Radical Innocent

Danilo Dolci speaks of Sicily as "the world of the condemned." He is, of course, not the first reformer to set a special value on the outlawed. In St. Francis' Fioretti, you see the same processions of criminals, lepers, the exiled and the tortured, that Dolci writes of in his angry indictments of the island's society. For St. Francis, these were the beloved of God, chosen by him to atone for the greed and spiritual bankruptcy of their fellows. But for Dolci, the outcasts of Sicily are simply a monument to men's obliviousness of one another.

His enemies call him the "Mad Apostle." Admirers call him a saint. Awards like the Lenin Peace Prize, support from both leftist and conservative groups in Italy and Europe, and acclaim from such different figures as Camus and Aldous Huxley make it difficult to determine just what kind of movement Dolci is leading. All that you can definitely say is that Dolci has been able to capture the imaginations of men throughout the world. His movement is non-violent, and he shuns politics as a source of corruption, yet he is attempting a regional development plan for all of eastern Sicily--a plan that must inevitably involve him in the bitterest kind of political quarrels--if not a revolution.

Dolci's complexity is really a radical innocence: he has an immediate and child-like reaction to wrong, and a child's ruthless logic: "I studied architecture in Rome and Milan, but one day I thought it over. In a country like Italy, architecture is for the rich. It becomes the art of putting injustices into stone. So I stopped." Overcoming the resistance of his family--"like all middle class Italian families, they wanted me 'systemized'"--Dolci went into social work. Until 1951, he wrote and published religious poetry, but he now considers himself an agnostic.

He came to Sicily in 1952, with no plan and no particular goal, knowing only that men were miserable there. Sicily was then, and according to Dolci is now, living in its own dark age. He began to draw up an indictment of a corrupt and bandit-ridden society of absentee landlords and what he considers the most oppressed rural proletariat in the world; a society where "violence and misery are so written into the order of things that men cannot even dream of change." The indictment took the form of a series of books whose titles tell their own story: To Feed the Hungry, Act Speedily and Rightly, for People are Dying, and Outlaws. Outlaws describes an area called Partinicio, where the population's "650 years at school ... is balanced by a total of more than 3000 years spent in prison." As in the rest of Sicily, hunger and unemployment drive men to crime, and Dolci says it is typical that, though four and a half billion lira were spent in nine years on police measures, "no one has lifted a finger to utilize the waters of a neighboring stream which, properly harnessed, would provide work for everyone."

Indictment of Sicily

Dolci has a map of Socily dotted with black crosses; each cross stands for a Mafia killing since 1945. The eastern end of the map is black with crosses; many of the killed were union leaders. The acceptance of violence in Sicily has led Dolci to put great emphasis on public displays of non-violence; these displays have of course made him more famous in Europe than his more substantial activities. One of his public hunger strikes forced the local government to build a dam for a village. Another form of non-violent protest was his reverse strike in 1956, for which he was imprisoned. 700 people from several villages began to work on a road construction project without pay and without official permission. Public response to these displays was encouraging, and, after his short prison term, Dolci saw "that I could move people, though I didn't know where to take them, or what was to be done."

What was to be done, he decided, was regional development. With money collected from groups in Italy and Western Europe, he located five community centers, each in the heart of an eastern Sicilian region. Each of the development centers now has a staff of experts and volunteer workers, and slowly the ratio of the experts (social workers, economists, planners, and teachers) to the unskilled volunteers is increasing.

A center's first problem is winning the people's trust. Sicilians are not apathetic, Dolci insists, or if they are, one has to define their kind of apathy: "they suffer like all human beings, and know that they are suffering, but they do not believe that change is possible." In one village, an agriculturist came and persuaded some of the less suspicious farmers to let him use a few worn-out fields for demonstration plots. He grew vegetables and fruit, instead of the Sicilian grain. "The first year, the people thought he was crazy, but then they saw his yields. The year after there were 39 similar plots, and the year after that, 81."

Meanwhile, a social worker had started a small school for the village's children, "who in Sicily always roam the streets like chickens." After a time, the people became used to strangers genuinely interested in their welfare, and, "although they still thought we were crazy," they were ready for what Dolci considers the most important step: "they began to think with us how they themselves could change things." Together, planners and the villagers began figuring out what the village needed, what it could do itself, and how the government could help it.

"They Fed Me..."

Up to now, the local and national governments have given Dolci little except harassment. Indeed, when asked what the government has done for him, Dolci usually answers, "I was in prison and they fed me for two months." His passport was lifted at one time, and one of his books was officially condemned as "obscene." As his staff prepares its regional development plans for all of the area covered by the five centers, it seems inevitable that Dolci's principle of non-violence will meet a real test. As he himself says, "The political, social, criminal, and reliigous authorities are one and the same in Sicily, and authority is against change." The Mafia still considers him "harmlessly crazy" he says, but has no idea how long they will continue to do so.

Dolci is in this country seeking trained personnel (especially anthropologists interested in cushioning the impact of technology), advice, and financial aid. Characteristically, he rejects offers of volunteers without some special skills: "the Peace Corps is sending five people over to us, but it is to train them, not to help us." He is disappointed with the lack of any current regional planning projects in America--"you had TVA once, but that is over now."

Whether Dolci is a Mad Apostle remains to be seen. Certainly there is hard calculation and a method in his madness, but just as certainly he is attempting peaceful change of a people that does not really understand what change is. Perhaps "change" is a wrong word--what he says he is trying to do is "give them spectacles to see with."