{"id":327892,"date":"2016-01-08T05:00:54","date_gmt":"2016-01-08T04:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/living-the-gospel-the-works-of-love\/"},"modified":"2024-05-16T15:02:36","modified_gmt":"2024-05-16T13:02:36","slug":"living-the-gospel-the-works-of-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/living-the-gospel-the-works-of-love\/","title":{"rendered":"Living the Gospel. The Works of Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"immigrati-lampedusa-libia\"<\/a><\/strong>\u201cFifty exhausted young Africans arrived in our city<\/strong>. After many days at sea, the Italian flag came into sight. They had fled Lybia<\/a>, some from the religious conflicts between Christians and Islamist fundamentalists, some from the overly exploited territories. They amassed on the seashores, beaten, robbed and constrained to take to the sea on crowded boats. After a stop at Lampedusa, they were spread out over several Italian towns. One of those towns was ours, Pomigliano d\u2019Arco, in the Province of Naples. The oldest was thirty-six, and the youngest eighteen. We young people from San Felice <\/em>Parish in Pincis ran out to visit them.<\/strong> They didn\u2019t even know us, yet they welcomed us offering us places to sit, and they listened to our words. We had nothing to offer them other than our love. That meeting changed our life. The parish and the quarter adopted them. We got to work, many volunteers from different parish communities, but also many others who are doing as much as they can. The first thing to be done was to collect clothing. The children arrived shoeless and only with the clothes on their backs. We quickly began Italian lessons, organized cultural exchanges in view of gaining citizenship, while not overlooking their spiritual needs. We were very struck to see how the Catholics held on to their Bibles, robbed of everything else, they managed to salvage what they held most dear. They have much to teach us: when everything is lacking, faith in God can never be lacking. The Sunday liturgy, transformed into a trilingual Mass \u2013 with Italian, English and French \u2013 concluded amidst dance and applause to the rhythm of the bongos. Their singing and dancing not only conveyed their joy, but also made us live it with them as an image of the Resurrection. The Muslims received a visit from the Imam<\/strong>. Young people from Catholic Action organised a prayer vigil: blacks and whites, Catholics and Muslims, a tangible sign of peace amongst peoples and religions! One journalist from the area observed<\/strong>: \u201cAnyone who follows their situation is inevitably overwhelmed by their honesty, values, neighbourliness, their dramatic stories that suddenly dampen even the most solid barrage of prejudice and transform \u2018sterile\u2019 solidarity for the needy into fraternal concern and loving closeness.\u201d Such demonstrate show the contagious power of Love.\u201d (Ilaria and Salvatore, Focolare Parish Movement<\/a>, Pomigliano d\u2019Arco, Italy) Source: Chiara Favotti: \u201cUna buona notizia, gente che crede gente che muove\u201d<\/em> (Rome: Citt\u00e0 Nuova<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cLove is the most powerful force in the world. It unleashes a peaceful revolution around those who live it.\u201d These words of Chiara Lubich encourage us to unite in this witness, to put this month\u2019s Word of Life in practice.<\/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":[893],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-327892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-focolare-worldwide-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327892","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=327892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327892\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}