shirt sleeves.Where I could hear my friends being thrown headlongdown the stairs.Night was as day, and long shrieks wounded me.In vain I tried to think of wooded lanes and flowers,a serene life and human words.The thought seized up, it was as if a wound were opened upagain and again and endlessly searched.From the mouth struck, teeth and blood came out,and lamenting moans from the deep throat.Away, away from that house, from that street and town,from anything similar to it.I must save myself, keep up my mind,that I should not be led to madness by these memories.Oh, if we could go back to a void, from which a new order,a maternal opening could come forth,if I hear a certain tone of voice even in jest, I shudder.My unhappiness is that I avoid the sight of suffering,hospitals and prisons.I have yearned for high solitudes, lands of still sunshineand sweet shadows,but I would always be pursued by the ghosts of human beings.All of a sudden I feel the need of distraction and play,to lose myself in the noise of the fairground.I remain with you, but forgive meif you see me sometimes act like a madman.I try to heal myself by myself, as an animal,trusting that the wounds will close.I stop to listen to the simple conversations of the womenin the marketplace, with their dialectical lilt.I rejoice at the footsteps of running children,their overpowering calls.Because you do not know the absurdity of my dreams,the fixed expressions, the incomprehensible gestures.There is turmoil inside me, which seems to ridicule me.And I cannot cry out, not to be like them.Tomorrow I will go towards some music, now I am getting ready.” Aldo Capitini Life , Women , Men , Children
“The true synthesis is only with the unforeseen.Detach yourself from a pledge left behind and open yourselfto a command which supremely calls,without trembling at the freedom suddenly infinite.Do not pay your extreme homage to the dead,there is something beyond.Even the sound of bells is only a preparation,and beyond the voice of orchestras, a new sublimity.Who has been more worn by life, knows it.To love, to be reborn together, open sky.” Aldo Capitini Hymn Love , Life , Freedom , Dead
“Nonviolence is opening to the existence, freedom and development of every being” Aldo Capitini Hymn Freedom
“The important thing is to understand that in the struggle for freedom and Socialism the uniting revolutionary element was violence (which then was impairing the freedom and Socialism); now instead we add as the revolutionary uniting element this passion for nonviolent activity open to total liberation.” Aldo Capitini Hymn Understanding , Freedom , Passion
“We approach one another as if we were separate entities and see the other only from a limited point of view – not as part of us; we do not open ourselves to others with complete faith. When we first encounter objects or persons we think, because of this feeling of separateness, that they are just as we find them and nothing else. But if my attitude towards this person is of love, interest, oneness, then I will lose that first impression of having accidentally found them and will grow beyond my limitations towards something at once more intimate and more vast.” Aldo Capitini Hymn Love , Faith , Feeling , Thinking
““Violence and materialism will become so widespread that from them will come weariness and disgust: and from the execution block a passionate yearning will rise to withdraw one’s spirit from any collaboration with that error, and to at once initiate, starting with ourselves (which is the first progress), a new way to relate to life: the feeling that the world is alien to us if we have to stay in it without love, without an infinite opening of one towards the other, without a unity above so many differences and so much suffering…This is the present threshold of history.” Aldo Capitini Hymn Love , Life , World , Way
“From a high tower I have looked to the four points of the horizon.I will go and lift up the dead on the battlefield.I will stretch out their contorted arms and legs.I will close their cold eyelids on their fixed pupils.I cannot bear to see eyes if I do not receive any words.Invisible life entrusts us with sad tasks,I look back to my years, and the pains I have sufferedare not enough.Soon there will be clashings of men and horrible clanging sounds.And people hunted, pushed, wrenched.Also I will find myself in the midst of the madness of war.I will open pure words, orders of thought, fraternal acts.In the meantime they will bring forward the mancondemned to death and they will tell him to dig his own grave.He will look up at the still hills and the sky.Some distant sounds of life will still reach him.He will not have time to think back to his many days –to the voices of his dear people, and the close relationships.Not even will he be able to look ahead,to come to terms with what is happening now.And when the shots will be fired, with the flash a cry will go upThe human cry which is too late, and it’s lost.To free, to free as soon as possible.They will ask me: why don’t you come to fight with us?They will not understand, they will carry on with the war.I loved to be with other people, as the light of the day.It is so good to work together, in trust, in mutual help.To lose myself in the crowd in modest clothes.In a circle of equals to listen and to speak.And now nobody wants to listen, and yet they are all people.I have become a stranger, the others do not know that I am there.The abrupt reply, the friend who looks the other way.It would be easy to join them in earnest action.Forgetting the deeper unity, beyond the war?I remain here, isolated from everybody,working for a deeper togetherness.Everything was only a trial, reality must yet begin.Every being was partaking of another reality yet he did not know.But now this reality is becoming clear,and it matters only what opens us to it.” Aldo Capitini Love , Life , Death , Men
“The only law to which we can give our obedience is the one of which we are convinced. And this way to act cannot be alleged to be egocentric or disorderly. First of all it is easy to realize that everybody really acts like this, that is, he does not obey laws to which the doors of his conscience have not been willingly opened. But the difference lies in that some choose an authority, and from then onwards are prepared to obey all its commands. Others instead prefer to often re-examine the reasons for these prescriptions, and do not entrust anybody with the keys of their own conscience. This does not mean that they will want to undertake a deep study of every law, every regulation, but the fact is that they do not recognize even their country’s government or their society’s president as an absolute authority. This second way will certainly be more tiring, but it is certain that the first will be more dangerous, because it diseducates people and harms those who exercise power and those who are governed.” Aldo Capitini Hymn People , Law , Way , Exercises
“We try to transform our spirits using nonviolent means towards everybody; and this love and sacrifice gives us the guarantee that what we cannot change with our own human strength will be changed by the future, by the infinite, by nature, by God (according to the various faiths, it doesn’t matter; what matters is this opening beyond our actual forces, in the name of love for everybody, of the honesty, of the purity of the values on which conscience feeds).” Aldo Capitini Hymn Love , God , Faith , Nature
“The open revolution changes also the spirit of man, the relationship between man and man, because it changes the method of struggle. Therefore it brings a total transformation of power economy and nature.” Aldo Capitini Hymn Nature , Change