Essays by Alessandro Andreini, Vincenzo Arnone, Marco Beck, Ilaria Crotti, Enrico Elli, Elena Landoni, Giuseppe Langella, Pasquale Maffeo, Marta Morazzoni, Roberto Osculati, Fulvio Panzeri, Guglielmina rogante, Ferruccio Parazzoli, Elena Rondena, Sarah Sivieri, Francesco Diego Tosto,

The modern literature is full of priests or religious, all invested with a mission so delicate and precious. Of course, there have been, in the past, the complaints, even severe, on account of their work, that they were legitimate or the result of ideological bias. The Vatican has marked this respect, a true watershed, with a total rethinking of theological and sacramental mystery of the Church. With some lasting consequences, such as the abandonment of the critical aspects that had fueled the controversy for decades anticlerical. The care of souls is thus came to associate the teaching of the Beatitudes and the Ministry of proximity and mercy.

But the Council, proclaiming the "universal priesthood" of all the baptized and giving prominence to the Church as well as "people of God", gave the Catholic laity a relief and a function within the community of the faithful, who in the course of centuries had gone eclipsing. The narrative also regularly records this significant change, suggesting some emblematic figures of committed lay people, exemplarily faithful to their baptismal promises.

Witnesses of God's love in a world often devoured by selfishness, hatred, mistrust, dall'abbrutimento, the one and the other, "clergy and laity", together form a unique line of resistance to the loss of 'modern man and to the absence, on the literary construction of the character, the figure of the hero.