Dialogue with Vincenzo Buonomo, Rector of the Pontifical Lateran University; Luigino Bruni, an economist; Amy Uelmen, a lawyer and professor at Georgetown University. https://vimeo.com/402934400
In these times of the coronavirus, often it is no longer possible for us to visit relatives, friends or acquaintances that we know are in need. The media seem to be the only way to express our concrete love. The following text shows us another way in which we can respond. It is wise to spend the time we have by living God’s will to the full in the present moment. Sometimes, however, we worry about the past or the future. We are concerned about situations or people for whom we cannot do anything at the moment. This is when it becomes difficult to steer the ship of our lives. It takes great effort to keep to the course that God wishes us to have in that particular moment. At such times we need strong willpower, determination, and especially trust in God, sometimes to a heroic degree. “Can I do nothing to resolve a certain complex situation or for a dear person who is sick or in danger? Then I will concentrate on doing well what God wants from me in the present: study, homemaking, prayer, taking care of the children … God will take care of the rest. He will comfort the suffering and show a way out of that entangled situation”. This way the task is being done by two in perfect communion. It demands from us great faith in God’s love for his children. And in turn it gives God a chance to trust that we do our part. This mutual trust works miracles. We will realize that Another has accomplished what we could not do, and that he has done it far better than we could have. Then our trust will be rewarded. Our limited life acquires a new dimension: we feel near the infinite for which we yearn. Our faith invigorates and gives our love new strength. We will know loneliness no longer. Since we have experienced it, we will be more deeply aware of being children of a God, who is a Father and who can do everything.
Chiara Lubich
Taken from: Here and Now, New City Press, 2005
How the many children who are members of the Focolare Movement are living this moment of global emergency. A new website designed for them goes online. “We have to stay at home at the moment, but we have a secret to stay happy: loving. So every morning we throw the dice and do what it says”. Gen 4, children who are members of the Focolare Movement, are not giving up. Even in isolation, they start each day with their ‘dice of love’. Each of the six sides bears one point of the ‘art of loving’ and they try to live it during the day. In some cities, the Gen 4 boys and girls have been busy writing letters and cards offering help to the older residents in their apartment blocks. They’ve drawn their parents into the activity too. “None of our neighbours has actually asked us for practical help,” explained one mother, “but it’s been a great opportunity to get to know each other and they’ve all been calling us to say thank you”. “What if some of the children here don’t have as many toys as we do?” reflected Niccolò and Margherita, two Italian Gen 4. So they filled a box and left it in the hallway of their apartment block, with a sign saying: “Ciao! We found these toys at home and we’re not using them. You can take them if you like and keep them. Courage!” While it may be true that “home” in these times is coming to signify “limits”, in Rome the Gen 4 have welcomed a proposal to build their own small houses out of cardboard and fill them with accounts of their acts of love. As the cardboard houses fill up with notes and pictures, the adults confined with them are learning how everyone can fill their home with small acts of love. The Gen 4 are present all over the world. As the pandemic spreads to all countries, it’s natural for them to feel solidarity with those who are suffering the most. Two Gen 4 in Asia sent a video-greeting with the image of a rainbow, as they called out “Courage Italy!”. Another greeting from Africa encouraged everyone “We can get through this together!” Alongside the children, Focolare animators are actively accompanying them through this delicate period. From Brazil to Congo, new ideas are springing into action. In Bilbao, Spain, they wrote, “We had the idea of holding meetings for the Gen 4 and their families every week via the web. We share how we are living this new situation, highlighting our acts of love. We encourage each other by promising to pray for peace, for the sick and for all who are suffering”. A group in Portugal is preparing a video about each Sunday’s Gospel reading which they share on social media every week. Being part of a network is proving valuable at this time. And a new website (https://gen4.focolare.org/en/) from the international Gen 4 Centre has just gone online, for children and their educators, offering material and formation programs in the Focolare spirituality, designed for this age group. The timing is significant. On 29 March 1972, Chiara Lubich gave life to the Gen 4, as the youngest generation of the Focolare Movement. A few years later, comparing the whole Movement to a large tree, she defined the Gen 4 as “the buds of the tree. (…) Something so very precious, very precious. It is the very future of the tree” .
