Operation Unity Washington D.C.
“The Best Spirituals”, new album by Gen Rosso
Gen Rosso, one of the Focolare Movement’s international bands, has announced the release of a new album entitled “The Best Spirituals”. This collection marks a significant moment in their career, bringing together live versions of some of the most famous songs from the band’s spiritual repertoire, recorded during tours from 2020-2025. The album stands out both for the selection of songs and for the new arrangements and reinterpretations which give a contemporary voice to timeless melodies.
Each track has been carefully reinterpreted to engage today’s listeners while preserving the heart of the “Spirituals” tradition. The live recordings capture the energy of the stage, the emotion of the moment and the deep connection between the artists and the audience, inviting listeners into an experience of hope and closeness.
“Seeing these songs continue to live and generate life even today is something wonderful and very important, a legacy that must be valued and preserved over time,” says Band. This desire to keep the tradition alive is reflected in Gen Rosso’s concerts, where audiences are encouraged to sing along and participate, transforming each performance into a shared celebration of joy. “The Best Spirituals” is not just an album; it is an invitation to rediscover time and time again, the beauty and relevance of these powerful messages. With rich harmonies, vibrant arrangements, and renewed rhythms, Gen Rosso continues to further its passion for music, paying tribute to a musical and cultural heritage that transcends time and generations.
The release of this album is an unmissable opportunity for fans of Gen Rosso music and for anyone who believes in the power of art as a force for unity and change.
Gen Rosso invites everyone to join them on this particular musical journey, rediscovering together the timeless value of the “Spirituals” and letting themselves be carried away by the emotions that only music and history together will be able to evoke. The album is available from 11 August on all digital platforms.
Lorenzo Russo
Photo: Gen Rosso at the Youth Jubilee in Tor Vergata (Rome) on August 2, 2025 (© Gen Rosso)
Brotherhood
Come exiled brother, let us embrace. Wherever you are, whatever your name, whatever you do, you are my brother. What does it matter to me if nature and social conventions try to separate you from me, with names, conditions, restrictions or laws?
The heart cannot be restrained, the will knows no limits and by making an effort to love we can overcome all these divisions and reunite as a family.
Don’t you recognise me? Nature placed you elsewhere, made you different, within other borders, you may be German, Romanian, Chinese, Indian… You may be yellow, olive-skinned, black, bronze, copper-toned… but what does it matter?
What does it matter that you are from a different country? When this small, still-glowing globe consolidated, no one could have imagined that for such accidental outgrowths, people would kill each other for ages.
And even today, in the face of our political systems, do you think that nature ever asks our permission to express itself through volcanoes, earthquakes or floods? And do you think it cares about our disparities, appearances or hierarchies?
Unknown brother, love your land, your fragment of the shared crust that supports us, but do not hate mine. Under all the trappings, under the all the social classifications, no matter how codified, you are a soul that God created as a sister to mine, to that of every other person (there is only one Father) and you are like every other person who suffers and perhaps you cause suffering, who needs more than he possesses, who falters, who gets tired, hungry, thirsty, sleepy, like me, like everyone else.
“Unknown brother, love your land, your fragment of the shared crust that supports us, but do not hate mine. (…)
In you I recognize the Lord. Free yourself and even now, brothers that we are, let’s embrace. “
You are a poor pilgrim following a mirage. You believe yourself to be the centre of the universe and yet you are nothing more than an atom of this humanity that from millennia to millennia struggles more through sorrow than through joys.
You are a speck, brother, so let’s join forces instead of fighting. Do not be proud, do not isolate yourself, do not accentuate the marks of differentiation devised by man.
Didn’t you cry when you were born, as I did? Will you not groan when you die, as I will? Whatever its earthly shell, the soul will return to be naked, equal. So come. From beyond all seas, climates, all laws, from beyond every social, political or intellectual compartment, from beyond all boundaries (man knows only how to circumscribe, divide and isolate) come, brother.
In you I recognize the Lord. Free yourself and even now, brothers that we are, let’s embrace.
Igino Giordani
in: Rivolta cattolica, Città Nuova, 1997 (ed. Piero Gobetti, Torino, 1925)
Compiled by Elena Merli
Photo: © CM – CSC Audiovisivi
This curse of war
I couldn’t understand how anyone could give life to a young person, have him worn out by studies and sacrifices, in order to prepare him for an operation, in which he would have to kill strangers, unknown, innocent people and in turn, he would be killed by others to whom he had done no harm. I saw the absurdity, the stupidity and above all the sin of war: a sin made more acute by the excuses used to justify it and by the futility with which it was decided.
The Gospel, long meditated upon, taught me that to do good, not to kill was a fundamental duty; to forgive, not to take revenge. And reason itself gave me a sense of how absurd it was to engage in a conflict where victory did not go to the just, but to those with more cannons; not to justice, but to violence.
