In the late 1940’s, almost imperceptibly, the Movement began to spread beyond the borders of Trent. Invited to Milan, Rome, Florence, and Sicily, Christian communities like the one in Trent began silently to blossom in other parts of Italy. But precisely during those years of extraordinary spreading, the Church began to study the Movement with even more interest. It was a long period of examination, more study, suspension, and doubts. The 50’s and early 60’s were years lived in uncertainty of ever receiving approval, which seemed to never arrive.

The nascent spirituality, which was rooted in the Scripture, highlighted words that weren’t often heard in the period prior to the Council, words like: “unity,” “Jesus in the midst” of the community, “Jesus Forsaken,” etc. Moreover the first focolarine were young and they were lay people who were trying to live the words of the Gospel, not only to read and meditate on them. This appeared “protestant”. And their practice of the communion of goods in order to offer an orderly and organized assistance to the poor appeared “Communist.” But for them it meant living like the first Christians and they felt a particular affinity with the Church in the years before it was divided.

In the late 1940’s, almost imperceptibly, the Movement began to spread beyond the borders of Trent. Invited to Milan, Rome, Florence, and Sicily, Christian communities like the one in Trent began silently to blossom in other parts of Italy. But precisely during those years of extraordinary spreading, the Church began to study the Movement with even more interest. It was a long period of examination, more study, suspension, and doubts. The 50’s and early 60’s were years lived in uncertainty of ever receiving approval, which seemed to never arrive.

The nascent spirituality, which was rooted in the Scripture, highlighted words that weren’t often heard in the period prior to the Council, words like: “unity,” “Jesus in the midst” of the community, “Jesus Forsaken,” etc. Moreover the first focolarine were young and they were lay people who were trying to live the words of the Gospel, not only to read and meditate on them. This appeared “protestant”. And their practice of the communion of goods in order to offer an orderly and organized assistance to the poor appeared “Communist.” But for them it meant living like the first Christians and they felt a particular affinity with the Church in the years before it was divided.

Thus, in the 40’s and 50’s, without knowing it, the Focolare was becoming interwoven with invisible threads with the main currents of thought that were spreading through the Christian world and later taken up by the Second Vatican Council. The attention they paid to the Gospel was in perfect agreement with Biblical movement; their desire to live for unity bound the focolarini to the ecumenical movement (from 1960). Then they were prepared, when religious and social conditions arrived which required it, to embrace dialogue with people who have no religious reference. Moreover, having been started by a laywoman, for laypeople, placed the Focolare in perfect harmony with the emergence of the laity in the Church.

This new passion for unity would be fully recognised and welcomed into the heart of the Catholic Church on the eve of the Council in 1962, when it approved the central nucleus of the Focolare Movement-Work of Mary.