To Most of the world, Don Luigi Sturzo is known, if at all, as an astute political thinker and as founder of the Popolare Party in Italy following the First World War. Sturzo's own political career began in 1905, when he was elected mayor of the Sicilian town of Caltagirone, in spite of the fact that he himself was a priest. As he attests, he was brought to engage actively in politics, then as well as in 1918, when founding the Popolare, because he saw that social action, which his own town in Sicily needed badly, was impotent without the necessary political action to aid in carrying out reform.