In the “radiant May” of 1915, I was called to arms. […]
So many bugles, speeches and flags! All this only deepened within me the sense of revulsion for those clashes, in which governments, entrusted with the public good, carried out their task by slaughtering the children of the people, hundreds of thousands and by destroying or allowing the destruction of the assets of the nation: the common good.
How stupid it all seemed to me! And I suffered for the millions of people, who were forced to believe in the sanctity of those murders, a sanctity also attested by clerics who blessed the cannons destined to offend God in His masterpiece of creation, to kill God in His image, to carry out fratricide among baptized brothers.
“I saw the absurdity, the stupidity
and above all the sin of war…”
As a recruit I was sent to Modena, where there was a kind of university for the training of warriors and commanders. Coming from the world of Virgil and Dante, the study of certain manuals that taught how to deceive the enemy in order to kill him, had such an effect on me that, in an act of reckless defiance, I wrote in one of them: “Here we are learning the science of imbecility”. I had a very different concept of love of country. I understood it as love and love means service, the pursuit of good, the promotion of well-being, to provide a happier coexistence: for the growth and not for the destruction of life.
But I was young, and I did not understand the reasoning of the older generation, who didn’t really want to understand. They distracted themselves with parades and shouted slogans to numb their senses.
[…]
After a few weeks, having completed my training in Modena, I returned home briefly before departing for the front. I hugged my mother and father, my brothers and sisters (we rarely embraced in my family) and boarded the train. From the train I saw the sea for the first time, much wider than the Aniene River, it felt as though I had fulfilled one of life’s duties. After three days, I reached the trenches along the Isonzo and joined the 111th Infantry Regiment.
The trench. In it, from school I entered life, between the arms of death and cannon fire. […]
If I fired five or six shots, into the air, I did so out of necessity: I never aimed my rifle towards the enemy trenches, for fear of killing a child of God. […]
If all those days spent, in the bottom of the trenches, watching reeds and tufts of brambles and bored clouds and shining blue sky, had been spent working, we would have produced enough wealth to meet all the demands for which the war was being fought. Clearly: but that was reason and war is the opposite of reason.
Igino Giordani
Memorie di un cristiano ingenuo, Città Nuova 1994, pp.47-53
Compiled by Elena Merli
Photo: © ZU via Fotos Públicas
What is the point of war?
War is a mass murder, clothed in a kind of sacred cult, as was the sacrifice of firstborns to the god Baal: and this because of the terror it instils, the rhetoric with which it dresses up and the interests it serves. When humanity has progressed spiritually, war will be classified alongside the bloody rites, the superstitions of witchcraft and other barbaric practices.
It relates to humanity as sickness does to health, as sin to the soul: it is destruction and devastation, striking both soul and body, individuals and the community.
[…]
According to St. Thomas, “All things seek peace”. In fact, they all seek life. Only the insane and the incurable may desire death. And war is death. It is not wanted by the people; it is wanted by minorities to whom physical violence serves to secure economic advantages or, worse, to satisfy base emotions. Especially today, with its cost, its deaths and its ruins, war reveals itself as a “useless slaughter”. A slaughter which is moreover useless. A victory over life which is becoming humanity’s suicide.
According to St. Thomas, “All things seek peace”.
In fact, they all seek life.
Only the insane and the incurable may desire death.
And war is death.
[…] Saying that war is a “useless slaughter “, Benedict XV gave the most precise definition. Cardinal Schuster called it, “a slaughterhouse of men.” It means whole regions destroyed, thousands and thousands of poor people without homes or possessions, forced to wander in the desolate countryside, until death cuts them down from hunger or cold.
[…] The material gains from a victorious war can never compensate for the damage it causes; so much so, that it takes several successive generations to painstakingly rebuild the full sum of spiritual and moral values that were destroyed during an excess of war frenzies[1]. ” […]
[…]
2uman ingenuity, destined for far nobler purposes, has today devised and introduced instruments of war of such power as to arouse horror in the soul of any honest person, above all because they do not only affect armies, but often still overwhelm private citizens, children, women, the old and the sick, as well as sacred buildings and major monuments of art! Who is not horrified at the thought that new cemeteries will be added to the countless ones of the recent conflict and new smoking ruins of towns and cities will pile up more mournful wreckage?» [2]. […] […]
Compiled by Elena Merli
Igino Giordani, L ‘inutilità della Guerra, Città Nuova, Rome, 2003, (third edition), p. 3
Foto: Cover: © RS via Fotos Públicas, Igino Giordani © CSC-Audiovisivi
[1] Card. Schuster, messaggio natalizio 1950.
[2] Pio XII, «Mirabile illud», 1950.