Natale Benazzi, Vestire gli ignudi. Alloggiare i forestieri (‘Clothing the Naked. Housing Strangers’), San Paolo, Milan, 2016, 90pp.

A Saint, a Story

Brother Ettore Boschini, the madman of God who welcomed and clothed.

In the Milan of the 1960s, but even more in the Milan of thirty years later, certainly one of the most well-known and most original figures, at the boundary – for many people – between madness and saintliness, was Ettore Boschini – ‘Brother Ettore’ for all those who learnt to know him and appreciate him, but also for those who disapproved of him for a long time and contested what he did, which seemed impracticable to most people: taking unto him all those whom nobody wanted to even draw near to.

As a good son of St. Camillus de Lellis, of the inventor of the modern idea of care, Brother Ettore did not manage to avoid seeing himself as similar to that unfortunate knight who – five centuries previously – had changed hospitals starting with a simple insight – that of a mercy that can only give of itself entirely when it makes itself the last with the last.

Where St. Camillus had taught the West how to take care of the sick, observing that they are a concrete image of the suffering Christ, Brother Ettore taught an entire epoch the meaning of welcoming people who nobody wants: tramps, the homeless, foreigners. The tent of Brother Ettore was like the tent of Abraham with its borders extended to the extremes, perhaps to excess as well, but a tent which today more than ever before appears prophetic, almost necessary.

Download the PDF here