Abstract

This article constitutes a first attainment in a critical annotation work and study of a conspicuous sample of letters written from Northeastern Argentina by the Italian Priest and Little Brother of the Gospel Arturo Paoli during his first decade overseas (1960-1969) after his two consecutive forced departures from Rome (1954) and from Italy (1959). This epistolary documentation offers a privileged access key to the complex human and spiritual itinerary undertaken during the 1960s by this important figure of twentieth-century Italian Catholicism, in a country grappling with the burdensome inheritance of the Peronist period and in a Church in which Vatican II had the effect of a new detonator of more or less latent conflicts. Addressed to about twenty recipients, the Argentine missives allow us to throw a first light on an important, unknown, biographical segment of the life of this reluctant passeur between two continents, marked by the search for a new vital rooting in Latin America.