Jan 18, 2018 | Focolare Worldwide
Mirvet Kelly’s grandfather was a deacon: “I remember going with him every Sunday to the Syro-Orthodox Divine Liturgy. I was proud to watch him all dressed in white as he recited his portion of the prayers at the altar.” There are several Christian Churches in Homs, Syria, where Mirvet grew up: Armenian Apostolic, Greek Orthodox and various Catholic Rites, Maronite, Melkite and Syro-Catholic. Before the war, even though we were linked to our own Churches, the faithful attended other Churches without any problem. “As I grew older,” she went on to say, “a lot of things changed: Grandfather died and the Divine Liturgy seemed long and outdated. I was the only Christian at school in the midst a lot of Muslims. At Christmas and Easter I’d be the only one absent and, when I returned, I was bombarded with questions: ‘Why are there so many Churches? Why was your Jesus crucified and rising from the dead on different dates in different Churches? Some friends and I decided to no longer belong to one Church or another, but to be Christians and that’s all. Like many of them, I stopped going to my own Church.” A
fter a while, Mirvet met a group that was trying to live the Gospel according to the Focolare spirituality. “Through them, I discovered that God is the Father of everyone and that we’re all loved by Him as sons and daughters. My life began to change. Every time I tried to love, going to visit an elderly person or a poor person, for example, my heart would be overcome with peace and joy. One day, I came across a sentence in one of Chiara Lubich’s writings: ‘We should love the other person’s Church as our own.’ Not only did I not love the other person’s Church – I didn’t even love my own Church, which I had criticized and abandoned. At that point, Mirvet’s life, which was already very fruitful both personally and ecumenically, took a new leap. She felt God calling her to give herself entirely to Him. “In the Focolare communities I’ve lived in,” she explained, “I found myself to be the only Orthodox among Catholics of all ages, countries, languages, cultures, Churches and ways of thinking. Trying to live in unity with all the different ideas about things is always a challenge, because each of us has her own tastes and ideas down to the smallest details. But when we try to appropriate the other person’s reality as our own, we experience that the differences become an enrichment. We often pray for each other’s Churches, in an ongoing growth in the faith and in the relationship with God. And almost without realizing it, we bring the fruit of our communion into our respective Churches, to our jobs and into our daily lives. It seems like a drop in the ocean, but even the tiniest steps united to those of many others in the world, can make a difference. In the countries of the Middle East where I lived, for example, I saw priests helping people, without ever asking what Church they belonged to. They did projects to help out different Churches, to help them meet their needs whether they were Christian – or even Muslim. Last year, Catholics and Orthodox celebrated Easter on the same day. Two Syrian friends who now live in Vienna, Austria, recently reported to me how they and many other Syrians have been helped by a parish priest and some Catholic women focolarini to look for a house, medicine and work. They formed a group in which they live and help each other to share their common Christian experience. In the United States there are more than fifty Syro-Orthodox Christians who meet regularly, once in the Orthodox churches and once in the Catholic churches. They experience that God is always with us and that we have to pray, to live and to love so that Jesus’s testament ‘that all may be one’ is fulfilled as soon as possible.”
Jan 17, 2018 | Focolare Worldwide
It is the second day of Pope Francis in “their” land, after he landed in the evening of 15 January at the Airport of Santiago, to start a journey that in two weeks will touch base with two South American countries. “I want to look into your eyes, face to face,” he had said before setting out on his journey. About 15,000 volunteers are at work, offering their talents, time and commitment, to provide a fundamental service in the various events that will be held during the first lap in Chile. “This experience breaks the limits of a task we are entrusted with: in fact, it is the sincere expression of a commitment which will mark our lives forever,” some of them said. “In contrast with the apathy expressed by some of the media, the youths of Chile offer a note of enthusiasm and emotion for the Pope’s arrival,” well expressed by the song composed by Claudio González Carrasco, of the Focolare community in Temuco (southern Chile). Welcomed by the outgoing President, Michelle Bachelet, the Pope then proceeded towards the Apostolic Nunciature, where he will stay during this first lap. Among the many fundamental moments of the journey in Chile, will be the meeting with Chilean mapuches populations, who are battling to safeguard their own identity, and the Mass of 17 January for the indigenous populations of the region.
