Who trains the trainers? Who, and especially how, accompanies seminarians and priests on their discreet mission and pastoral training? How can we support priests, deacons and seminarians to be, as Pope Francis said to Brazilian bishops in July 2013, “ministers capable of warming the hearts of the people, to walk with them in the night, to dialogue with their illusions and delusions, and to rebuild when things fall apart?” These are relevant questions for all the Christian community and were already being explored during the Second Vatican Council, which led to the creation and opening of schools to train priests in the spirituality of communion. Some history: in 1966 the Focolare Movement’s school for priests began at Grottaferrata, Rome. In 1974 it moved to Frascati, and then in 1984 to the international center at Loppiano, where today it is called the Vinea Mea (“my vineyard”) Spirituality Center. The idea is to offer training in unity for priests, deacons and seminarians who place living fraternity front and center. It is a school of life for men who are called from all over the world to announce the Gospel, to train in a life of communion with their bishops, fellow priests, laypeople in their parishes, and women and men of every creed and culture. This follows the words of Focolare founder Chiara Lubich, who in 1966 told participants at Grottaferrata: “Know how to set aside everything, and leave all pretenses of power behind, to ensure the presence of Jesus among you, living as children in the kingdom of God. This way a “new” pastoral way will be born, together with “new” priests – priests who are Christ for humanity, ready to give their lives for all.” This matches what Pope Francis has a number of times told today’s priests: to go out towards the “existential peripheries.” Since 1966 more than 4,000 priests and seminarians have been trained under the guiding hand of many priests, beginning with Fr. Silvano Cola. Their ages have ranged from 20 to 75, and they have come from close to 60 countries from around the globe. It is an experience that, through the commitment to put Gospel love into practice each day, aims to produce “priests of communion” who are the service of others. After close to two years of renovations, the spirituality center reopened in October 2013, having risen to the challenge of marrying the classic with modern. It brought together the Church’s centuries of tradition with the communitarian dynamic – both in the community’s training methods and in the architecture itself. “Vinea Mea,” explains Fr. Imre Kiss, who heads the center presently, “offers training in the light of the Focolare Movement’s spirituality of communion. Over the course of a year, the school offers courses on spirituality, theology, anthropology and ecclesiology, as well as seminars on current topics such as youth, family, communication, and dialogue between religions and cultures. “By sharing their lives in small communities, it responds to needs expressed by many priests: to tangibly experience a spirituality that is based on communion, in order then to transmit it to the women and men of our times.” The center works in tandem with similar setups in the movement’s other little cities – in Poland, Germany, Kenya, Brazil, Argentina and the Philippines. It also often promotes annual courses and workshops for seminary educators in order to sustain and spread a priestly lifestyle that is based on communion. In November 2016 Vinea Mea inaugurated the Evangelii Gaudium Center, in collaboration with the Sophia University Institute. This emerged in response to the pope’s invitation to give a new push to the renewal work necessary for a new phase of evangelization in the Church: the call to go out towards the existential edges of our time. One of the center’s first initiatives, organized by Vinea Mea, has been a course that goes into depth into the apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium. From Loppiano online