{"id":305786,"date":"2018-01-05T01:10:11","date_gmt":"2018-01-05T00:10:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/the-birth-of-the-focolare-history-and-sociology-of-a-charism\/"},"modified":"2024-05-15T20:36:08","modified_gmt":"2024-05-15T18:36:08","slug":"the-birth-of-the-focolare-history-and-sociology-of-a-charism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/the-birth-of-the-focolare-history-and-sociology-of-a-charism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Birth of the Focolare: History and Sociology of a Charism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"callebaut-focolari-copertina\"<\/a>From a small city in northern Italy to five continents<\/strong>: an ample sociological dossier outlines the history of the Focolare, from its birth up to the definitive approval of the Church in 1965. It is a detailed reconstruction, encouraged by the founder of the Focolare herself already in the 1980s, and published for the first time in 2010 in a French edition, and lately translated into Italian by Citt\u00e0 Nuova. Piero Coda<\/strong>, Rector of Sophia University Institute<\/a>, introduces Callebaut\u2019s study in the preface, with these words: \u201cUp to today, there has never been an overall scientific approach to the history of the Focolare [\u2026] this current research for the first time constructs and institutes a historical and interpretative dossier of the important phenomenon represented by the Focolare Movement. \u00a0[\u2026] The work is accurate, precise, and as thorough as can be [\u2026] exemplary and excellent under the historical profile.\u201d Interviewed by Lorenzo Prezzi <\/strong>for settimananews.it<\/a>, Bernhard Callebaut (Bruges, 1953) <\/strong>explained the sense of the book: \u201dI think that the purely testimonial narration, in which the person is strongly felt, is always valid. I think that a book like mine could cancel from my story the beneficial shock experienced in the reading of some pages of Lubich\u2019s first (Meditations)<\/em> pages that stimulated the actualisation of the messages they contained. On this premise, I think that at a second moment, we have to respect the need to understand, contextualize, link the phenomenon in itself to a previous story and gather some of the future prospects.\u201d With studies in law, philosophy and sociology at the Catholic University of Lovanio<\/strong>, Bernhard Callebaut is currently a professor at Sophia University Institute in Florence, of which he is also Program Director of the Religions in a Global World research group. \"Foco_Chiara_DonForesi\"<\/a>The first 20 years of the history of the Focolare<\/strong> are fathomed starting from the \u201cenlightenments\u201d of Chiara Lubich, which later became the core of her spirituality. \u201cThe charism is always granted to someone in particular, also here,\u201d Callebaut explains. \u201cOnly after a certain time, Lubich realised that actually that gift had been bestowed on her and nobody else, at least, not in such a strong, limpid and overwhelming manner. But with time, she realized that also her first companions, who were sent elsewhere \u2013 first to Italy, then\u00a0 Europe and the continents \u2013 also became in some way, harbingers, multipliers of the charism, \u2019springs\u2019 in turn. As of today \u2013 and in my book it is amply demonstrated \u2013 the core of Lubich\u2019s charism is linked to having identified \u2013 as a gift \u2013 and later developed, and as never before in the two millenniums of Christian life, the meaning of that apex of the passion that constitutes the moment of that cry of abandonment of Man-God.\u201d The history of the Focolare at the start of the story is made up also of a long and suffered wait for the formal recognition of the Church. \u201cAt the start of the 1950s the Holy Office examined the papers on the Focolare and initiated a series of meetings with the young founder. To put her and her followers to the test and measure their faithfulness to the Church, they asked her to take a step back, and no longer act as head of the Movement. Her followers would have never hidden who was really the soul of the Movement and there was no leadership crisis during those years, until Paul VI definitively resolved the issue. In 1965 Lubich signed her first letter as president of the Focolare. Today, after a certain time, we are beginning to see that behind her stature as a bearer of spirituality, there was also a rather unusual density of thought.\u201d In more recent years, the charismatic intuition of the founder translates also into a series of concrete proposals as a contribution to the resolution of social and cultural issues. Some of these were Economy of Communion, \u201cwhich actuates the preferential choice for the poor, and at the same time, values those who are able to contribute to economical life with the not common talent of entrepreneurship,\u201d or the founding of the Sophia Institute, \u201cas an interesting contribution to the debates and ordeals of contemporary thought.\u201d Today, all the members of the Focolare, in some way bring ahead and multiply the charism of Chiara Lubich to fulfill the prayer of Jesus: \u2018that all may be one\u2019. <\/em>And Callebaut concludes: \u201cWe need to continue working for some centuries more, it seems.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n

  \"Bernhard<\/a>Callebaut Bernhard, Tradition, charisme et proph\u00e9tie dans le Mouvement international des Focolari. Analyse sociologique, <\/em>Paris, Nouvelle Cit\u00e9, 2010, LXXXIII + 537 p. Italian translation La nascita dei Focolari. <\/em>Storia e sociologia di un carisma <\/em>(1943-1965), New City \u2013 Sophia, Rome 2017, p. 640. Entire interview by Lorenzo Prezzi<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The \u201cFocolare phenomenon,\u201d from a scientific-sociological viewpoint in the historical and cultural context in which the movement has developed: the precise analysis of Bernhard Callebaut, Belgian sociologist, available in French (Nouvelle Cit\u00e9, 2010) and now in Italian (Citt\u00e0 Nuova, 2017)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-305786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-categorizzato"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305786\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}