The first religious to follow Chiara Lubich

At 100 years of age, Father Bonaventura Marinelli OFMCap has died. He was the first member of a religious order to follow Chiara Lubich’s spirituality. Father Fabio Ciardi looks back on his life.

On July 15 we celebrated the feast day of his namesake, Saint Bonaventure. On August 1, Fr Bonaventura Marinelli left us for heaven, where he could celebrate the centenary of his inseparable contemporary, Chiara Lubich. What a deep and faithful friendship they shared!

In the years 1942 to 1946, as a young priest studying theology while living in the Capuchin monastery in Trento, he was, as he loved to say, “an eye-witness, albeit at a distance” of the beginnings of the Focolare Movement. At a distance, because in those years, no close contact was permitted. But eye-witness because he saw for himself the way those “extraordinary Third Order Franciscans” were living.

“After the bombardment of 1944,” he recalled in an in-depth interview, “Chiara and her companions were always in our sight. They came to Mass, not in our church which was bomb-damaged, but in the sacristy which was even smaller and so we were brought even closer together. I remember what a deep impression they made on me every time I saw them. I’m rather shy by nature and find it hard to talk to people. But I can still remember how throughout the summer of 1943 and afterwards, when I was out almsgiving among the people, it became easier and easier for me to meet with families, children and others. This new way of seeing people came not from my nature, but from the life I saw in Chiara and her companions.

In 1946, a year after I had been ordained a priest, my superiors sent me to a university in Switzerland. For the first few months I regularly received letters from my companions with whom I’d made a pact of unity. Then, suddenly, nothing, silence. The Vatican’s Holy Office (now known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) had started investigating the Movement, but I didn’t know. Personally, I found myself slipping into unutterable desolation. Until 23 April 1948, precisely. I’d returned to Trento to vote in the elections, and that morning, before leaving to go back to Switzerland, I met Chiara. She brought joy back to me, but in a much deeper way than before. I understood that what matters is to love. I felt I was touching heaven with my fingertips. When I arrived back in Fribourg I wrote to her. That was the first letter”.

So began a correspondence through which Chiara communicated what she was living in that period. It’s thanks to Fr Bonaventura that today we have such a priceless patrimony of writings, some of which have become very well known. For example the letter dated 30 March 1948, in which she confides, “the book of Light the Lord is writing in my soul has two aspects. One page shines with mysterious love: Unity. The other shines with mysterious suffering: Jesus Forsaken”.

The letters demonstrate the deep relationship which sprang up between them.

11 May 1948: “Your letter confirmed for me the impression I had of your soul, so beloved of the Lord. And immediately, without delay I would like to give you all that is mine, all God has built in me, using my nothingness, my weakness and wretchedness. (…) What I wish to write to you today is that we mustn’t break the unity God has made. (…) Saint Francis will not be happy until you  revive it in yourself and also in your brothers. So make a start. You can do it”.

8 September 1948: “Your letter gave me such joy. Jesus is present. I found Him in your thirst for ‘life’, in the optimism it contains, overflowing through the pages, and above all in the peace that comes from your desire to love Him more and more. You can be very sure, as long as I’m never parted from Jesus (and how could that ever be? In Paradise I’ll have Him even more), I’ll never stop following your soul with a vigilant eye and fraternal care”.

27 January 1951: “You can’t imagine how your soul is ‘penetrating’ my own (almost literally, as if I could almost feel the effect on me!)”

I remember the joy whenever they met and spontaneously started talking in their Trentino dialect. They were the same age, but he felt he was a disciple and she was his mother. In one of their first letters, Chiara signed herself “s.m.”, which Bonaventura straight away interpreted as “sua madre” – “your mother”. So he replied, signing his name as “s.f.” (“suo figlio” – “your son”). And Chiara herself understood.

A Focolarina remembers hearing Chiara greet him in 2000 with the words, “this is my first son who is a religious!”

Fr Bonaventura lived a long life. A Professor of Sacred Scripture, a translator of German biblical commentaries, bearer of various roles of responsibility in his Order including Provincial, Formator, and in the General Definitorium. He was then invited by Chiara to lead the international Centers of Spirituality for Religious men at Castel Gandolfo, near Rome and at Loppiano, the Focolare Movement’s small town in Italy.

Self-effacing and extremely humble, he knew how to witness unostentatiously and sincerely the Ideal Chiara had transmitted to him. He was, in the words of one of his confreres, “a true child of the Gospel, in wisdom and simplicity of life”.

I have my own personal memories of Fr Bonaventura, from the time in 1978 we went to Canada together for a whole month, to animate a formation school for religious men. Later I lived in community with him at Castel Gandolfo. I found an entry in my diary for 10 November 1999, when he had already left to take up a new posting and came for a visit. I wrote, “Bonaventura arrived and there was a really festive atmosphere, as usual”. I was struck by that “as usual”.

Perhaps my most beautiful moment of all with him was on 18 March 2008, at Chiara’s funeral in Rome, in the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls.  At the end of the ceremony, he asked me to help him approach the coffin, despite infringing official protocol. He was an old man by then, and he had difficulty bending down. But he managed to kneel down in order to hug and kiss the coffin. So I too knelt down and kissed the coffin (but actually for us, it was embracing Chiara not the coffin). And with that, everyone started to surround the coffin to kiss it. But with Bonaventura it was a unique gesture of a son towards his mother.

I too always felt his love for me. In one of his last letters, he wrote, “You’re in my thoughts and I’ll always remember you with gratitude. I hope to have the joy of meeting you once more in person. This morning I entrusted you especially to Saint Francis. A hug!”

Fr. Fabio Ciardi OMI