Tullio Vinay

Tullio Vinay was born on 13 May 1909 in La Spezia. He was the third child of Pietro Giosuè, a Waldensian teacher, and Iside Saccomani, the daughter of a director of a Baptist mission school. He and his brothers (Valdesina, Valdo, and Cornelio) completed secondary studies in Trieste and at the Waldensian College in Torre Pellice. He pursued theological training at the Waldensian Faculty of Theology in Rome and the New College in Edinburgh. During his studies, he edited the periodical La Luce and served as a temporary substitute for pastors in Rome during summer holidays.

In 1934, following a probationary year in Milan, Vinay was consecrated as a pastor of the Waldensian Evangelical Church and assigned to Florence (1934-46), during which time he participated in anti-fascist resistance. During the war, Vinay hid several dozen Jews in the pastoral house in Florence to save them from deportation. This effort was later formally recognised by the State of Israel. In 1941, he married Fernanda Teodori, with whom he had two children. 

As the War came to an end, Vinay served as the secretary of the Federation of Waldensian Unions (FUV), edited the journal Gioventù Evangelica, and organised youth camps in Prali. Influenced by Giovanni Miegge and Barthian theology, he began to challenge the authoritarian management of the Waldensian church. In 1951, he inaugurated the Agape ecumenical centre in Prali, designed (pro bono) by architect Leonardo Ricci. As Ricci noted in a letter to Vinay, 'My life as an architect is but an episode of my inner life, an ordinary act like so many acts make up our day'. The centre was built by volunteers as a site for international reconciliation and encounter. Vinay directed Agape until 1960. In addition, in 1952 Vinay was a founding member of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation and led a group to Calabria and Lucania to conduct a social inquiry into Italy's depressed areas. Among these, the agricultural towns of the South (particularly Sicily, after the collapse of the sulphur mining industry) were in particularly dire need. As a result, he began to develop his concept of "political diakonia"—the idea that the church must perform social and political service for the world. In 1954 Vinay collaborated with Danilo Dolci, providing aid for Dolci's social initiatives in western Sicily and sending youth volunteers from Agape to assist. He would form many close friendships with Sicilian thinkers and activists over time, among them Dolci and the socialist poet Calogero Bonavia.  

This involvement led, over time, the foundation of the "Servizio Cristiano" in Riesi, Sicily (1961–1975). In 1961, Vinay moved with his family and a group from Agape to Riesi to establish the "Servizio Cristiano" (Christian Service). Working again with architect Leonardo Ricci, he founded a centre to combat poverty, illiteracy, and the influence of the mafia. The next year, during the Belice earthquake, Vinay and the local community in Riesi mobilised alongside the Salesians to provide significant social solidarity and relief. In 1964 he was a primary mover for the establishment if a primary school in the town. Over the following years, he established a nursery school, a professional school for mechanics, an agricultural centre, a library, and a pediatric clinic.

Meanwhile, the social justice thought of his first 'village' (Agape in Prali) was advancing, and absorbing the influences of the student revolutions of 1968, the peace movement and the ecumenism which had gained traction after Vatican II.  In 1973 Vinay travelled to South Vietnam with don Enrico Chiavacci on an inquiry mission regarding political prisoners, promoted by Amnesty International and Pax Christi. The next year, he helped found the Action of Christians for the Abolition of Torture (ACAT). In Riesi, he opened a family counselling centre. In 1976, Vinay was elected to the Italian Senate as an independent on the Italian Communist Party (PCI) list. His decision to run sparked intense debate within the Waldensian Synod regarding the relationship between faith and political commitment. One of his early parliamentary contributions was the proposal for a 'Minister of Peace' (Ministro della Pace), presented in February 1977. This aligned with Article 11 of the Italian Constitution (renouncing war) and UN principles, emphasizing nonviolent conflict resolution. He was re-elected to the Senate in 1979, where he served on committees for Labour, Foreign Affairs, and Ecology. His parliamentary work focused on disarmament, environmental protection, and women's rights. In 1981–1982 he received the honorary title of "Righteous Among the Nations" (1981) and the Medal of the Righteous (1982) from Israel for his wartime actions in Florence. Throughout his later life, he received honorary degrees from the Universities of Montpellier and Prague, the Leopold Lucas Prize from Tübingen, and peace awards from the Queen of the Netherlands.

Tullio Vinay died in Rome on 2 September 1996.

Works

• Giorni a Riesi (Torino 1966)

• Ho visto uccidere un popolo. Sud Vietnam: tutti devono sapere (Torino 1974); 

• L’utopia del mondo nuovo. Scritti e discorsi al Senato (Torino 1984)

• Die politische Diakonie der Kirche (Tübingen 1987); 

• L’amore è più grande. La storia di Agàpe e la nostra (Torino 1995)

• Speranze umane e speranza cristiana. Scritti religiosi e politici, edited by Goffredo Fofi (Roma 2014).

• L'utopia del mondo nuovo: scritti e discorsi al Senato, preface by Luigi Anderlini and with a postscript by Carlo Galante Garrone (Claudiana, Torino, 1984).

Sources

• Associazione amici di Agape Centro ecumenico, Agape: 60 anni e non sentirli. 1951–2011 (Prali: Agape, 2011).

• Burigana, Riccardo, Una straordinaria avventura. Storia del movimento ecumenico in Italia (1910–2010) (Bologna: EDB, 2013).

• Grifo, Marco, Le reti di Danilo Dolci. Sviluppo di comunità e nonviolenza in Sicilia occidentale (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2021).

• Jourdan, Marco (ed.), Un viaggio chiamato Riesi. I 50 anni del Servizio cristiano (Torino: Claudiana, 2011).

• Margotti, Marta, ‘Agape. Un villaggio sulla frontiera,’ in Paolo Naso (ed.), Storia dei valdesi, vol. 4 (Torino: Claudiana, 2023), pp. 443–461.

• Margotti, Marta, '‘The Protestantism of the Future?’: the Agape Centre and Protestant Catholic Cooperation', in M. Hutchinson, D. Saresella, and P. Zanini, The Brill Global History of Italian Protestantism (Leiden: Brill, 2026), pp. 358-369.

• 'Vinay, Tullio', Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani vol. 99 (2020), https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/tullio-vinay_(Dizionario-Biografico).