When you met Chiara Lubich, what impact did it have on you and your family? What were the effects of your relationship with her and her spirituality?
Danilo: “In the environment where Anna Maria and I were raised, traditional customs were of great importance. The family was present, but it was united more often because of social customs. Upon meeting Chiara we understood that being Christians entailed a certain choice, above all. That’s why we suffered a lot to free ourselves from the prevailing mentality, and the attachment to our roles, social circles, and professional titles. I had chosen the career of an engineer, but to live the Gospel radically, we started to host the poor, and practice the communion of goods. All these things were a cause of scandal, since they broke with the traditional customs of a bourgeois city. My parents didn’t understand our decisions and were against them. I remember that once, I had gone to speak in a mountain town since I was also the diocesan president of the group of Catholic men. I was suffering so much and torn inside. Right after that, I entered a Church and found myself before a statue of Jesus Forsaken. Immediately and clearly, I understood that facing such painful moments is also part of our being Christians.”
In 1956, Focolare Co-founder Igino Giordani (Foco) wrote that “also the married people are capable of fulfilling their call to the perfection of charity.” What do you think about this letter?
Anna Maria: “Chiara had deeply understood that married people are called to sanctity. In order to live in this way, we had to detach ourselves from an idea of the family of those times, and that each of us as well as our children had to make a personal choice. With great love she supported the single components of the family, and highlighted the personal calling of each one, so that we could become a family that lives the Gospel phrase, “Where two or more are united in my name, I am in their midst” (Mt, 18.20). Foco contributed greatly in highlighting the divine part of the family, while also giving value to the human aspect, since he loved his wife in an extraordinary way, and to the very end. He also loved our children, took care of them, and made us understand the grace we had been given. He felt the need to relive the times of the early Christians, where people could say that married couples are also consecrated people in all aspects, apart from celibacy, and that we all belong to God.”
You were present when Chiara founded the New Families Movement on July 19, 1967. What struck you most at that moment?
Anna Maria: “It was during the first school of the married focolarini. At one point Chiara understood that a new reality was coming about. From the moment I had met her in Tonadico in 1953, I had felt that she had her eye on the whole humanity. Now she was opening up a vast horizon before us, entrusting us with the world’s families, who were in painful and difficult family situations, and with orphans whom she particularly loved… the engaged couples. Right from the start Chiara took to heart those young couples preparing themselves for marriage, and what they were doing to increase their love for one another. She wanted them to understand that love is a gift from God and that difficulties can have meaning too. She made them fall in love with love itself, that true love, and she did the same for us, married couples.”
You’ve seen the New Families Movement come to life and you’ve met families throughout the world who have discovered in the spirituality of unity the answer to the challenges families face in their own context. What has this experience meant for you?
Anna Maria: “We felt immersed in the reality of love which Chiara had for all families. She valued the cultures and the characteristics of each nation and local tradition, but she also reached out to the very roots of humanity, to human beings created by God. The experience we made in visiting families in different parts of the world was an extraordinary one, because we felt like brothers and sisters, as if we had lived a whole lifetime together. We went to the rich and to the poor alike. In the Philippines and Brazil, for example, we visited the slums where the streets were only a meter and a half wide and where the houses were like rooms scattered here and there. There too the ideal of unity had reached them!
What is the greatest gift that Chiara brought about in your family?
Anna Maria: “Chiara made us feel that we were loved and she taught us what true love was, with all its characteristics: it is the first to love others; it makes itself one with the others. She made us see the beauty of unity lived with her and amongst us. She also provided us with the right conditions to have joy, fullness, and strength in the face of difficulties or before failures which occur in the life of a family. She gave us a light so strong that it revealed to us Jesus Forsaken as he who has generated this unity in the world, who accepted suffering out of love and who left us his own legacy. This helped us understand how to educate and to raise our own children.”
