Our revolution

One day I was telling our story to a group of high school kids in Turin; some students already knew us, they had already visited the Arsenale several times, while the majority were seeing me for the first time. Reasoning with them, listening to their questions, I realized that there were two souls in that class: the revolutionary one, who affirmed that the system must be overthrown at all costs, that part of society that oppresses the weakest must be brought down, and the other willing to suffer what happens.

Disheartened boys, passively angry, who devalue themselves, who don't value themselves, passive in everything. After all, revolutionaries in reverse.
I didn't give anyone precise answers, but I said that at the Arsenale della Pace we want to make a revolution, indeed we've been doing it for a few years, but it's a slightly different revolution.

Our revolution is called restitution, it doesn't subvert systems, it doesn't bring down the enemy, it doesn't replace evil with a hypothetical good, it doesn't blow heads, it doesn't judge, it doesn't condemn anyone to death. Our revolution is silent, it is slow, it takes place within people, within systems. Our revolution transforms and starts from the initiative of each of us who can decide to live it by giving back. Because it's normal, because it's right, because it's not something striking, because it's obvious that if someone dies of hunger we have to help him. And we do. Does one struggle? We have to help him, it's normal and we do it. And let's try to do it wisely, with intelligent charity.
We have discovered that perhaps that revolution is not noticed at the moment, perhaps it seems less impactful, but it changes things and makes people change; it makes us discover that no one is to be condemned, neither ourselves nor the others because everyone can redeem himself, because everyone can do something good, even those who were thought to be absolute evil. This is the real revolution and we carry this revolution in prayer, before God.
In front of Jesus crucified and risen, the one who made the only truly great revolution in history, silent, discreet, which leaves us free.

In our history, in the midst of so much suffering we have encountered, we have also glimpsed a good that does not give up. Indeed, it is precisely when evil is unleashed, as in the case of the war in Ukraine, that good does not disappear, indeed it can surprise! Good surprises if ordinary people - like us - begin to engage consistently in a myriad of small and large acts of goodness. Every day, beyond the color of the skin, political or religious beliefs, the various ages or states of life. Where we are… at home, at school, at work.

I don't know if I convinced them, but they certainly listened.
And some of them have come to help out. Like so many others, young people and adults who, for a few days or for years and years, have given back their time and skills by making something more powerful in this house than what the old arms factory did. It is the strength of good that develops in silence, in discretion, in an apparent weakness, which opens a path in which everyone can become a protagonist, the one that really changes the world in the end.

Mattia Cignolo
FOCUS
NP May 2023