On 11 October 2025, in Saint Peter’s Square, Leo XIV addressed pilgrims from Tuscany:
“Don Lorenzo Milani, prophet of the Tuscan and Italian Church… had as his motto ‘I care’. I urge you not to be passive, and to do your part to shape the face of a Church that cares about people’s lives.”
Those words, spoken before thousands, were deliberate. They echoed Francis’s earlier praise of the same man. Leo knew exactly what he was saying. He was canonizing corruption.
Don Lorenzo Milani (1923 – 1967) was no prophet. He was a priest who wrote letters so vile that even his admirers blush to cite them.
***Reader Discretion Advised***
In a 1959 letter he admitted,
“If there is a danger for my soul, it is certainly not that I have loved too little, but that I have loved too much—meaning even to the point of taking them to bed. And then, who will ever be able to love boys to the bone without, in the end, putting it up their backside, if not a teacher who, together with them, also loves God, fears hell, and longs for heaven?”
Those are Milani’s own words, printed by his supporters. They read like the diary of a predator; an unholy mixture of piety and perversion. They reveal a mind that confused affection with lust, sanctity with sickness. Nothing in them speaks of holiness, only of the corruption of innocence dressed up as spiritual sensitivity.
This is the man Leo XIV called a prophet. Who Francis called a role model for priests! A priest who openly fantasized about sexual acts with boys is now held up as a model of “a Church that cares.” It is obscene. It is the inversion of everything Christ’s Church once stood for.
Milani’s educational experiment in Barbiana blurred every moral line between teacher and pupil. It became the seedbed for Il Forteto, the Tuscan commune whose founder, Rodolfo Fiesoli, boasted that he was realizing Milani’s vision “better and greater.” Italian courts later exposed Il Forteto as a system of organized sexual abuse of minors; Fiesoli is serving a fourteen-year prison sentence. Yet progressive media still call the project “inclusive education.”
Even friendly critics concede that Milani’s writings were “full of obsessions and contradictions.” That is a polite way of saying diseased. And still Leo XIV, following Francis, dares to proclaim this man a prophet.
Continue reading at Hiraeth In Exile