ABSTRACT

This chapter shows how Capitini’s practices of nonviolence answer the concern raised in Chapter 2. The first section focuses on the descriptive level through the analysis of the most well-known nonviolent action created by Capitini, the first Italian peace march of 1961. A nonviolent action – in this case the march emerges as a protest-to-project aimed at transcending the contention and enhancing self-restraint, personal responsibility and the inclusion of everybody in an open-ended project; it is a balance between destruction and construction, affecting physical, political and symbolic levels. Section two turns to the praxeological level. Capitini’s nonviolence emerges as a political approach, with a strong constructive drive beyond realism and moralism. At the centre of this approach there is the project of omnicracy or power of all. The last section turns to religion. Religion is the highest act in the construction of the reality of all. The encounter between nonviolence and religion leads to an ‘open’ religion, a new set of thought, an action towards complete openness to the others.