«Pare di trovarci ai tempi apostolici o ai tempi delle persecuzioni». L’esperienza della grande guerra nel taccuino di un religioso soldato, fr. Giacinto Secco FSC

This paper examines the unpublished diary of the Piemontese Lasallian brother Giacinto (born Paolo Secco), who in May 1917 set off for the trenches in the Karst plateau and died there the following 29th August. His notebook describes the short but intense experience of a religious brother as a second lieutenant in an infantry regiment. His narrative offers an interesting view of the relationship between the religious life and the military one, (spirituality at the front) and the appropriate forms of piety, and his tragic encounter with total war and mass death. In his writing Brother Giacinto, Italian soldier and man of the cloth, reveals a substantial alienation from the national 〈war culturo〉. But the work also shows how decisive the tradition of catholic intransigence was in his ennobling of the war as an opportunity for sacrifice and atonement, legitimising in Christian terms the carrying out of a duty to fight to the death.