This is a continuous tension because our nature loves itself.
Often we hear news of disasters, earthquakes, hurricanes which claim victims and leave people injured and homeless. But it’s one thing to be one of those affected and another thing to be an onlooker.
Even if we are able to offer some aid to help the others, we are not them.
Tomorrow it could be the other way round: I on my deathbed (if I am given a bed!) and the others out in the sun enjoying life.
All that Christ has commanded us goes beyond our nature as it is now.
But also the gift he gave us, the one mentioned to the Samaritan woman, is not human in nature. So it is possible to share in our brother’s pain, joy or worries because we have in us charity which s of a divine nature.
With this love, that is with Christian love, our brother can be truly comforted and tomorrow I might be comforted by him.
And in this way it is possible to live, because otherwise human life would be very hard and difficult, indeed sometimes it would appear to be impossible.
In early August in Trent, Italy, the Foco School, a Focolare Movement congress for the Gen3 boys and girls, the adolescent generation of the Movement, was held.
A total of 350 participants attended – ages 14 to 17 along with assistants ages 18 and older – from 19 nations with 12 different languages. A little over a week to deepen adolescent themes, experience in depth the relationship with God, discover how the Ideal of unity and universal fraternity is possible to live it and build it day by day despite the threat of wars in various parts of the world. There was also a Festival of peoples where each nation could represent itself through songs, dances, outfits, photos, and local food. A way to learn about each other’s culture and build a piece of a world that is more united and fraternal.
Here are some testimonies.
Sofia, Italy: “I decided to attend the Foco school to have a more intimate relationship with Jesus. From this school I learned the way to always love the people around me. I can better cope with moments of difficulty and pain by feeling closer to Jesus.”.
Veronika, Croatia: “I experienced a united spirit that flows from the desire for peace and community, which is based on prayer and dialogue with God. After listening to the testimonies about the violation of peace, about the struggle to keep peace in oneself, in one’s family, in one’s country, the desire to do everything to keep peace in these places was awakened in me.”.
Naomi, India: “I attended the Foco School to improve my relationship with God. At the end what I took home was how I can take comfort during times of difficulty or pain by thinking of Jesus forsaken on the Cross. But I also discovered the power of reconciliation through confession. I will always try to use my whole self to propagate the Gospel and make my city a place of love.”.
Tomás Portugal: “During the Festival of Peoples, I was proud to show our country and at the same time learn about the cultures of other countries. After this school, I miss everything I experienced there, but I also want to live what I learned there every day.”.
Emanuel, Croatia: “At Foco School, I enjoyed the Festival of Peoples. We were able to learn about different cultures and traditional dishes. I met many friends there and tried various specialties. I would gladly relive this experience 100 more times.”.
Gloria, Brazil: “I have felt changes in my relationship with God. At first I could not connect with Him and feel Him in people, but I know that after all the experiences I have heard and reflections I have experienced, I can easily feel Him in every situation. Also, I have learned to help people I don’t like, to help people with problems and to identify God in everyone.”.
Sarahi, Mexico: “I realized that even though we live in different countries and even on very distant continents, the Ideal of unity can always be lived. It was a very good experience especially to learn about other countries’ culture, food, their clothes, some words and traditions. What I took away from the school is that first of all I stopped being afraid of confession and this made my faith in God grow. Daily Mass has helped me a lot, I hope to continue going every Sunday of my own free will.”.
Sebastian, Croatia: “I liked it when we represented our countries at the Festival of Peoples: everyone showed some tradition of their country. It was a lot of fun when we played soccer in the evening and got to know each other like that. My favorite moment was the final party where we sang and had fun. My life changed after the school, now I try to live the gospel by loving the people around me.”.
Silvia, Italy: “After the school my life turned around and I began to see the world with different eyes. It was the most meaningful experience of my life and made me want to be able to resemble what Chiara Lubich always wanted from the Gen.”.
Anna, Italy: “I highly recommend Gen who have not yet attended a Foco School to do so! You will have a lot of fun, I can guarantee.”.
Jakov, Croatia: “At Foco School, I understood the importance of unity. When I arrived, everyone was welcoming, it felt like one family. Rarely have I experienced this feeling before, maybe never. Also, I understood how to love and want everyone, regardless of who they are and their background. I would like to experience more such encounters, it was an unforgettable experience.”!
Julia, Brazil: “I take home the immeasurable love of Jesus for me and for everyone, as well as the hope and the feeling of wanting a united world to become a reality. Seeing that Jesus loves each one of us and being able to feel his love at Foco School was one of the most beautiful experiences I have had and I will definitely take it with me. I found hope and faith again. Now the challenge will be to bring the love and unity I felt at school into the “real world,” at home, at school, with my friends. But it is the memories and the love of what I learned in that experience that will push me to not give up and to fight for a united world.”!
