Taken from Introduction by Rosy Bindi and Paolo Nepi to the volume Vittorio Bachelet, The responsibility of politics, AVE 1992
That demanding lesson of method from which we started finds its fulfilment, in the case of Bachelet, in the tragic but not desperate epilogue of death. Tragic, as an unnatural term, but not desperate, as for a Christian death is never the sign of a failure, above all when it becomes for others an occasion of redemption from the evil of violence.
When we have to talk about the violent death of a good and just man, to whom we have been bound by authentic relationships of affection and friendship, it is not easy to escape rhetoric. But this should not constitute an alibi for keeping silent, since not considering Vittorio Bachelet's death as a privileged way to understand his life would be a grave error of perspective, an unforgivable reticence. It is therefore necessary to accept the risk of always measuring oneself with that death, whose spiritual significance must continue to worry us, of that same uneasiness that certainly unsettled the perpetrators themselves and all those who have returned to that episode since that day, seeing in it something more than a news story of terrorism.
From the outset, Bachelet's death disturbed some notoriously and professedly secular consciences, who did not make their position at the top of the democratic state grounds for an exclusively institutional duty to share in the pain of their families, but who sincerely admitted that they saw in that death something different from the ordinary. That death unsettled a large sector of terrorism, which however had made homicidal violence a tragic instrument of political struggle, and which was therefore psychologically and ideologically equipped to overcome the emotions of feelings. But the death of the righteous is in itself an insurmountable sign of contradiction, inexorably confining those who have sown terror on the losing side. It is the law by which, in a Christian way, life always defeats death.
Only a historiography attentive to the values of the spirit, what Giorgio La Pira used to call the "historiography of the depths", is able to understand the meaning and role that Bachelet's death and martyrdom played in the moral defeat of terrorism, of its political delegitimization, of its military-organizational isolation, of the delivery of many terrorists to the laws of justice, of the failure of terrorist violence as a method of political action.
A true Christian like Vittorio Bachelet had repeatedly meditated on what can certainly be considered the most demanding command of Jesus to his followers: "no one has a greater love than those who lay down their life for their friends". In his frequent reference to some authentic modern martyrs of the faith, such as Maximilian Kolbe and Martin Luther King, someone saw it as an omen or at least as a thorough understanding of the demands of a religious belief centered on the redemptive value of Christ's death. In his speeches and in his writings there are frequent references to the demands of the Cross, a sign that he had certainly taken into account, in terms of a mature spiritual attitude, the duty to consider himself ready even for the supreme trial.
Therefore, the idea with which we intend to conclude this introduction should not appear paradoxical, saying that we must seek the highest political teaching of Vittorio Bachelet in his death, in the definitive gift of his life for a better life of the country. Cardinal Martini rightly defined his death as a "lay martyrdom", because he was killed in the name of those lay values of freedom and democracy, justice and peace for which he had worked. Indeed, if we ask ourselves why he was killed, we will have to answer that he was the victim of that terrorism which in its perversion had the lucidity to deprive us of the best men, of those who were capable of making the institutions it wanted to destroy transparent and efficient, we will have to answer that it was victim of a political project that goes beyond the Red Brigades and which, even today, pursues the design of depriving the country of the leadership or in any case of the significant presence of democratic Catholics in politics. But definitively we will have to conclude that Bachelet was killed, in a Christian logic, because when a people suffers there is always the just man who gives his life. And his death should be seen precisely as the luminous testimony of a martyr who shed his blood for the defense of the supreme political values of law and justice.
