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29 Oct 2011 | Non categorizzato
One year has gone by since her beatification, attended by more than twenty-thousand young people who travelled to Rome for the occasion, and viewed by many more youths around the world via internet. . The powerful testimony of Chiara Luce Badano, the Gen from Genoa, Italy, who the Church declared blessed, seems to have made holiness fashionable again. Her “nineteen years full of life and love and faith,” (Pope Benedict XVI), awakens in youth and adults alike the desire to spend their lives for something great. They discover that holiness can be lived in daily life. Chiara Luce has shown us that we can also love always and unconditionally.” This was said by a Brazilian youth during one of the many evening presentations of the “Life Love Light” Musical which are spreading around the world: from Italy to Spain – during the WYD – and in other European countries; from the Middle East to Asia; reaching the Americas, Australia and many African countries. Her parents, Maria Teresa and Ruggero Badano have received numerous invitations to share their story. Everyone feels a living relationship with Chiara Luce Badano who is still alive. But, as one youth explains very well: “Chiara Luce has taught me something very powerful: I can’t become a saint on my own, we need to become saints together.” And Chiara Lubich, foundress of the Focolare spoke the following words when she presented the young blessed: “The final goal of the Focolare Movement is to cooperate with the Church in realizing the testament of Jesus, ‘that all be one.’ While she was still a small child, Chiara Luce already discovered that sufferings are like precious pearls that can be gathered throughout each day. Therefore, she lived her life with Jesus and with Him she transformed her passion into a wedding song. Yes, Chiara Luce is a fulfilled Gen, a modern living testimony of our Ideal which came to maturity in her when she was 18 years old.” Her story is being spared using every means: over 30,000 copies of the book “Io ho tutto” and over 15,000 copies of “Dai tetti in giù” already translated in several languages. Then there are thousands of DVD and musical CD’s about her life and beatification. But it is mostly the internet that shows how many people know here, or discover her in unimaginable ways and want to live like her. Her Facebook page has numerous fans who share, post comments, photos. The “Life Love Light” website has become a reference point for many people to share their personal discovery of the reason for Chiara Luce’s life and the happiness that she expressed with her dying words: “Mamma, goodbye. Be glad, because I’m happy.” Direct Link to Chiara Luce profile on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/ChannelChiaraLuce
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27 Oct 2011 | Focolare Worldwide
Video of the trip "In the Footsteps of Jesus"
Watch video of the trip on Vimeo
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25 Oct 2011 | Focolare Worldwide
“It was an inspiration,” Maria Voce, president of the Focolare told the Roman Observer newspaper, “an inspiration that will certainly mark a new acceleration and depth in living one’s personal religious convictions in the service of peace. This is especially urgent today when the absurd fear of religion is spreading. Religion, which by its very nature is a vital source of peace, is being blamed as the primary cause of many conflicts, tensions, phobias, intolerance and religious persecutions that are teeming around the world.” The numerous and high profile delegation will leave from Rome by train on the morning of 27 October with the Pope. Maria Voce will also be on the train with leaders of all the major religions of the world. She will represent the Focolare Movement which is founded on the charism of unity of Chiara Lubich and has always been deeply and naturally involved in dialogue. The Movement includes members from 350 Christian Churches and Ecclesial Communities. Because of the universal expansion of the Movement, there is now an open dialogue with the major world religions, and not only with individual followers or religious leaders but with leaders and followers of vast movements: like the Buddhist movement of the Rissho Kosei-kai, which has six million adherents in Japan; with the Afro-American Muslims in the United States and with various Gandhian movements in South India. Thousands of followers of other religions live, inasmuch as possible, the spirit of the Focolare Movement and actively collaborate in working for its goals. Dialogue also began with persons of no religious faith like the agnostics, the indifferent and the atheists. This dialogue develops between believers and people who not have a religious faith but who share the common desire to work together for the brotherhood of the human family. From this point of view, it is quite emblematic that Benedict XVI wished to invite a group of non-believers to the Assisi event, who “though not professing to be religious, they feel that they are on the seeking path for the truth and they feel a common responsibility for the cause of justice and peace in our world.” Four invitees have accepted the invitation of Benedict XVI. They include philosophers, historians and professors from various countries in the world. Among them is Walter Baier: Austrian economist, General Coordinator of “Transform! Network,” a European research group that includes magazines and leftist think tanks. He is a member of the Austrian Communist Party, but also a collaborator with the Focolare’s international center for dialogue with persons of non-religious convictions. “A world-city truly appears on the horizon, shining with hope.” This is what the upcoming event in Assisi 2011 foreshadows. “Today,” says Maria Voce, “dialogue between religions cannot be limited to the leaders, researchers and specialists. It should be a dialogue of the people, and this will be more and more essential for peaceful coexistence in our cities and countries as we find ourselves elbow to elbow with Muslims and Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs. It is a chronicle that will have to be discovered and perhaps invented, without allowing ourselves to be discouraged by the rumors of violence and intolerance. It’s the daily testimony that opens the way.”