Maria Teresa, Italy: “I participated in the Foco School as I felt a desire to know more about the origins of the Focolare movement. From this School I take home the hope for a better future for our generation. My life has improved because I have realized that I have to look at it from a different perspective, make every obstacle a launching pad! Being very insecure, I am always afraid to play the violin in public. In fact, when I was proposed to play at the school I was a little unsettled. Then one day there was a talk about how each of us can give to others our own talent or quality, which Chiara Lubich calls a “pearl.” So I decided to give my pearl to others, and while I was playing with another Gen, a group of boys and girls came up to accompany us with singing, giving us support. I lived Luke’s Gospel passage (Luke 6:38) “Give and it will be given to you.”.
Elena, Italy: “At the end of this school, I take home what I understood during a day dedicated to Jesus in his pain, abandoned on the Cross. It also affected me deeply because, thanks to the testimonies of the Gen, I was able to understand how to overcome pain through love.”.
Tomás, Portugal: “I brought home the discovery of Jesus forsaken, the power of prayer, as well as confession. I will carry God’s love wherever I go, I have strengthened my faith, I have learned a lot from this school.”.
Trieste is a city located in north-eastern Italy, on the border with Slovenia. Historically, it represents a crossroads of cultures, languages and religions. Today it is one of the main entry points to Europe for migrants following the Balkan route. They come with a burden of suffering, wars and persecutions.
In Trieste, the Focolare Movement community collaborates with other institutions to welcome migrants.
Claudia, from the local community told us, “The biggest problem is the perception of the problem itself. It is not an emergency, an unmanageable invasion as it is often portrayed but it is a structural phenomenon that is the reality of our historical present. A continuous flow of incoming people who, if properly welcomed, can enrich our city and our country. If the migratory phenomenon is not understood and addressed in appropriate ways, it will inevitably generate distrust, fear, impatience, rejection”.
Last autumn, in anticipation of the cold weather, the Bishop of Trieste, Archbishop Enrico Trevisi, expressed a wish to open a shelter as a concrete response to the reception of migrants. Together with other Catholic associations and individual citizens, some Focolare members responded to the Bishop’s appeal by volunteering. Claudia said, “For us it is not just a charitable service but an opportunity to meet a brother or a sister who needs to be loved in many details: by giving a smile, offering a meal or exchanging a few words. Often these brothers and sisters tell us pieces of their story, their sorrows and their hopes. They show us photos of their children but we also have a laugh and simply spend time together. Some of us have also looked after some migrants more closely for example by accompanying them to a hospital appointment or helping them prepare a CV for a job application”.
Sandra from the Focolare community added: “We try to get to know the migrants, their stories and their needs. This gives rise to experiences that have seen us involved in helping beyond our shift at the shelter and these experiences encourage us to continue. The shifts allow us to work with the other volunteers and to discover that even though many of them are not part of any associations or involved in parish life, they were happy to respond to the Bishop’s appeal”.
Claudia said, “Relationships grow slowly and are a sign of unity for the local Church. This experience, combined with the recent Italian Catholics’ Social Week[1], which took place in Trieste and was attended by Pope Francis, will bring great life to this border city of ours”.
A guest of the diocesan shelter said, “In Trieste I met the best volunteers, people who do not stop at distributing food. Satisfying the hunger of the needy and treating the wounds of the sick are noble tasks because they are the most urgent and essential. However, human beings have other extremely important needs, for example their emotional and spiritual health, which are symptoms of the state of their soul. This is not an individual or minor issue, it is what makes the difference between actions that have a momentary impact and those that persist and permeate the entire society. The best volunteers are so because they are aware that the needy are not just recipients of charity, we are people with stories worth listening to. They know every migrant mourns their lost roots, while also harbouring a hope that crashes against the walls of the system and an incessant struggle for survival. The best volunteers are moved by this suffering humanity and are encouraged to listen to our stories, despite the language barrier. They teach Italian or learn Spanish, use technology, give up their personal time, invest their energy in the common good and dream of a community in which we can all offer the best of ourselves”.
The Pedrinhas (SP, Brazil) headquarters of the Fazenda da Esperança welcomes young people and adults who are going through different stages of recovery from drug addiction and various forms of addiction and social distress. There could not have been a better place to host the conference of UNIRedes, the platform of NGOs, social and humanitarian projects and cultural agencies inspired by Chiara Lubich’s spirituality of unity in Latin America. In attendance were 140 people from 37 of the 74 partner organisations of UNIRedes, active in 12 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean.
The aim of the conference was to present the work of these years to Margaret Karram and Jesús Morán, who were present at the meeting; to define the next steps common to all the partner organisations and to strengthen the link with the Focolare Movement in order to share the experience gained beyond the Latin American continent.
