Its beginnings in 1971 were pioneer days for the new magazine, with two dilapidated typewriters, metal plates for stamping addresses and several moves from one location to another. But the goal of the Gen’s magazine was clear and also quite daring: to place the charism of unity of Chiara Lubich and the Focolare Movement at the service of pastoral ministry so that it might breathe with the spirit of the Second Vatican Council: communion and dialogue that stem from entering always more deeply into the Paschal-Trinitarian mystery of God.

The format of the magazine was designed to offer reflections that could produce effects in daily life and were not linked to the insights of individual persons or specific circumstances, but would highlight attitudes and behaviours that could be applied in many different contexts.

At the origins of the Gens magazine three years earlier was the need to keep seminarians from different lands connected who had found in the life of the Gospel and in the communitarian spirituality of unity a solid foundation for their own lives as well as a motivation for living as a “new generation of priests (sacerdotes)” – hence the name – who, placing God first in their lives, saw the call to the priestly ministry above all as service and witness. A mimeographed magazine began to be printed in 1971, later a printed page and finally the present magazine.

Throughout these busy forty years Gens has become a vibrant living workshop of life and ideas which has seen such signatures on its pages as Chiara Lubich, Pasquale Foresi, Igino Giordani, German bishop and theologian Klaus Hemmerle, as well as other bishops who had begun working for the magazine as seminarians – Italian theologian Piero Coda, Fr. Silvano Cola, Fr. Toni Weber and many others.

Today the Gens magazine continues to build bridges between the Church and the modern world in unison with the Citta Nuova Editorial Group whose vision it shares: Jesus’ dream “that all be one”.

By clicking on the Citta Nuova link you can access the extensive reference material that includes issues of the magazine from 1971 until today. (Click Gruppo CN and then “gens”.)

Over the years, Gens magazine has also been published in other languages in both paper editions and online. In Portuguese as Perspectivas de Comunhão; in English Being One and in German Das Prisma. Other editions are published in India, Argentina and Poland.