The centenary of the birth of Giorgio La Pira (1904–1977) has seen an impressive set of commemorative events including the issue of an Italian postage stamp. Who was he? University law professor, a founding father of the Italian Republic, internationally renowned and long-serving mayor of Florence, politician, writer, someone capable of prophetic and daring actions and thoughts, and possibly a saint (his cause of canonisation opened in 1986). The two books under review focus respectively on La Pira as a follower of Aquinas and on his correspondence with Pius XII.

Possenti's volume, really a new edition of an earlier publication, results from the conviction (surely correct) that Aquinas was a constant and formative influence on La Pira. Aquinas, combined with the Scriptures and Catholic social teaching, stimulated and directed La Pira over decades of involvement with questions of war and peace, poverty, work, unemployment, housing, the role of the state, economics and international relations. This is an invaluable presentation, rapid but well researched and not uncritical, with approximately half the book forming an anthology of La Pira's writings on Aquinas, including the fascinating late study, Omaggio al Maestro. The texts date from 1939 to 1974, although this is only a selection of course. For Possenti, it was Aquinas (mediated in part by Maritain) who showed La Pira how to combine metaphysics with history, prophecy with politics, an account of the person with the contemporary history of peoples. La Pira had a strong sense of the teleology of history, and believed Vatican II would begin a new epoch for Church and world. Whilst centred on a strong life of faith and prayer, La Pira was no stranger to controversy and polemics: some considered him a ‘sacristy communist’.

Possenti makes an illuminating point in identifying La Pira's three preferred interlocutors as the poor, people of prayer and contemplation, and heads of State. Characteristically, in 1951 La Pira both contacted Stalin concerning peace in Korea and started to write to enclosed nuns asking for their supportive prayers. His tireless mission, no lesser word will do, took him to Africa, the Middle East, the United States and Asia, as well as different parts of Europe. In La Pira, all this activity combined dialectically with contemplation and reflection, inspired by Aquinas's thought on various philosophical and theological matters. Possenti presents several key topics in an engaging manner, making the reader want to read La Pira's own writings and know more about his manifold activities. His description of La Pira as a man of ‘struggle and contemplation’ is apt. La Pira lived for a number of years in the Dominican priory of San Marco (Florence), and remained very close to that priory. Possenti mentions that La Pira joined the Dominican Third Order in 1927, but does not go into the duration of his membership or his becoming a donatus.

From the work by a professor of philosophy, we can turn to a very different yet complementary volume. There are already various collections of letters from La Pira, and now for the first time the letters written in 1952–8 by La Pira to Pius XII and two of the Pope's closest collaborators, Mgrs Dell’Acqua and Montini (the future Paul VI), have been published. The letters, the introductions by Riccardi and Piersanti, and the notes are a treasure-trove. In these letters, La Pira tried to decipher the deeper currents of grace at work in world events, examined critically his own involvement and strategies, pondered what the papacy should do, and laid his examination of conscience before the Pope. Although there are no direct replies from Pius XII, La Pira knew that his letters were read and not unwelcome. The letters are printed in chronological order, falling into 8 broad thematic groupings: housing and work; from Florence to Moscow; the flag of peace; elections and the second La Pira administration; the Mediterranean as the centre of history; Italy as bridge between the West and the Arab world; Europe and the Arab risorgimento; the new politics.

In these letters, we can see in the kind detail usually found in diaries, La Pira's spiritual geopolitics, his attempt at once both visionary and realistic to understand what the times required and how certain places were crucial. One letter, written to Pius XII on 9 August 1957, encapsulates La Pira's attentive reading of events, his significant choice of places to visit, and his prophetic intuitions about the direction to be given to the future. Reflecting on his visit to Morocco, La Pira proposes for the Islamic world the model of authentic Western ‘Christian democracies’. This corresponds to the desire for a society and a state neither communist nor ‘American’(that is, capitalist and materialist). Reflection on the Algerian crisis generated another memorable letter from La Pira to Pius XII (18 April 1958), taking the West to task constructively and with precision. La Pira took a noteworthy interest in the Muslim world, and was denounced for it by some. Deep in public controversy over his stand for justice in an industrial dispute, La Pira wrote an impassioned letter to the Pope at Christmas 1953 recalling that as he had spoken out clearly to fascists and to communists so he was doing to the owners: ‘all things obey money’(quoting Ecclesiastes 10:19, as a saying of the Holy Spirit). In yet another letter (17 October 1955), La Pira tells Pius XII how he had organised in Florence a meeting of mayors of the capital cities of the world, and planned to speak in the Kremlin about Christ. These were ‘strange’ acts that break the logic of Machiavellianism and political rationalism, opening the way to hopes and values of another nature and weight.

Neither volume is intended to be a biography. Possenti demonstrates how La Pira took his own advice to university students: read and meditate Aquinas if you want to construct a truly Catholic mind. In his 1974 Omaggio to Aquinas, La Pira recalled how throughout forty years of cultural, political and constitutional experience Aquinas had lit up and guided his path. The letters to Pius XII show in detail how in the 1950s La Pira applied his Christian theology of history to local problems in Florence, politics in Italy, events around the Mediterranean, and epochal shifts on a world scale. A key idea for La Pira was ‘the geography of grace’.