Don Milani

Lorenzo Carlo Domenico Milani Comparetti (1923 –1967) was an Italian Roman Catholic priest. He was an educator of poor children and an advocate of conscientious objection.

His father, Albano Milani, and his mother, Alice Weiss, were staunch secularists. Alice Weiss was Jewish and a cousin of Edoardo Weiss, one of Sigmund Freud's earliest disciples and the founder of the Italian Psychoanalytic Association.

In June 1943, after a period of study at the Brera Academy, Milani converted from agnosticism to Roman Catholicism, perhaps after a chance conversation with Don Raffaele Bensi, who later became his spiritual director. He also exchanged a complacency of the economically fortunate for solidarity with the poor and despised. He was ordained a priest in 1947 and sent to assist Don Daniele Pugi, the old parish priest of San Donato in Calenzano. There he established his first "school of the people" (scuola popolare), The fact that it served children from both believing and non-believing families scandalized conservative Catholic circles. After Pugi's death in 1954, Milani was sent to Barbiana, a small, remote village in the Mugello region.

At Barbiana, Milani continued his radical educational activities despite both clerical and lay opposition.