Italian Chesterton Society

Last week I was privileged to be among the speakers at an informal conference organized in the hot Italian sunshine by the Italian Chesterton Society, whose blog is an important point of reference on matters connected with GKC. Some photos of the event can be found on the blog post for 5 July. In the course of a week of events celebrating the brief but luminous life of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, one day was set aside to discuss the philosophy and way of life known as DISTRIBUTISM – which seems to be alive and well in Italy. The country as a whole is blessed with relatively strong regional identities, strong families, and rich natural resources – and is the home of the Slow Food Movement. Of course, it, is affected as the rest of us by the economic crisis in Europe, but one feels that if anyone can find their way through the crisis to a new and saner way of life, it is the Italians. While there we heard about the Monti di Pieta (Montes Pietatis), credit unions and confraternities that flourished there in the past until swept away by modernity. The Italian Chesterton Society is playing its part in trying to revive such initiatives, by founding cooperatives to put Catholic social teaching into practice – and even a Scuola Chesterton, similar to the Chesterton Academy in the US. For my article proposing "a distributist philosophy of education" go to The Distributist Review.