A Story That’s Continuing

What Catholic Action have the 150 years of the Association’s history formed? This is the question that Antonia Pillosio’s documentary “Catholic Action a Continuing Story” is intended to answer. The film will be presented in Rome on 17 November.

In the course of these years of the history of Catholic Action—explains the national president, Matteo Truffelli—the association has evolved in order to “remain faithful to what was originally a group of lay people who wanted to share the responsibility for accomplishing the Church's evangelizing mission in the world.”

A note made public by the association quotes the words of the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin: “The Pope recognizes that Catholic Action has taken as the program for its life and activity the indications that he gave in Evangelii Gaudium, and I believe that these statements are fundamentally summed up with two terms: disciples and missionaries.”

The story—“accompanied” by the historians Giovanni Vian and Giorgio Vecchio—begins in 1867 with the first steps of the association, when two young laymen, Mario Fani and Giovanni Acquaderni, feeling the responsibility to respond to the Church’s difficult historical situation in those years, founded the Society of Catholic Youth, which was the first cell of today’s Catholic Action.

The historical account is enriched by some original insights of Maria Dutto, president of Catholic Action in Milan between 1976 and 1983, on Girl’s Youth Association and the figure of Armida Barelli during the post-war years.