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23 Oct 2011 | Senza categoria
The Eucharist always had an important role in the life of Chiara Lubich, ever since her childhood. Both her personal life and that of her first companions – and that of the entire Movement – has been marked by the Eucharistic presence. And it could not have been otherwise, when we recall that Eucharistic Jesus is the heart and soul and very life of the Church. The action of the Holy Spirit in his charism of unity, instilled in Chiara and in her first companions a powerful attraction for Jesus in the Eucharist, to the point that they could not wait to go to Mass and share their lives with Him each day. And later, when they began travelling through Italy by train, they would eagerly gaze out over the countryside searching for church steeples, because they knew that the Eucharist, their love was there. There is a marvelous interconnection between the Eucharist and the spirituality of unity. Chiara comments on this great mystery in the following way: “Since the Lord concentrated our attention on Jesus’ prayer for unity when he wanted to initiate this vast movement, it meant that he had to give us a strong push in the direction of the only one who could accomplish this unity: Jesus in the Eucharist. In fact, just as newborns instinctively nourish themselves at their mother’s breast, hardly knowing what they are doing – ever since the beginning of the Movement we noticed that people who grew close to us began going to Communion every day. How are we to explain this? What instinct is for a newborn, the Holy Spirit is for an adult, who is a newborn into the life that the Gospel of unity brings. He is driven to the “heart” of Mother Church and he fees on the most precious nectar that it has, in which he feels to have found the secret of the life of unity and of his own divinization. Indeed, the work of the Eucharist is to make us God by participation. Mixing together our flesh that has been made alive by the Holy Spirit and Christ’s life-giving flesh, we are divinized in soul and in body. The Church could be defined as: the oneness caused by the Eucharist, because it is comprised of divinized men and women, made God, united to Christ who is God and united to one another. This God-with-us is present in all the tabernacles of the world, listening to our confidences, our joys, and our fears. How much comfort Eucharistic Jesus has provided for us in our trials when no one would grant us an audience because the Movement was under investigation! He was always there, at all hours, waiting for us, telling us: In the end, I’m the boss of the Church. And in struggles and pains of every kind he gave us such strength that we thought we should have died many times if Eucharistic Jesus and Jesus in our midst, whom he fueled, had not sustained us.”
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21 Oct 2011 | Non categorizzato
“It’s with surprise and great joy and gratitude that we welcomed the proclamation on the up- coming ‘Year of Faith’ announced by Pope Benedict XVI. And even more so, his apostolic letter ‘Porta Fidei’ that announces this thematic year, which will begin on October 11, 2012, on the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council. Once more we grasp the strong thrust of the Holy Spirit in this initiative which arrives punctually in this moment of history. The young people of the World Youth Day, the families, workers and youth who are demonstrating, inaugurate a new springtime and invoke profound social reformations. They are signs which tell us how much today’s humanity is seeking change. I found confirmation of this also in my recent trips which I took to the United States, Santo Domingo, Russia, Slovenia and Great Britain. “We cannot accept that salt should become tasteless or the light be kept hidden,”[1] writes the Pope. We also deeply feel this urgency and it calls us to convert: to live the Word of God with particular intensity. In welcoming the Pope’s ‘mandate,’ we have launched out once more with even greater vigour. We have committed ourselves to go back to the totalitarian way of living of the first years of the Movement: first of all to re-evangelize ourselves, in order to then spread the Gospel with all its transforming power to that humanity which surrounds us. Even today – as Chiara Lubich wrote already in 1948 – “the world needs a cure of the Gospel.”[2] Moreover, we have profoundly echoed the Pope’s pressing invitation to give public witness to faith, to the Word lived-out “as an experience of love received,” “communicated as an experience of grace and joy.”[3] In the initial years of the Focolare Movement’s life, the sharing of experiences of life based on the Word of God was a novelty. These experiences were irrefutable, because they were ‘life’ and fruitful, able to generate a living encounter with Jesus and to form a community out of dispersed people. Benedict XVI reminded us that we don’t face this task alone, but together. We want to intensify that experience of communion and brotherhood in our environments: in parliaments, factories, neighbourhoods, universities and families, because it is in communion that the Risen One makes Himself spiritually present, touches people’s hearts and transforms them. The Pope strengthened our conviction that this is a moment of special grace for the Church, in which the Council’s spirit of renewal is in action more than ever.”
[1] Apostolic Letter “Porta Fidei,” n. 3.
[2] Lettere dei primi tempi. Alle origini di una nuova spiritualità, edited by F.Gillet and G. D’Alessandro – Città Nuova Publishing House, 2010.
[3] Apostolic Letter “Porta Fidei,” n. 7.
