Giuseppe Maria Zanghi,  one of Chiara Lubich’s first companions, passed away on 23 January 2015, after a brief illness, at the age of 85 years. Known simply as Peppuccio, he was for many years responsible for the Focolare’s Abba School cultural centre.

In conveying the news, president, Maria Voce remarked, “He often spoke to us about Heaven, and now he can fully enjoy it.”

We remember him with this excerpt from a 2009 interview in Città Nuova magazine.

You took part in the beginnings of the Gen Movement with Chiara Lubich. What made her later decide to tell the new generations about those mystical experiences known as the “Paradise of ‘49”?

“When you get right down to it, what is this ‘Paradise of ‘49’? It’s the written account that Chiara gave to Igino Giordani of what happened to her during the summer of 1949 at Fiera di Primiero. This was a period of intense contemplation during which God marked her soul, as with a branding iron, with the whole design of the just-beginning Work of Mary. God does that with all the mystics who are to be great founders in the Church. The striking thing about ‘49 is that with Chiara others, the group of focolarinas and focolarinos who were vacationing with, her partook in the experience of intense contemplation (by participation). They were merged into one by God’s love: a merging, however, that left their respective individualities intact.

It was a highly original experience also in terms of culture, because it concerns what I like to call the ‘collective’ subject. In actuality every culture is born from a subject and, in my opinion, today’s world is in search of the subject for the culture that must be born now. For me this is the greatest – and yet to be discovered –  contribution Chiara makes to the birth of the new culture. But leaving that aside for now because much examination and study is still needed, the reality through which God opened to Chiara the endless depths of His Divine life while making her simultaneously understand many things about the Work of Mary that was about to be born. For her it wasn’t something merely to be remembered; it was actual life. And you could feel this when you were with her. You could feel that following the ideal of unity was not so much a matter of knowing a doctrine or hearing stories about someone’s experiences. No, it was entering into the very reality that Chiara had lived in ’49, and which continued.

Well, in her mind the young people of the Movement, the Gen, also had to get into this experience which was human and divine, spiritual and cultural.They had to stay there, develop it and bring it forward. That’s why, at a certain point, she began to give them something of this ‘Paradise.’”

Source: Città Nuova