UNIRedes: a network of networks
Maria Celeste Mancuso, Argentinian, international co-responsible of the New Humanity Movement, explains that UNIRedes is not only a solidarity super-project: “It is also a space that generates a cultural reflection to identify the anthropological and epistemological categories necessary to generate a new culture of care for the person and societies in Latin America”. This is why cultural agencies inspired by the charism of unity such as the Sophia University Institute (Loppiano, Italy), its local branch, Sophia Latin America and the Caribbean (ALC), and the ASCES UNITA University Centre in Caruaru (PE) are also fully part of it.
Virginia Osorio, Uruguayan, one of the initiators of the project, explains its origins: “The constant political and economic changes in our countries made our organisations increasingly fragile and isolated. With UNIRedes we found a place where we could strengthen each other and share our sufferings and hopes. Our most recent project was for Genfest: hundreds of young people volunteered with many of our organisations, experiencing first-hand fraternity and closeness to the poorest”.
The common root: “dying for one’s people”
The first root of UNIRedes is not based on geopolitical or economic analyses: we need to go back to the early 1970s when the Gen, the young people of the Focolare, like many of their peers in many countries, wanted to change the world and bring equality, justice, and dignity.
Chiara Lubich, who met with them frequently, supported and confirmed the need to make a peaceful social revolution, especially in Latin America, a continent she saw as having this special vocation. She told the young people of the Focolare that: “Each one must feel that we must die, yes, for humanity, but we must find our local Jesus Forsaken to die for our own people”[1].
“That’s how many people went to the peripheries of the cities, to the slums, wherever poverty took away people’s dignity,” says Gilvan David, a Brazilian from the Latin American articulation group of UNIRedes. “The first NGOs were established, and in the meantime we were trying to structure ourselves, but it was not enough: ‘You come to us,’ the poor told us, ‘but then go away and leave us alone’. To respond to this cry, we started to network with local public policies and at the same time, several priests who lived the spirituality of unity also founded social projects: Frei Hans with the Fazenda da Esperança, Father Renato Chiera with the Casa do Menor and others”.
One “single” Latin America
“Then the first groups of organisations were created,” continues Gilvan David, ‘Sumá Fraternidad’, which brought together projects from a number of Spanish-speaking countries; the civil association ‘Promocion Integral de la Persona’ (PIP) in Mexico; and the Brazilian social organisations continued to grow, finding their own identity and space for service. These were not easy years, but we started various paths in different territories in Latin America to support their social commitment, which then merged into UNIRedes. We met several times, but the founding meeting was in 2014, also attended by Emmaus Maria Voce and Giancarlo Faletti, then President and Co-President of the Focolare Movement. Emmaus on that occasion said: ‘You give the Movement a new visibilitỳ, a new meaning to its action, you are a testimony for those who look at you from the outside; you give complete visibility to the Charism through concrete actions’. I would say that it was then that we recognised ourselves as a unique reality for the whole of Latin America: we found ourselves embraced by the Charism of unity”.
There were many substantial contributions that built this conference, along with the presentation of the different partner organisations.
Juan Esteban Belderrain: from inequality to hope
The Argentinean political scientist Juan Esteban Balderrain analysed the wound of inequality of which Latin America holds the world record. “It is a matter of building a vision of this continent that starts from hope and this is possible because if we look at the deepest root of the problem of inequality, we find that we have lost the reference to that God who is love and who helps us understand that we are brothers and sisters of one another and with nature, which is also an expression of his Love. Referring to the 20th century, Paul VI said that it was a blessed time because it demanded holiness from everyone. I think these words also apply to ours.”
Padre Vilson Groh: the “open-eye mysticism”
For over 40 years, Father Vilson has lived in the “morro”, a slum in Florianopolis (Santa Catarina, Brazil), carrying out social projects especially for young people. He spoke of the “open-eye mysticism”: “We must take our organisations to the dark cellars of our peripheries; be a hope there. Genfest brought the perspective of “togetherness”, which Pope Francis promotes. This requires a patient, resilient journey; it demands being steadfast in the pursuit of the common good. Unity is superior to conflict, the Pope always says, and unity is plurality. Let us bring diversity into our organisations: the charism of unity is a door for the wounded Christ to open spaces”.
Vera Araujo: Latin America builder of fraternity
The Brazilian sociologist’s talk focused on a positive vision that recognises the Latin American cultural and human heritage and offers it as a gift to the world.