Anna Lisa Innocenti
Gen Verde live streaming from Loppiano… #distantimauniti Riccardo, Anna, Cristian, Paola … the list is unending. They are just some of the over 4,000 fans who watched Gen Verde live streaming directly from their home last week. This is not the time for concerts, as public gatherings are banned, yet some questions just keep coming back to haunt us: how can we support those who are lonely, or are in the front line facing this pandemic, to be bearers of peace and of hope where we all are right now? This is where the idea of “Gen Verde from Home” was born: no longer live from town squares and concert halls but the living room at home. The instruments are there: a guitar, a keyboard, a flute, microphones and … a computer helping us reach the homes of all those who connect. But this is not a concert, it is quite an extraordinary appointment: we sing, we tell real life experiences, we present the fruits of the creativity born of this moment and … as Hans Christian Andersen wrote, ‘Where words fail… music speaks.’ In real time everyone from home can express a thought, send a message and literally the chat explodes and it is impossible to contain the gratitude and enthusiasm of those connected from all 5 continents. Nobody is missing from the roll call: from Argentina to Korea, from Canada to Hungary, from Italy to Australia. Suddenly, through the miracle of technology, the living room open to so many at the same time becomes an intimate place where singing and praying are synonyms, where celebrating a birthday and remembering those who have lost the battle against COVID-19 take on the same importance and everything is a gift of love. “Recently – Colomba says – I have heard a lot of news, not only from TV, but also from our neighbours, family and friends. Unfortunately, it is often quite painful news. I feel so much fear, worry, and an almost overwhelming sense of helplessness … of not being able to do anything for those who suffer. And I ask myself “why? and for how long?” In the past few days, one morning, while cleaning the house, I heard a voice speaking within: “be at peace, if you do small things well with love where you are, this is a contribution to support humanity”. A simple experience for Colomba who, like the other women of Gen Verde, seeks a meaning to stay at home, to deal with household chores like so many women all over the world. “Since that day the situation has not changed much – Colomba continues – but I can change my attitude by believing that this can change the world”. Here then is the recipe for transforming the 4 walls of the house (which sometimes appear very narrow) into a living room wide open for all humanity, a recipe to try and live. And Colomba is already at work and between a phone call and housework her experience has become music … and it is ready to be shared during the live streaming April 3 at 4pm (Italian time). An opportunity not to be missed. Just connect by clicking on https://youtu.be/NLsPTyuITu0
Tiziana Nicastro
Fraternity, tenderness and creativity: the right ingredients to face the coronavirus emergency, with thousands of experiences of love for others Struck particularly hard by the Covid-19 pandemic, Italy is experiencing one of its greatest ordeals since World War II. Despite this, Italians are facing it with countless gestures of solidarity, fraternity and tenderness. “At the beginning I was afraid of contagion, so I was very quick in my nursing duties,” writes I.V., a nurse in the ward for patients testing positive for Covid-19 in the province of Naples. “A patient asked me for a coffee from the machine. At first I told him I couldn’t. But then, by involving a colleague, we found two coffee machines for all the patients.” Having to stay at home changed life for Salvo and Enza’s family in Viareggio, with their children Emanuele and Marco. “Until a few days ago,” says Enza, “the children, taken by so many commitments, could barely say a quick hello to their sick and bedridden grandmother. Now they stop more and try to help me, even just by giving her a glass of water. At lunch and dinner we have more time to talk and to laugh, too.” 