Jan 11, 2018 | Focolare Worldwide
Rosy and Leo Prisco are from Naples, Italy. He’s a railroad worker and she’s an accountant. They’re retired. Their story began 40 years ago at a time when couples who opted for a civil ceremonies were very few. They were agnostics and went to city hall for their wedding. They were so different from each other that no one was betting on their staying together. At the birth of their first child they had a doubt: Should they baptize him or not? They spoke with the parish priest. “For us, adamant Marxists and agnostics, it was unthinkable that a priest should welcome us in such a warm, friendly and open way. Father Salvatore didn’t express a single judgement towards us regarding our situation as a couple, but he became a friend to the point that we were even able to tell him about our constant fighting. Yes, because it was easy to be a revolutionary when we were outside the house, inside the house I was the one doing all the cooking and cleaning. I remember how – to get Leo to listen to me (I was a bit crazy, but at least it worked sometimes!) – I’d do what we did when we held protests on the town square: I’d hang signs on the kitchen walls that said: ‘You’re a tyrant,’ ‘You’re treading on the equality of women,’ and so on. Father Salvatore introduced us to other couples. They were also having problems but had learned to dialogue, and they also had a secret: apologizing and beginning again. We began doing the same, which helped to improve our relationship one day at a time. Meanwhile, Father Salvatore agreed to celebrate Francesco’s baptism and, six years later, the baptism of Nunzio.” “Thanks to Father Salvatore and the other families,” Leo explains, “we had an encounter with God and with God’s love and, little by little, the desire grew in us to be children in accordance with God’s heart.” We came to realize that even though we had turned our backs on him, He never stopped speaking to us, because He is Love. Just as He had in 1993, inside a mortuary room at a hospital. There, by chance, we had come across the pain of two parents whose little angel, a boy of three years, had died. That was a powerful message to us. What if that happened to us? They were the same parents that we met again at a Focolare meeting, invited by Father Salvatore. Yet, from that pain of theirs three family homes were opened for children in difficulty.” For Rosy and Leo, who in 1995 said their yes in the Sacrament of Marriage, finding Gino and Elisa within the context of the Focolare appeared to be no small coincidence. “Right away a bond was established,” Rosy recounts, “which led us to offer our full-time help as foster parents in a home for families who came to stay at Casa Sorriso for longer or shorter time periods, depending on their family situations.” “This experience,” Leo confides, “gave us an awareness of being merely instruments in God’s hands, and being able to be of help wasn’t a matter of having any special gifts. Today, as then, we’re not the perfect family. We just want to place ourselves at the service of Jesus in the people we meet. Like those little Russian children that we took into our home: a relationship that continues until today now that they’re adults.” In the beginning of 2017, already retired, they wanted to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the New Families Movement by being actively involved in some of the celebratory events. They also took part in a meal for young people. The year came to an end, but not their determination to give more. Last October they moved to Loppiano, planning to stay until July and be able to follow things more closely: practical things like transportation for the families that go there from around the world.
Jan 10, 2018 | Focolare Worldwide
A warm summer atmosphere of the Southern Hemisphere was the framework of an encounter with the sociology of Latin America, which some of the participants described as “dazzling”. Every time we love, every time we give, it’s Christmas, claims the book “Love in the Time of Globalization”, written by Social-One Secretary, Silvia Cataldi, researcher at La Sapienza University of Rome, along with Vera Araujo and Gennaro Iorio who wrote Toward a new conception of sociology (Città Nuova, 2015). Sociologists pondered that same agape dimension during study sessions and in workshops.
Vera Araujo
Jan 8, 2018 | Focolare Worldwide
It was a very unique “group photo” taken during a public presentation of the social budget of the Tassano Group in the presence of some of the protagonists and authorities. Over time the Group was transformed from a cooperative into a consortium, and from a consortium into a group of consortia. It is complex and made up of different parts, currently comprised of 33 cooperatives that offer diversified services to 4,700 direct users and 100 thousand indirect users in the northwest region of Italy, which arrives from a brief stretch away at the sea and Mediterranean farmland all the way to the snow-covered mountains of winter. It involves 700 employees formed in the spirit of the economy of communion. “It’s an economic approach that the world doesn’t follow,” Luigino Bruni explained, “but it exists. Businesses who follow it try to destine profits in three directions: a part for creating jobs, a part for helping the poor, and a part for spreading this culture. The Tassano story is a love story made of employees and work that generated wealth and values.” 