“UNIRedes originates in Chiara Lubich’s charism and can be transformed into an incredible opportunity for the rest of the world: unity seen not only as a religious value, but also as a force capable of effectively composing the human family, realising an interaction between the multiplicity of people, preserving distinctions in the context of social realities. Here the charism of unity offers a solution that is not easy, but rather a sense, a meaning, a Person: Christ Forsaken on the cross.
‘To love well‘, says Chiara, ‘we must not see in the difficulties and injustices of the world only social evils to be remedied, but discover in them the face of Christ who does not disdain to hide beneath every human misery’[2].
Susana Nuin Núñez: the path of peoples and social movements
The Uruguayan sociologist described the journey and the social, political, economic richness of the continent’s peoples and certain social movements. “These networks with their most varied physiognomies, with their developments in social practices or in the academic world, act in a complementary manner, generating an unquestionable socio-cultural fabric with a multifaceted community character that Latin America is the bearer of”. She then underlines the peculiarity of UNIRedes, which for over ten years has been a social subject that heals, revolutionises, transforms and influences from the Gospel and the word of unity.
Margaret Karram and Jesús Morán: UNIRedes is part of the Focolare Movement
“Those who want to live the Gospel in this region are always in crisis because they see inequalities constantly,” Jesús points out. “Unity cannot fail to take on this reality. How do we achieve unity on this continent, without taking into account those discarded by society? What you do as UNIRedes should inform the whole Movement in this region; its work for unity is not credible if it is not also done through social works. Of course, we will not solve social problems. The only thing we can do is to make people convert to love. If we touch hearts, someone will grasp the spirit and in freedom will understand how to live the Gospel”.
Margaret encouraged UNIRedes to move forward: “Now you have to figure out how to make your life and example reach everyone in the world. Quoting a conversation of Chiara Lubich from 1956, she reiterated that in its social commitment the Movement must not forget that the key to solving the problems that the Charism of Unity offers lies in the novelty of reciprocity rather than in justice. It promotes sharing, the putting in common among everyone the little or the much that is available to create a greater Common Good which, in addition to solving social problems, produces the human and spiritual fulfilment that only happens in fellowship among all. Finally Margaret launches a proposal: “Add a new article in your Charter of Principles and Commitments: a solemn pact of fraternity to be proposed to those who want to be part of UNIRedes: we are here to witness to mutual love and only if we have this love will the world believe”.
“UNIRedes speaks to us of hope,” concludes M. Celeste Mancuso. “It is a transversal and synodal proposal of an organisational network that can inspire similar models for those existential peripheries in other parts of our vast world. In this way we can think of building global networks of fraternity that promote the common good”.
Stefania Tanesini
[1] Chiara Lubich at the “Gen School”, Rocca di Papa (Rome, Italy), 15 May 1977
[2] Chiara Lubich, Towards a civilisation of unity. Keynote address at the Congress “A culture of peace for the unity of peoples”, Castelgandolfo, (Rome) 11-12 June 1988.
One day a co-worker of our center had received a gift of a pair of new sports shoes size 43. But who could have possibly needed them? That same day we learn that a 14-year-old boy we know really needed those shoes and that size! He is the son of a friend who was in the hospital at that time. Her other daughter had also visited our center that day and we had learned that they needed clothes and medicine. She made us understand that she is in need of a cell phone to keep in touch with her mother in the hospital. And…we had received one (a phone) a few days earlier! It is impressive to see how there is always “Someone” who provides us with just those ad hoc things which we can then donate!
A bed in two minutes
We were at the final goodbyes of a Sunday spent “as a family” (so to speak because we were surrounded by hundreds of people) with activities to raise funds for our youth. A Venezuelan friend among the first people I met years ago had introduced me to an 18-year-old young man – Jesús. He had told me some of what he had experienced having left Venezuela alone at the age of 16. Two years of adventures, enough to make an action film, with many moments of suspense. For 15 days he had been in Peru. Talking with him I discovered that he was sleeping on a mat on the floor! Diligently he had planned with his first paycheck (he had in fact found a job in Peru immediately) to solve the problem of documents and then think about the bed. At that time I had no solutions, but we promised to stay in touch. Shortly after saying goodbye to him I met one of our co-workers who, without knowing anything about Jesus’ needs, asked me, “So what do we do with that bed?” “But how? Do you still have it?” I was surprised. “Yes!” he said to me. I immediately called back Jesús who was leaving the Center. He joined us immediately, and upon hearing that there was already a bed for him, very strong was the light I saw in his eyes. It had not been two minutes since I had told him that I would try to find a solution!
Free ultrasound scans
Many of the migrants who arrive at our center need medical care and sometimes even diagnostic tests. Recently, another blessing from Heaven occurred: a medical center near us offered us the possibility of performing ultrasound scans for free. They want to give this opportunity to those who do not have the possibility of paying for these examinations. Truly a gift for so many of our patients.