In Lucca, Paolo and Daniela offered to do the shopping for all their neighbours, and they donated some masks too. Also in Lucca, Rosa and Luigi, a young couple of teachers with two children, all at home at the moment, lent their car to a family with a serious financial situation. In Siena, Giada and Francesca offered their services as babysitters for the children of nurses living near home to support them. In Pisa, Carla and Giacomo prepared food for some families near home, while in Arezzo there was a race of solidarity between Rosanna, Rita and Mario to support two people who cannot go out, through shopping and preparing meals. In Latina, in order to support her young colleagues away from home and forced into isolation, Barbara began to record videos to share her recipes. They thanked her very much, because by doing this she makes them feel at home, like family. Emanuele and Simonetta from Sardinia have been in quarantine for two weeks with their three children. “It immediately seemed to us an opportunity to build deep relationships as a family,” they write. “Since we came into contact with the virus, we started sharing our experiences in a chat group with other people who are experiencing the same suffering. “One day some of them needed food. Since we couldn’t do the shopping ourselves, we found another couple who immediately were able to provide. And we realized that we should never give up when faced with someone else’s needs.” “In my work in the cardiology intensive care unit, I found myself with a young patient who had a complicated heart attack,” says Orsolina, a nurse from Sicily. “In her eyes I saw fear and despair, because she did not have the comfort of her family and small children with her. “I felt that I could be her family. So I helped her with her personal hygiene, thinking about what I would have wanted if I were in her place – making her bed just right, fixing her hair. Her eyes changed, and we felt a great joy together. At that moment we were a family.” In Rome, Mascia, Mario and their son Samuel are discovering that “this virus, as well as reminding us that we are all interconnected, is giving us the opportunity to appreciate small things, to put family and affection first, to give free rein to creativity against the frenetic schedules and rhythms we are used to.” As class representative, Masha is looking for the best way to love families and teachers, keeping relationships vibrant through online chats and phone calls. As Focolare’s co-president, Jesús Morán, said a few days ago: “This is truly a moment of wisdom… It leads to an awareness of reality enlightened by love and… triggers a formidable movement of fraternity. “Truly God can do exceptional things, even in the midst of evil. He defeats it with his plan of love.”
Lorenzo Russo
Many people are wondering, while a pandemic is afflicting humanity, where God is in all this. The following writing by Chiara Lubich invites us to believe that nothing we experience, even if it is very painful, escapes his love and that behind everything there is a positive purpose, even if for the time being we cannot see it. We talk about a Holy Journey and encourage each other to live our life as a Holy Journey, … and we often think of it as a series of days in which we want to make each day more perfect than the last: doing our work well, studying, resting, spending time with the family, attending gatherings and meetings, doing sport and relaxing, and all of this done in an orderly and peaceful way. That’s how we think of it and both humanly and instinctively we are inclined to expect it to be like that, because life is a continual tending towards order and harmony, health and peace. … We act like this because everything else is of course unforeseeable, but also because there is always hope in the human heart that things will go like that and not any other way. In reality our Holy Journey turns out differently, because God wants it to be different. He himself brings other factors into our programme that are either wanted or permitted by him so that our existence may acquire its true meaning and reach the goal for which it was created. This is where physical and spiritual sufferings come in, the illnesses and the thousand other sufferings which speak more of death than of life. Why is this? Is it perhaps because God wants death? No, on the contrary, God loves life, but a life that is full and fruitful in a way we could never have imagined, even with all our efforts towards all that is good and positive, and towards peace. A Word of Life explains it: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (Jn 12:24). If the grain of wheat does not die, it stays nice and healthy, but remains alone; if it dies it multiplies. God wants that during our life we experience a kind of death, or sometimes many kinds of death. It’s because for him the Holy Journey means bearing fruit, doing works that are worthy of him and not just of us simple people. For him this is the meaning of our life, a life that is rich, full and superabundant; a life that can be a reflection of his. So we have to expect these deaths and get ready to accept them in the best possible way. Therefore, the choice of Jesus forsaken that we renew every day, and our preferential love for him, is wise and indispensible and nothing other than genuine Christianity. It prepares us … to accept these deaths, whether great or small, but also to see that all we had planned to achieve has been far exceeded, strengthened and made fruitful. … They are passive purifications: illnesses, the death of people dear to us, the loss of goods or of our reputation, problems of all kinds. They are dark nights of the senses and dark nights of the spirit, where body and soul are purified in a thousand ways through temptations, spiritual dryness, doubts, a sense of being abandoned by God; and it’s when the virtues of faith, hope and charity waver in us. They are real anticipations of purgatory if not almost of hell. What should we do? Give up the holy journey, thinking that by living a more ordinary life, in the way of the world, we could avoid many or at least some of these trials? No, we cannot turn back! Here, I have only listed the purifications; we’ve also got to look at the consolations, the “beatitudes” (cf. Mt 5:3-11) that life lived as a Holy Journey already brings to this earth. Jesus’ death actually calls for the resurrection. The death of the grain of wheat calls for “much fruit.” In a way, “resurrection” and “much fruit” stand for an anticipation of paradise, the fullness of joy, the joy that the world does not know. And so, let’s go ahead! Let’s look beyond every suffering. Let’s keep going rather than stopping when things are uncertain, when there is anguish, illness or other trials. Let us look forward to the harvest that will come from it … foreseeing and having a foretaste of the abundant fruit which is on our doorstep.