It’s a story that began a long time ago when, in 1989, two friends, small local businessmen, Gicaomo Linaro and Piero Cattani, together with 24 volunteer partners adherents to the Focolare Movement, started a cooperative to respond to the many cases of social poverty in the region. The cooperative grew and gradually won the trust of several interlocutors, including public ones, which led to the acquisition of new services. Two years later, the members of Tassano felt that their objectives were in perfect harmony with the Economy of Communion Project begun by Chiara Lubich in Brazil so that it spread solidarity at a global level. They joined the project at once. Little by little, the diversified growth of the different activities and the consequent growth of new specialized cooperatives gave rise to a Consortium of businesses that remain independent administratively, but are united in the experience, all operating with the same spirit in the social, educational and assistance field, with services geared towards the weakest strands of the population, elderly who are alone, the disabled, mentally ill, unemployed, but also families, children and young people, as well as a view towards the maintenance and appreciation of the region. In 1997, Tassano became a Group of Business Cooperatives, with the intent of unifying the difference business and social experiences that already existed, but also to act as an incubator of new production agencies. In the future, all the strategic areas will flow into consortia that will be able to consolidate growth and favour further development. Maurizio Cantamessa, president of the Group, explains: “We’re quite a cohesive group, sharing the same values and understanding at the level of every day work. It was the right moment to group together, to consolidate and start again. The fact of being concentrated on the region is very important, because it favours relationships. We work side by side every day with local institutions every day. Being in the business of serving people, it’s important to be here in person. Business and solidarity together. Even with all the changes, the mission of the Group has always stayed the same: to promote a concept of business dealing geared towards the integral and solidarity promotion of the human person and of society, while not neglecting a strong orientation towards the market, through the individuation of objectives and business development plans that can lead to the creation of new businesses and new jobs. In demonstration of the fact that the values and ideas of the cooperative can be translated into concrete work actions in favour of the region and its citizens.
Jan 3, 2018 | Focolare Worldwide
“Without giving it much thought, we had chosen the title together, “Building Bridges,” which could not have been more suitable: we couldn’t distinguish the youths of the wealthier districts from those of the poorer communities. The teams were composed of boys and girls from 10 to 18 altogether. The bigger kids took care of the smaller ones and the smaller ones enlivened the older ones. The participation of the poor communities did not imbue minimally an aspect of social assistance: all benefited from this interaction.” Renzo Megli, who had taken part right from the beginning in the organization of the Olympic games for kids, immediately laid down the foundations and success of the project, and described the preparatory activities with a passionate tone. “It seemed the winds were blowing against it. The idea of perfection and the memory of the “professional” or “semi-professional” sports fields of the previous editions deterred out spirits, blocked our minds, and saddened our thoughts. On the contrary, I was happy because of all the doors that closed on us and the slow and tiring change of direction: the only possibility that remained was to bring the Olympic games to the CEU, the Condominio Espiritual Uirapuru. We started to work on the project, determined to make the event a reality. But the conflicts remained evident; the compasses were still disoriented by old magnetic fields. Stop! We had to choose: shall we go ahead as one or stop? Would it be better to achieve something less perfect, but together, or something perfect in disunity? These will be different types of Olympic games, less professional, and perhaps less “trendy.” But perhaps it is precisely the breeze of the Spirit that is leading us to do something new, and different. We decided to go towards a common north. Even those who first were contrary have started to row in the same direction. Only then did I remember a conversation I had much earlier on with a focolarino who is older than me. He had given me this advice: “To lose an idea you must first possess it, and possibly, it must be really yours, as if it were your child, flesh of your flesh. Imagine a bottle of champagne: it must be full before you can remove its cap and let its bubbles flow.” That was how I felt, “father” to my idea, but ready to lose it. Each of us, upon “losing” our own idea, have become together, “parents” of a better idea, which has been polished along the way. Renzo continued his story: “The CEU Director has promised space and the equipment. All the work we had performed up to then was based on this available place. But then the cancellation arrived: we could no longer use that facility. The “dynamics of losing” and of placing in God all our worries has become almost like a daily event that after a few moments of dismay we took this adversity as a clear sign of the spirit. Inviting the children of the CEU community was the most important thing, but time was flying and the enrollments proceeded slowly, leaving us with a lump in the throat: will we reach a minimum number of participants? We decided to open the enrollments also to those who cannot participate due to economic difficulties. We wanted to entrust ourselves to Providence. Many supporters popped up, and all the expenses, even the unforeseen, were covered. The smile of the numerous CEU children became the icon of our Olympics. An extraordinary joy was evident in all, animators, parents, and players. A child of one of the CEU communities said: “I found my father here.” This was a bigger boy who really had shown him love. Among the participants were also the girls of the Lar Santa Mônica community that hosts adolescent victims of domestic sexual abuse. They had become a bit surly and wanted to go home immediately. Instead they participated up to the end. We saw them leave happy. This transformation was one of the most beautiful victories of our Olympics.”
