Chiara Lubich herself called Igino Giordani one of the “co-founders” of the Movement. He was a unique focolarino, familiarly called “Foco” by everyone in the Movement. Although a lover of peace at all costs, he became an officer in the First World War, where he was wounded and received a medal of honour. He was a teacher, an anti-fascist, librarian, husband and father of four children, a known polemicist on the Catholic side, a pioneer of Christian involvement in politics, a writer and a journalist. After the Second World War, living as an anti-fascist and forced into exile, he was elected to the Constituent Assembly of Italy. He was a government deputy, an enlightened layman, a poineer of ecumenism. Moreover, he was the one to bring the married, lay people and the family into the interior of the focolare, opening it – in a certain sense – to the world.

Chiara Lubich herself called Igino Giordani one of the “co-founders” of the Movement. He was a unique focolarino, familiarly called “Foco” by everyone in the Movement. Although a lover of peace at all costs, he became an officer in the First World War, where he was wounded and received a medal of honour. He was a teacher, an anti-fascist, librarian, husband and father of four children, a known polemicist on the Catholic side, a pioneer of Christian involvement in politics, a writer and a journalist. After the Second World War, living as an anti-fascist and forced into exile, he was elected to the Constituent Assembly of Italy. He was a government deputy, an enlightened layman, a poineer of ecumenism. Moreover, he was the one to bring the married, lay people and the family into the interior of the focolare, opening it – in a certain sense – to the world.

His meeting with Chiara happened in his office at the House of Representatives, in Montecitorio, in September 1948. He was passing through a difficult moment in his spiritual and political life: “I studied religious topics with a passion,” he writes in his Memorie di un cristiano ingenuo, “but also because I didn’t want to look at my soul whose appearance wasn’t very edifying. It was weighed on by boredom and, in order not to admit to the partial paralysis, I plunged myself into study and wore myself out with activity. I believed there was nothing else to do. To some degree I possessed all the areas of religious culture: apologetics, ascetics, mysticism, dogmatics, and morality. . . but I possessed them only as a matter of culture. I didn’t live them within myself.”

That day, in front of his desk, sat a diverse group, appearing strikingly original to a man like Giordani who was an expert in Church life: a Conventual Franciscan together with a Friar Minor, together with a Capuchin, and one Third Order Franciscan, who was Chiara herself. The meeting started cordially. But Giordani later wrote: “seeing them united and agreeing was already a miracle of unity.” Chiara spoke, greeted by some polite skepticism of the deputy, “I was sure to hear a sentimental propaganda about some utopian welfare project.” But that was not the case at all. “There was an unusual timbre in her voice,” Giordani would recall, “the mark of a deep and certain conviction that comes from a life that is supernatural. Suddenly my curiosity was aroused and a fire began to blaze within me. When, after thirty minutes, she had finished speaking, I found myself taken by the enchanted atmosphere: surrounded by a halo of happiness and light; and I would have wanted that voice to continue speaking. It was the voice that I, without realizing, was waiting to hear. It put holiness within the reach of all.”

Giordani asked Chiara to put in writing what she had just said, which she quickly did. But personally, Giordani wanted to know more about his new acquaintances. Gradually, he recognized in the focolares, the deep desire of Saint John Chrysostom that the laity might live as the monks but without celibacy. “This desire was so strong within me,” he went on to say, “and so I had always loved Franciscan instruction in the midst of the people and the virginal instruction given by Saint Catherine of Sienna to the Dominican Third Order of the Catherinites. And I went along with initiatives that seemed to lead to the removal of the walls interposed between monastics and laity, between the consecrated and the common people: walls, behind which the Church suffered as Christ in Gethsemane. Something happened in me. It happened that those pieces of culture, which I had always been standing side by side for comparison, began to move and come alive and become a living body, flowing generously with blood: the Blood with which Saint Catherine was burning? Love had penetrated and invested those ideas, and its gravitational pull drew them into an orbit of joy.”

And to explain the “discovery” he had made, he would often repeat a phrase which he said to many people during the final years of his life, which spent in a focolare, in Rocca di Papa, following the death of his wife, Mya, whom he loved deeply: “I moved away from the library clogged with books, towards the Church inhabited by Christians.”

It was a real and true conversion that “plucking me from the doldrums that walled me in, was urging to place myself in a new landscape that was boundless, somewhere between Heaven and earth, inviting me to walk again.”

The cause of canonization is presently underway for Igino Giordani, called Foco.

• Biography of Igino Giordani