From Columbia University Press:
Gianni Vattimo, a leading philosopher of the continental school, has always resisted autobiography. But in this intimate memoir, the voice of Vattimo as thinker, political activist, and human being finds its expression on the page. With Piergiorgio Paterlini, a noted Italian writer and journalist, Vattimo reflects on a lifetime of politics, sexual radicalism, and philosophical exuberance in postwar Italy. T. . Vattimo . . . became notorious both for his renewed commitment to the core values of Christianity (he was trained as a Catholic intellectual) and for the Vatican’s denunciation of his views. . . .
This tidbit about the Shroud of Turin caught my attention:
I, however, had my own personal master. Apart from school. A Thomist, an ultra-Thomist: Monsignor Fietro Caramello. A man who thought it was too progressive even to call himself a neoThomist. He used to protest that he was a Thomist period, forget the “neo.” He edited the works of Saint Thomas for the publisher Marietti, and he was the chaplain of the Sindone (the Shroud of Turin), practically a retainer of the House of Savoy. But I don’t believe the Shroud was very important to him. He certainly respected it as a relic, but he would never have undergone martyrdom for the Shroud. He was a philosopher. A philosopher. A master. But also a spiritual director, a friend. Maybe the person who did the most to bring me up, who was immensely fond of me and of whom I was immensely fond.
It was my parish priests who first sent me to him, who knows why. Maybe they thought they had stumbled upon the philosopher’s stone.
After I graduated from university we drifted apart, and it is one of my regrets that he died while I was in America. I was moved recently when I recognized him in a television documentary, where he is seen opening the reliquary and spreading out the sacred fabric.
Does anyone know what documentary?