Focolare Movement: General Assembly 2014
The General Assembly of the Focolare Movement will be held between 1st and 28th September 2014. Electing the President, the Co-President and the general council members who will remain in office for the next six years, decision making on requests and proposals received from various parts of the world and establishing broad guidelines for the coming years will be among its main tasks. President Maria Voce states “the Assembly is called to express its views on key topics for the life of the entire Movement”, and it sets forth towards this work “with a great sense of gratitude towards God for what we have lived together during the past six years”. The 494 participants at this General Assembly will be representing the geographical variety of members, who are of different ages and have different commitments, as typical of the Focolare Movement. 15, who come from various non-Catholic Christian Churches, non-Christian religions and non-religious cultures, have been invited to be among those present for this Assembly. They will accompany the work of the Assembly and express their views, something very essential for the life and activity of the Movement. During the last six months, a series of different initiatives have been taking place in Focolare communities throughout the world to facilitate reflection, analysis and assessment about the work of the Movement, its challenges and its prospects, and thus to suggest themes and proposals on which to set the work for the coming General Assembly. 
The outcome of this process of participation are more than 3000 suggestions, each expressed in a maximum of 100 words, and as Maria Voce says, “these indicate the vitality of a people on the move and growing”. Following a process of reflection in all five continents, a group of young members of the Focolare Movement came together for an international conference, where a manifesto was approved and then handed over to the President. The set of suggestions is being made functional by a preparatory committee who is working on it, and at the beginning of July a copy will be sent personally to each participant. The twenty members of this committee represent the actual International Centre, the various branches of the Movement and the regions of the world where the Movement is present. The General Assembly of the Focolare Movement is the most important governing body of the Movement and it ordinarily meets every six years. The previous General Assembly was held in July 2008, three months after the passing away of the foundress, Chiara Lubich.
“You love God, the Father, also by giving food to you brother who is hungry. The whole development of literature on this issue, especially the great patristic literature, is a struggle against the selfishness of those that cause the misery of others, a kind of reconstitution of violated and degraded humanity, starting from the principle: nourish the stomach, to replenish the physical body which is also part of the Mystical Body: it too is a presence of the living Christ […]. Not everyone can work miracles, wrote St. Augustine, but everyone can feed the poor. “You cannot say to the paralytic, Arise and walk! But you can say: While we are waiting for you to get up, have something to eat…”. Anyone who would be able to feed the undernourished, the malnourished and the hungry and does not help them, is, according to a thought of the Fathers of the Church, a murderer, even a God-killer. He makes Christ die. Those who, during the years of war, condemned prisoners to die of hunger from the point of view of the Gospel have replicated the crucifixion. They have been, so to speak, murderers of God. The hordes of deportees, in the snow and blazing sun, in covered lorries or isolated ships, whose monotony was broken only by the collapse of the hungry, mark the line of practical atheism, even if perpetrated in the name of God For this reason, St. Vincent de Paul went out into the galleons of the most Christian kings, where the convicts fell exhausted. This is why works of mercy, by restoring justice, are not merely administration of food or of money to buy it. “Works of mercy are worth nothing without love,” says St. Augustine. And St. Paul says, “And even if I gave away all that I have to the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, if I have not charity, it is worth nothing” (1 Cor. 13, 3). Social works add little to the effects of religious life if those who carry them out do not bring that divine ingredient, that ardour of the Holy Spirit, which is charity […]. Works of mercy are a moral and material duty: by nourishing those in agony, I nourish myself: because his hunger is mine and of the whole social body, of which they are an organic part. “Though we are many, we are one body”, and you cannot injure one organ to benefit another. And if you do, you pay: with revolution and unrest and epidemics here, and then hell in the next life. It is tempting to think that this precept has become quite unnecessary in an era in which workers are reaching a certain comfort. Whereas it has never been so present and extended so vastly as in the era of rationing, of concentration camps, of deportations and unemployment, of war and the post-war period (…). A civilization that tolerates hunger alongside opulence is a civilization in a state of mortal sin (…). If someone does not have a ration, it means that someone else has two […]. Works of mercy are justified by the reality of human nature and perform the miracle of circulating love by circulating bread. The miracle is that the gift of bread becomes a kind of social sacrament, through which with love, we communicate God and through nourishing our body, we nourish our soul.” (from Igino Giordani, The Brother, Città Nuova, 2011, pp. 64-67)
“Here we are in Qum, the religious capital of Shiite Islam in Iran. A city that can be summed up with a few numbers: a little less than a million inhabitants, hundreds of universities, academic institutions, religious seminaries, among which a female seminary that has nearly 12 thousand students. There are about forty thousand students of the Koran and other aspects of Islam. “The first morning in this “holy city” concludes with a deeply spiritual and intensely emotional moment. We enter what everyone considers one of the most visited places in the Shiite tradition in the world: the shrine dedicated to Fatima Masumah, a woman who died very young, not yet thirty years old. Fatima was the sister of Imam Ali ibn Musa Rida (the eighth Imam, according to Shiite tradition) and the daughter of the seventh Imam (Musa al Kdhim). The tradition of this part of Islam often regards women as holy, especially if they are relatives of one of the Imams. Here our guides, extremely polite and expressing themselves in perfect English, tell us that they get up to 15 million pilgrims every year. The most striking thing in this environment is faith, spirituality and the depth of the sense of the sacred. Living a day in this environment, is to immerse oneself in the world of mysticism and the spirit beyond words and what can be seen and touched: here you experience it!” “Serenity and peace: an Iran you would not expect. The austere and committed life of Qum is serene, where the commitment to learn, to study and to follow the path of Islamic wisdom and its laws, occupies the minds and hearts of the people with obvious social repercussions. The number of libraries is impressive, but also bookshops. People flock to them! “It goes through my mind how the media in Europe present this people, the stereotypes, the grim looks of their leaders. Some of it is true, of course, but to experience life here is quite another thing. Direct contact makes these stereotypes crumble. In all honesty, I have rarely found anywhere else this depth of peace and serenity. I understand why Sufi mysticism (the mystical dimension of Islam) found its root among the ancestors of these people. “As the day draws to an end, under the hot sun of Qum that in summer will bring the temperature up to 45-50 degrees, I know in my heart that it will be mysticism and spirituality that save humanity and give a real possibility of encounter between different religious traditions.” Source: Roberto Catalano’s 
“In the Christian mentality, the one who loses knows the value of suffering and defeat because the Son of God has given them value. This person can still experience the deeper joy that comes from having given; given of him or herself during training, or in the relationships established in building up the team, in doing his or her very best in front of the crowds. True inner joy is born only from self-giving, from love. It is a more limpid, pure joy for those who win (if they have striven and won out of love) and for those who lose (if they too have striven and lost out of love). Then sport retains its authentic seal and will be elevated to its true social status. It can then contribute to regenerating humanity in our over-stressed world, to being an element that brings people together, one of brotherhood and peace among peoples and nations. In ancient Greece, during the Olympics, a moratorium was declared on all wars. Let’s not lag behind in comparison to then!”