Giovannino Guareschi’s Don Camillo stories are delightful little tales set in the “little world” of an Italian town in the Po valley in the years immediately after World War II.  What makes them wonderful is their pure humanity, the sheer warmth of the oft-contentious between Don Camillo, his eternal rival, the communist mayor Peppone, and the surprisingly loquacious crucifix which hangs in Don Camillo’s church.  I very much recommend the stories.

The following quotes don’t truly give a picture of this sense I’m describing, but they were my favorites, spoken by Jesus to Don Camillo (taken from the Kindle edition, so I have no page numbers to offer you).  First on the perils of progress:

They search desperately for justice on earth because they no longer have faith in divine justice, and just as desperately go after worldly goods because they have no faith in the recompense to come. They only believe in what they can touch and see….It is a body of ideas – a culture – that leads to ignorance, because when a culture is not supported by faith, there comes a point where man sees only the mathematics of things. And the harmony of this mathematics becomes his God, and he forgets that it is God who created this mathematics and this harmony.

Rustic Philosophy, The Little World of Don Camillo

Reading them again, I realize the ideas they express are rather Chestertonian.  Indeed, the whole little world of Don Camillo is the sort of place you’d feel Chesterton would enjoy, maybe that’s why I liked it so much.

Christ’s ultimately optimistic take on the effects of this progress:

Progress makes man’s world ever smaller: one day, when cars run at 100 miles a minute, the world will seem microscopic to men, and then mankind will find itself like a sparrow on the pommel of a flagpole and will present itself to the infinite, and in the infinite it will rediscover God and faith in the true life. And mankind will hate the machines which have reduced the world to a handful of numbers and it will destroy them with its own hands. But all this will take time, Don Camillo. So do not worry, your bicycle and your scooter are in no danger for now.’

Rustic Philosophy, The Little World of Don Camillo