Chiara Lubich
(From a telephone conference call, Rocca di Papa, 25the February 1988)
A couple from Croatia and their experience with the Focolare Movement’s “Paths of Light” project “Like small children who start learning, we too learned to understand ourselves first, understand feelings, recognize them, understand each other, and learn that thinking differently doesn’t always have to end up in conflict. We understood that the couples around us enrich our relationships, and that we need to avoid isolating ourselves.” Melita and Slavko have been married for close to 20 years and are parents. They live in Croatia. They tell their experience as a couple candidly, without glossing anything over, or omitting those trying moments that made their path a challenge. Their marriage was a “house” to build every day, often without knowing what tools to use. It wasn’t a straight highway to drive with a powerful car, but a dirt road to be covered by bike with only one’s legs, lungs and heart as the engine, with tiring climbs and then descents to recover on. Theirs is a story that perhaps resembles many couples, yet it offers a key to understanding family that should not be overlooked. It came to light when they participated in the Percorsi di luce (“paths of light”) project in Italy, which the Focolare Movement has created for couples, especially those who are going through moments of division. In one of the darkest moments of their relationship, they explain, it was thanks to meetings like these that they found the tools to “use each day so that our family can be happy and our relationship can grow. The tools facilitate the climb that awaits us all in life as a couple, to realize God’s plans for our family.” Through their words, it becomes clear that the image of the “perfect” couple is a painful illusion. The expectation of a linear and sunny path, nourished by the enthusiasm that follows meeting the “right” person, clashes with the reality of a “game” that everyone must play. In this game the outcome is unknown, your teammate sometimes turns into your opponent and you win only if you both win. It is a game with no written rules, but one that has to be played with a clear goal, or at least, if it fades away, rediscovering that goal. It is a game where everyone is called to contribute and face adversity, without shortcuts. “Seen from today’s perspective,” they say, “we can testify that marriage is not a fixed and static thing, and that a course like this is not a magic wand that solves all our problems forever.” Rather, here “we have learned that our first child — our marriage — needs the greatest care and priority, because only when we are in peace and harmony can we be able to give love to the children and people around us. Only in this way can we become fulfilled as people.” In fact, their relationship went from feeling already fulfilled straight to the “starting blocks”. Melita tells about their beginnings: “It was a very beautiful time. I finally fulfilled my dream of having a man who could listen to me, console me, understand me. A person with whom to share similar views on life, faith, love. We soon realized that we wanted to crown our love with marriage.” Soon, however, the first test emerged: the loss of a pregnancy forced Melita and Slavko to review their plans and focus on the practical organization of life, work and home. It was a productive time, where they experienced a growing unity between them and with their respective families. They shared everything, says Slavko, finding “the strength, the will and the desire for common things”. “We idealized our lives,” Melita explains, “by completing the tiles in our mosaic and waiting for the family to expand.” After three years came the joy of their first child, but with it also the need to find a less demanding and more rewarding job. Employment for Slavko came, but the new situation produced tensions, misunderstandings, deep wounds in the couple. “The security we had built up and the trust in each other disappeared,” says Melita. “A period of dissatisfaction in our relationship began, with blame for the mistakes made. Slavko was not aware how dissatisfied I was, and I didn’t know how to make him understand the things that were bothering me.” “I was content with life, thinking, ‘What more do you want?’” he says. “We love each other, we are married, life goes straight ahead. Why do I continually need to show my fidelity and affection? She’s the one who doesn’t understand that I love her and stand by her. “I was deaf to her cries and I thought that she was the one who had to change and accept the new circumstances. In us there was a growing feeling of powerlessness and despair. We fell into an abyss from which we did not see a way out.” The thought of separating went through their minds. They had reached the bottom. But in that desert, life gradually began to flourish again. “At that moment the Lord sent our godparents and friends on our path, who, like others we had once erased from our lives, sent us directions to follow through them,” Slavko remembers. By comparing their situation with other couples participating in the project, they finally managed to glimpse a way out. “Facing each other, and before God, we began to understand and know each other again. We learned that having a different opinion does not mean that my partner does not love me; on the contrary, we have learned once again how diversity enriches us – it completes us as a couple.” Learning, discovering, growing and coming together as a person and as a couple: perhaps this is the unexpected result of an authentic and courageous journey, one that is unpredictable and full of tests, but also satisfying goals. Melita and Slavko have discovered that God’s plans for them as a couple and their family are not at all predictable, but it requires a determination to love each other. And they have learned that it is through this commitment that they each fulfil themselves as people.
