Last August 1, 2020, Fr. Bonaventura Marinelli left us for heaven, where he could celebrate the centenary of his inseparable contemporary, Chiara Lubich. Theirs was a deep and faithful friendship!
“After the bombardment of 1944,” Fr. Bonaventura recalled in an in-depth interview, “we always saw Chiara and her companions. They came to Mass, not in our church which was damaged by the bombing, but in the sacristy which was even smaller, and so we were brought even closer together. What a deep impression they made on me every time I saw them. I’m rather shy by nature and find it hard to talk to people. But I can still remember how throughout the summer of 1943 and afterwards, when I was out almsgiving among the people, it became easier for me to meet with families, children and others. This new way of seeing people came not from my nature, but from the life I saw in Chiara and her companions.
“In 1946, a year after being ordained priest, my superiors sent me to a university in Switzerland. For the first few months, I regularly received letters from my companions with whom I had made a “pact of unity.” Then, suddenly, there was nothing, silence. The Vatican’s Holy Office (now known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) had started investigating the Movement, but I didn’t know that then. Personally, I found myself slipping into unutterable desolation… until April 23, 1948, precisely. I had gone to Trent to vote in the elections, and that morning, before returning to Switzerland, I met Chiara. She brought joy back to me, but in a much deeper way than before. I understood that what matters is to love. I felt I was touching heaven with my fingertips. When I arrived back in Fribourg, I wrote to her. That was the first letter.”
So began a correspondence between them, where Chiara communicated what she was living in that period. It is thanks to Fr. Bonaventura that today we have such a priceless patrimony of writings, some of which are now well known. For example, the letter dated March 30, 1948, in which she confides: “The book of Light the Lord is writing in my soul has two aspects. One page shines with mysterious love: Unity. The other shines with mysterious suffering: Jesus Forsaken.”
The letters demonstrate the deep relationship which sprang up between them.
May 11, 1948: “Your letter confirmed for me the impression I had of your soul, so beloved by the Lord. And immediately, without delay, I would like to give you all that is mine, all God has built in me, using my nothingness, my weakness and wretchedness. (…) What I wish to write to you today is that we mustn’t break the unity God has made. (…) Saint Francis will not be happy until you revive it in yourself and also in your brothers. So make a start. You can do it.”
September 8, 1948: “Your letter gave me such joy. Jesus is present. I found Him in your thirst for ‘life,’ in the optimism it contains, overflowing from the pages, and above all, in the peace that comes from your desire to love Him more and more. You can be very sure, as long as I am never parted from Jesus (and how could that ever be? In Paradise, I’ll possess Him even more), I’ll never stop following your soul with a vigilant eye and fraternal care.”
January 27, 1951: “You can’t imagine how your soul is ‘penetrating’ my own (almost literally, as if I could almost feel the effect on me!)”
I remember the joy whenever they met and spontaneously started talking in their Trentinian dialect. They were the same age, but he felt himself a son and disciple, and she was his mother. In one of their first letters, Chiara signed herself “s.m.”, which Bonaventura straight away interpreted as sua madre – “your mother.” So he replied, signing his name as “s.f.” (suo figlio – “your son”). And Chiara too understood.
A focolarina remembers hearing Chiara greet him in 2000 with the words, “This is my first son who is a religious!”
Fr. Bonaventura lived a long life. A professor of Sacred Scripture, a translator of German biblical commentaries, a friar who assumed various roles of responsibility in his Order including Provincial, Formator, and in the General Definitorium, the governing council of the four Franciscan Families. He was then invited by Chiara to lead the international Centers of Spirituality for Men Religious at Castel Gandolfo near Rome, and in Loppiano, the Focolare Movement’s little town in Italy.
Self-effacing and extremely humble, he knew how to bear witness, unostentatiously and sincerely, to the Ideal Chiara had transmitted to him. He was, in the words of one of his confreres, “a true child of the Gospel, in wisdom and simplicity of life.”
I have my own personal memories of Fr. Bonaventura, from the time we went to Canada together for a whole month to lead and animate a formation school for men religious in 1978. Later, I lived in community with him at Castel Gandolfo. In my diary entry for November 10, 1999, when he had already left to take up a new assignment and came back to visit. I wrote, “Bonaventura arrived, and there was a really festive atmosphere, as usual.” I was struck by that “as usual.”
Perhaps my most beautiful moment with him was on March 18, 2008, at Chiara’s funeral in Rome, in the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls. At the end of the ceremony, he asked me to help him approach the coffin, despite infringing official protocol. He was an old man by then, and he had difficulty bending down. Yet he managed to kneel down to hug and kiss the coffin. So I too knelt down and kissed the coffin (but actually for us, it was embracing Chiara, not the coffin). And after that, everyone started to surround the coffin to kiss it. But for Bonaventura, it was a unique gesture of a son towards his mother.
Fr. Fabio Ciardi, OMI
