{"id":326486,"date":"2014-06-11T03:11:16","date_gmt":"2014-06-11T01:11:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/scicli-a-community-which-is-a-family\/"},"modified":"2024-05-16T14:57:24","modified_gmt":"2024-05-16T12:57:24","slug":"scicli-a-community-which-is-a-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/scicli-a-community-which-is-a-family\/","title":{"rendered":"Scicli: a community which is a “family”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"201406Scicli\"In the early 1960’s,<\/strong> Sicily <\/a>was far from Trent and seemed inaccessible. Yet since that time, through the first group of the Focolare Movement, the spirituality of unity<\/a> spread in many towns of this island in the far south of Italy. Among these Scicli, which has 25 thousand inhabitants, is a town which is a jewel of the baroque period and has been declared a World Heritage Site. It overlooks the Strait of Sicily and has found itself at the centre of the new migrant influx of these times, like Agrigento, Pozzallo and others that we often\u00a0 hear mentioned as places where migrants from north Africa come to land. By nature, the people are welcoming,<\/strong> but Jesus’ invitation “That all may be one” (John 17:21) and the suggestions of Chiara Lubich<\/a> about the way to follow for those who wish to conquer their own city for God, over the years have motivated the Scicli Focolare community to seize every opportunity to reach out to many people: a dialogue with Christians of different churches, <\/a>support for\u00a0 immigrant youth, a New Year’s Eve initiative not to leave anyone alone, Italian lessons, a day care centre animated by children for children, a meals service which turned into a project (“One family, one table”), and more. \"201406Scicli1\"“There are members of \u00a0the Methodist Church<\/strong> living in our city,” says Ignatius Ventura from Scicli. Already in the 1990’s a deep dialogue of communion and sharing of ideas started with them. Together we decided to run a weekly canteen for the many immigrants in our city.” “Hichem and Samia<\/strong> are a young Tunisian couple who recently came to Scicli. We supported them as they tried to sort out their modest house. Worried about their precarious financial situation, they told us that they were expecting a baby. It was the concrete love of many that reassured to go ahead with the pregnancy. After the first few moments of joy, the birth of their child, Deyssem, turned into an alarming race against time. Due to an abnormality: an operation was needed within a few hours! We were with them\u00a0 in this delicate moment. We had to arrange the transfer to Rome. One of our community offered to accompany the child and his dad. The operation was completely successful and the child was saved.” Around that time, together with other institutions, the Scicli community founded an intercultural reception centre named “The Source”<\/strong>\u00a0 and responded to an appeal launched by the City Council for Italian language lessons for migrant youth which were given three times a week, for two consecutive years. The result was a performance in which North African and Scicli youth gave the best of themselves. \"201406Scicli2\"Inspired by the ‘Manifesto’ that Chiara gave to the new generations,\u00a0 “One city is not enough”,\u00a0 since 2005 the “Teens for Unity”<\/a> look after children in a day care centre which some Religious Sisters run. Here children from difficult situations have lunch and spend the afternoon. A rota was organized for \u00a0playing with them and for\u00a0 helping them with their homework. The social worker and the psychologist have said that the presence of the “Teens for Unity” is very important for children. In 2006 the families of the Focolare<\/a> were asked to contribute to the formation of the families of the children of the Centre. These were Albanian families, from a different religion and culture, families which were separated and some of which had \u00a0parents in prison or under house arrest … “Our support to the centre and to the Sisters gave us many opportunities to establish relationships of mutual help and assistance, even when all we could do was to listen and try to understand their suffering. This was how the\u00a0 “One family, one table” project started: a meal organized for sixty people, one Sunday a month.\u00a0 Ignatius concludes, “We are experiencing that the spirit of\u00a0 family spirit exists beyond cultural barriers. It’s really true that by giving ourselves to others we experience peace in our souls and the freedom of being children of God. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the small town of Ragusa overlooking the Straits of Sicily, there many initiatives to reach out to the lonely, marginalized and those who try to piece together a new life far from their homeland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"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-326486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-categorizzato"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326486","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\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326486\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}