Springtime of the family

Every year, spring blossoms a few days earlier in order to remember Chiara Lubich. March 14th is celebrated with a variety of new and annual events in every part of the world, each with a style all its own to remember the Focolare foundress on the anniversary of her death – or better – her birth to Heaven that happened in 2008.  

In 2017 this special day was interwoven with another event, the 50th anniversary of the New Families, which is a branch of the Focolare Movement that embraces 800 thousand families from around the world who strive to live the spirituality of unity and spread values of universal brotherhood in their local environments.

The powerful title, Chiara Lubich and the Family, was meant to express the special care and attention the foundress gave to a “daring, beautiful and demanding” calling whose “immeasurable and precious values could change the world and transform it into a family, if those same values were applied to humankind.” “Here, in front of you, I seem to see Jesus who looks at the world, looks at the crowds and pities them,” Chiara Lubich had said in her historic founding address on July 19, 2967. “Because, of all the portions of the world, the most broken part has been placed on your shoulders, the part most like Jesus Forsaken. (…) May this pity not remain at the level of the sentiments, but be transformed into works.”
Works that can now be seen: cultural projects, support for minors, seminars for families, help for separated couples, social and educaitonal projects that highlight universal family values from within the great human family. Concrete action is the main characteristic of a family, the basic cell of society, and this was strongly underscored in the two Synods that dealt with the topic of the family. The contents of those Synods then came together in Pope Francis’s Apostolic Exhortation, The Joy of Love.

The joy of love that the pope speaks of is well represented by the thousands of voices and it is on the faces of the people and families that converged on Loppiano, Italy, from all five continents last March to attend the  event, three days to learn the art of reciprocity. “Married life is like a ship,” one family from Peru commented, “if you try to row by yourself it takes a lot of effort.” It is the art of loving that gives strength to the family to regenerate, through trust, forgiveness, individual responsibility, creativity, acceptance and supportiveness.

The event at Loppiano was the pivot point for many other events around the world, beginning with last year’s January 27th inaugural event in Cairo, Egypt, and then for many successive events in Panama, Croatia, Italy, Uganda, Tanzania, USA, Brazil, France, Kenya, Panama, Lithuania, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Burundi, Singapore, and more. Practical experiences were presented and seminars on the themes of education, the relationship of the married couple, acceptance,  stories from daily life and hidden acts of heroism in war zones, solidarity in moments of difficulty, support for disadvantaged populations, together with workshops, shows, festivals and public prayer services.

Although it is difficult to list them all and describe the main characteristic of each one, it would be impossible not to recognize in these festive family gatherings in collaboration with other movements, Church, Religious and civil institution representatives –“seeds of communion for the people of the Third Millennium,” which were prophetically foretold by Chiara Lubich in 1993.