Claudia Di Lorenzi
He passed away recently at the age of 53. His passions were building bridges between peoples and cultures, and forming the new generations. Young people were the primary focus of Fr Silio Naduva’s work as a priest in the Fiji islands, in the South Pacific. He died recently at the age of 53. He dedicated his profoundest energies to ensuring a human and spiritual formation and education for the youth of one of the most remote islands of the archipelago. He realised that globalisation which brings the world into their homes cannot equip these young people with the knowledge and instruments needed to continue their lives in an informed, free and fruitful way. He got to know the charism of unity of Chiara Lubich in the late 1990s. What fascinated him was “the capacity of the ideal to create a sense of family, forge union between people, and in particular with the flock the Lord entrusted to him,” so described Roberto Paolini, a volunteer member of the Focolare, who collaborated with Fr Silio in a series of formation weeks in his parish of St Anne, at Napuka last summer. “In the spirituality of unity,” Roberto continued, “he discovered an incredible driving force” which helped him face moments of great pain and suffering. Born on 28 February 1967 in Serua province, in the small village of Namuamua in the interior of Fiji’s main island, Silio was the seventh of nine brothers. From an early age he demonstrated great generosity, resilience, resoursefulness and a caring nature towards his family members and everyone else. He attended a Marist school and at the age of 17 was conscripted into the Fijian armed forces. Silio was posted on two missions which involved traumatic experiences, but he never lost his profound sense of humanity. Only after the death of his father in 1996 did Silio enter the regional Pacific seminary to start his formation. The very next year he met the Focolare Movement. Silio was ordained priest on 1 January 2005, at the age of 37, beginning his ministry in the parish of Vudibasoga, in Nabala. He was diagnosed with a serious illness in 2013, but this did not hold him back in serving and using all his energies for his parish. In 2018 Silio accompanied a group of young people to the Genfest at Manila in the Philippines. He returned with the ardent desire to encourage his young parishioners to follow this pathway. He guided and educated them, he encouraged them to join him in building bridges towards the youth of other communities, who despite having different cultures and languages, are part of our same family. One of the last things he did was to promote a meeting for youth from his own parish with young people from other parishes nearby, organized last August in collaboration with Focolare and with the local Caritas agency. In such a fragmented community, where the social network is lacerated by poverty and violence, Fr Silio worked to unfold a wider horizon to these youth. He offered them a vision and experience of how living alongside each other can nurture solidarity, and how peoples separated by large distances, by differences in traditions, cultures and language, can meet together in mutual respect and with a shared desire to build real relationships as brothers and sisters of the same family.
