Enzo Bianchi, founder of the ecumenical community of Bose, has died

Enzo Bianchi, founder of the monastic community of Bose, died on the morning of 1 September 2026 at the Molinette hospital in Turin, at the age of 83. Hospitalised for some days with kidney failure, he closed a life of long-fragile health. Born on 3 March 1943 at Castel Boglione, in Piedmont, he had broken off his studies in economics to settle, in late 1966, in the abandoned hamlet of Bose, at Magnano, and there found a community.

Joined in the autumn of 1968 by the first brothers and sisters, he drew up the rule of a community that came to number some sixty members of five nationalities, present also at Ostuni, Assisi and Civitella San Paolo. Built on ecumenical and interreligious "dialogue", it gathered Christians of different confessions. A friend of Brother Roger of Taizé and close to the Orthodox patriarch Athenagoras, Bianchi was held to be one of the first interpreters of the orientations of the last council. In 1983 he founded the Qiqajon publishing house, devoted to biblical, patristic and monastic spirituality.

His influence reached beyond Bose. Named an expert at the synods of bishops on the Word of God (2008) and on the new evangelisation (2012), and an auditor at the synod on young people (2018), he was a consultor of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity from 2014 to 2019. Prior of his foundation until 25 January 2017, he then resigned, replaced by Luciano Manicardi, while remaining at the monastery.

The end was painful. By a decree of 13 May 2020, following an apostolic visitation, the Holy See asked Brother Enzo to withdraw from the community for an indefinite period, to help set right its internal life; from June 2021 he lived away from Bose, attached to a fraternity near Ivrea. In announcing his death, the community acknowledged that "the last years have been, for our community, very painful. We have suffered and we have made you suffer. Yet evil does not bring the good to nothing," and it published a last exchange dated 6 August, feast of the Transfiguration, presented as a reconciliation sought with his successor Sabino Chialà. There Bianchi wrote that he had "the awareness of being now at the end of my days" and that "the time has truly come to set sail."

What the Church has always taught about unity

The unity of Christians is not a work to be built by drawing together confessions held to be equally legitimate. Christ founded a single visible Church, and one enters it only by the whole profession of the same faith. Pius XI recalled it plainly against the pan-Christian movement: union will come about only "by the return to the one true Church of Christ of those who are separated from it," and to lend a hand to a federation where Catholics and dissidents assemble on an equal footing is to depart, little by little, from the divinely revealed religion. Leo XIII had laid down the principle: the Church is one by the unity of faith, of government and of worship, so that to break the unity of faith is to break the Church herself.

The measure

A community that gathers under a private rule members of divergent beliefs, and a life given to dialogue held as an end, stand in tension with this teaching. The perennial charity toward the separated brethren does not aim at their coexistence in difference, but at their return to the one fold. We measure here the work, not the man: of his soul and his salvation we pronounce nothing, remitting them to the mercy of God. We note only, soberly, that the Roman authority itself, by a formal act, judged that the internal life of this foundation called for a setting-right, and that the community publicly confessed its years of suffering.

For the faithful formed in the tradition, the lesson is simple and ancient. The way the Church has always shown is not the juxtaposition of confessions, but conversion to the one faith that saves and the whole profession of the Creed. One can love the men separated from unity without ever holding their separation to be a matter of indifference. Let us then hold to the faith as the Church has always taught it, taking nothing away from it.

Sources. Pius XI, encyclical Mortalium animos (6 January 1928); Leo XIII, encyclical Satis cognitum (29 June 1896); Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), from the article "I believe in the Holy Catholic Church."