Angelo Simonetti – Wikipedia

Angelo Simonetti (Firenzuola, 23 January 1861 – Pescia, 14 August 1950) was an Italian Catholic Bishop.
It was the 13th bishop of the city and diocese of Pescia.

Native of the hamlet of Cornacchiaia, he entered the seminary of Firenzuola at the age of ten and was ordained a priest on March 21, 1885.
In the same seminar, he will carry out Rector’s job.
Novello priest, he devoted himself to the political commitment, becoming councilor and then deputy mayor of the Municipality of Firenzuola, positions that he maintained up to the assignment of his first parish, the Pievania of S. Piero in Mercato, in Montespertoli (FI).
It was in S. Piero that the papal bubble of appointment as bishop of Pescia came to him on December 16, 1907.
He chose to be consecrated at the seminar of Cestello, at the hands of the then archbishop of Florence Alfonso Maria Mistrangelo, on January 9, 1908, and made solemn entry to Pescia on July 21.

Simonetti proved to be a bishop very attentive to the cultural formation of priests and the study of aggregative forms for the lay people.
In the diocese, many important Catholic cultural institutions flourished, which educated young people also from a trade union and political point of view.
The interest in political events never left him and in 1909, found in dissent with the powerful local liberal deputy Ferdinando Martini, former Minister of Education and Long -Course, moved so that a Catholic candidate presented himself in the college of Valdinievole Intransigent, in the person of the Florentine lawyer Guido Donati, alternative to both liberals and socialists.
In the following years, where it was possible, for example in the municipality of Massa and Cozzile, he encouraged administrative experiences of Catholic only.
He saw the birth of the Italian People’s Party of the Sicilian priest Luigi Sturzo and allowed many diocesan priests to have animators and propagandists.

In front of the birth of fascism, he proved to be the opposite at the beginning, then chose the path of dialogue, but maintaining spaces of autonomy and veiled dissent.
He never had opportunities for clash with the local fascists, however he left wide autonomy to those sectors of the local Catholic world already close to the popular party and which in the following years would have participated in the resistance and foundation of Christian democracy.
Before the fascist racial laws of 1938, he proved hostile.

During the Second World War, he was very close to the population of Pescia and his diocese and promoted significant welfare works at the expense of the local Church.
He himself dealt with the burial of the dead under the bombings, making them stirred in the garden of the Espiscopio, and intercede the authorities, at the time of the German employment, for the liberation of the prisoners.
He created with his parish priests a dense welcome work to refugees from many locations in Tuscany.
He managed to save his priest, who had participated in partisan actions, appealing to the concordat (the priest, subjected to canonical law, had to be “imprisoned” in the bishopric) and save him to shooting.
The gesture most remembered by the population was to have saved the city of Pescia from complete destruction.
In fact, in retaliation, the retired Germans against the local partisans (Pescia will be awarded the bronze medal of the resistance for the intense partisan activity carried out on its territory), had decided to set fire to the houses of the inhabited center, at the expense hundreds of victims.
The bishop, first through an Austrian woman residing in Pescia, Assunta Mayerhofer, who had already worked as an interpreter at the German command and at the Municipality, then personally going by the commander of the square and offering his life, managed to avoid the tragic action.
The Germans, however, destroyed all the bridges on the Pescia river and hanged twenty hostages at the Ligustri of Viale Forte and Viale Garibaldi, partly prisoners at the state prison, as retaliation for the killing of two German soldiers.

After the post -war period, now elderly, he continued his pastoral work woven in civic commitment.
He was awarded the golden megaglia to civil valor for preventing Pescia from was razed to the ground.
He did not hold openly anti -communist positions and this earned him the esteem and collaboration of the first municipal administrations freely elected by Valdinievole, mainly leftist.
At the same time, however, followed the rooting work of the Christian Democracy, which was made up of many representatives of the Catholic Action and other secular aggregations, which it trained.
In 1948, to celebrate the forty -year of his entrance to Pescia, the AC, the ACLI, the Catholic masters etc. They promoted the establishment of a house of the Catholic associations of Pescia named after him, still existing, in the premises of the former church of S. Maria Nuova.
In 1950, a few months after his death, he made a sensation of his position contrary to the nuclear rearmament, which the leftists, opposite in 1949 at the entrance of Italy in NATO, used as an element of criticism of the centrist government (if He talked about it on L’Unità, PCI printing body).
By now ninety -year -old and sick, he died on August 14, 1950.
The funeral was, according to the witnesses, an authentic triumph of people, without political or religious distinction.
He is buried in the Turini Chapel of the Cathedral of Pescia.

Episcopal genealogy is:

• Amleto Disquicciani (edited by), Fifty years of diocesan life. Mons. Angelo Simonetti Bishop , Edizioni Ets, 2003.