Riccardo Lombardi and South America: The dream of "a better world"

For contemporary historiography and in the popular imagination, Father Riccardo Lombardi, Jesuit and founder of the Movement for a Better World, remains a rather unenlightened character, gifted with a rather convenient sense of democracy: a sort of authoritarian chaplain of the Catholic right, one of the principal artisans of the famous Operation Sturzo. His character has often been the object of summary interpretations rather frequently linked to a historiographical perspective of ideological inspiration, which have hampered an understanding and analysis of the complexity of his work and human experience on the basis of purely politological categories. The path he travelled had effects on the life of the Church which went well beyond the strictly Italian context. Both his preaching and message profoundly marked international Catholicism, particularly Latin American, and found a powerful echo in the life of that Church, to the point of being determinant in the education and human and spiritual itineraries of a whole generation of ecclesiastics.