On Tuesday, April 8th 2025, Father Luca Mazzinghi was confirmed as President and Baptist minister Luca Maria Negro was appointed as the new General Secretary of the Bible Society in Italy (Società biblica in Italia, SBI) at the SBI’s annual general assembly in Rome. The exiting General Secretary, Mario Cignoni, was named Honorary President of the Society. Cignoni has also been the coordinator of the recent Ecumenical Literary Translation (TLE) of the New Testament, which was presented in Rome last February 25th.
President Mazzinghi, who is professor of Old Testament at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, announced the next major challenge: “the ecumenical translation of the Old Testament, which is even more complex because of the breadth of the material and the differences between Christian denominations in determining the list of its ‘canonical’ books.”
The new General Secetary of SBI, Luca Maria Negro, has served as a pastor in various Baptist congregations and as a journalist, editing the ecumenical magazine Confronti, the Protestant weekly Riforma and the press agency NEV – Notizie evangeliche. He also was Secretary for Communications at the Conference of European Churches, based in Geneva (Switzerland), from 2001 to 2009, and President of the Federation of Protestant Churches in Italy (FCEI) from 2015 to 2021. From 2017 to 2022 he was a member of the SBI Board of Directors.
Founded in 1983 as the heir to the historic British and Foreign Bible Society – active in Italy since 1851 – the Bible Society in Italy is a member of the United Bible Societies.