Claudia Di Lorenzi
To better understand what to do for others, Jesus invites us to put ourselves in their shoes; just as He did, when, out of love for us, he took on our human nature Are you doing it for yourself or for others? I found myself in a strange situation: I prayed every day, I attended Mass regularly, I was engaged in works of charity… and yet I didn’t have a living faith. It was as if a veil was preventing me from seeing clearly. One day, as I was accompanying my grandmother to the doctor, we got into a profound discussion; knowing how strong her faith was, I told her the state of my soul. She looked me in the eye and said: “Son, everything you do, do you do it for yourself or for others?” That simple question shocked me and called for a complete change of situation! I began to reflect, noting that even acts of charity were done out of a sense of duty. Now and then, I would visit an old man. When I visited him after that encounter with my grandmother, instead of talking about paperwork or medicine, I asked him what was in his heart. He told me about the war, the comrades that had died, his wife’s illness… At the end, he thanked me for the great gift he said he had received that day. (U.R. – Argentina) Loyalty Having fallen in love with a colleague, my wife left me with four children. I could not show them my despair as this would made their suffering worse but I could not help wondering where I had gone wrong. My own faith was being tested. Now the challenge was to minimise the impact of this drama on the children and make sure that she did not feel judged by them. Sometimes I would bring her our youngest child of four years old, sometimes I would make sure she attended parent meetings with the other children’s teachers. Slowly, a situation arose in which it seemed as if the mother, despite living away from home, somehow continued to be present in the family. But when she asked for a divorce, I felt like I was back at zero. I had to take a new step with the children. It was the oldest who, seeing me sad and thoughtful one day, gave me courage by saying: “Dad, don’t worry. We’re learning to take charge of life.” (B.d.P. – Croatia) The baby grow Used to having money, clothes, luxury ever since I was a child, I gradually had to drastically reduce my expenditure after the wedding. A few days ago I received an extra sum of money from work: I immediately thought about our baby that was about to be born and the baby grow I could buy him. But then, remembering how many poor people there are in the city, I told myself that the money could be used to help some of them. For the birth of our baby I received loads of second-hand clothes as a gift. Of course, I would have liked a brand new baby grow, but the things I received out of love were much more valuable and beautiful to me. (Anita – Venezuela)
Edited by Stefania Tanesini (taken from Il Vangelo del Giorno, Città Nuova, anno VI, n.2, march-april 2020)
Jesús Morán, Co-president of the Focolare Movement, in his homily during the Mass celebrated behind closed doors and transmitted via streaming shared the following thoughts: (…) In these last few weeks, which have also been during Lent, a thought overwhelmed my soul: the vanity of all things, the insecurity of our ability to deeply understand reality, life and the course of history. In fact, it only took a virus, a non-cellular microorganism, to put in jeopardy all our great reasoning and our security, our economic plans, our political strategies; to trigger panic worldwide and highlight the woes of so-called globalization. As a newspaper headlined a few days ago, using football jargon: Coronavirus 1 – Globalization 0. That is the sad truth. When thinking about the things that have been written in recent years on the phenomenon of culture in our times, the countless analyses and counter-analyses about the evolution of history and so on, I felt dismay and an almost paralyzing sadness. But it was then that I made a formidable rediscovery: Revelation, the Word of God addressed to humanity in human words and intelligence; the thought of God expressed in human words about the depths of life and history; a breath of understanding. In fact, I think that only the Word of God can provide us with answers for the period we are living in, because it alone preserves an eternal wisdom that goes beyond the times without losing its meaning. In the light of Revelation we realize something as overwhelming as it is paradoxical: that we are living a time of grace. Wisdom! This is the right solution. This is indeed the time of wisdom, a time for wisdom; a vision of reality that moves on other tracks, which is extremely imperative and indispensable today. (…) Wisdom that leads to an understanding of reality enlightened by love and that, precisely for this reason, triggers a formidable movement of living as one family. Truly God can do prodigious things, even in the midst of evil. He defeats it with his plan of love. Chiara’s life spanned almost a century and she lived it like a river of wisdom that watered the earth. She was attentive to the events of history and did not stop at what was on the surface of things, but went into depth and looked above to draw on the thought and vision of God and from God. That is why she paid no attention to anything but His Word. Unity, in fact, is God’s plan for humanity; it is the testament of Jesus, the Incarnate Word. Now we can see how much this word, unity, because it is anchored in Revelation, goes beyond the passing events, times and eras of history. It represents a vision of meaning that involves the past, present and future. It is a prophetic perspective that can activate the best energies of men and women of all latitudes, cultures, ethnicities and social conditions. Strengthened in unity we can transform the “globalization of indifference” into the “globalization of fraternity”. The match is not over. Of one thing we are certain: God’s mercy will triumph.
