Several Buddhist monks who visited the Focolare regularly also got to know her well. Benedetta was quite approachable and many got to know her, for she was gentle but fearless. She knew how to welcome people and you could go to her any time. Any problem, great or small, or any need, and some good news to share: she wasn’t scandalized about anything; she knew people’s hearts and knew how to love them. A bishop once described her as “a Sister of silver and gold” because of all the money she was able to raise for the poor.
When visiting the extreme northern part of Thailand, we always felt obliged to go and ‘have a chat’ with her, as she would say. She enjoyed news about her ‘great family’ as she loved to call the Movement, and she shared its life with many others. We would often meet people in the Mariapolis to whom she had already spoken about the spirituality of unity, or else someone would pass by the Focolare to meet us because they had heard about us from Sister Bene.
In other words, Benedetta was a true spiritual mother who gave much supernatural life to so many people, and many of them attended her funeral along with a large crowd of bishops, priests and laity. The small church of Wien Pa Pao and the adjoining convent where she lived were filled to overflowing capacity.
Sr. Bene was from the congregation of the Sisters of Charity of the Infant Mary. Born as Benedetta Carnovali in 1925, she became a pillar of the Movement and many of the people who belong to the Focolare community of Thailand were personally drawn to the Movement by her life. ‘A true Sister and a real Focolarina,’ as she was described by some: an ‘out-ofthe- ordinary’ Sister, always on-the-go and, at the same time, ‘firm’ when personally loving the person next to her.
She was a friend who would call you up to wish you a happy birthday, even though her voice grew feebler every year, but not her inner strength. Whenever you approached her, you never got the impression that you were disturbing her: it was as if she had been expecting you alone and didn’t have anything else to do but welcome you. Yet she was quite busy, judging from all the adoptions of children at-a-distance which she personally looked after, up until the last days of her life.
Sister Bene had met the Focolare’s spirituality of unity from an a Religious priest in1963, and from that moment on spent her life so that many people in Myanmar – where she was living when all the Religious were expelled by the regime – could come to know the spirituality and live it. When she was transferred to Thailand, she continued to deepen her friendship with the Focolare. Every time she would come to spend a few days in the Focolare, she nourished herself on the words of Chiara Lubich.
Like all those who genuinely follow God, Sister Benedetta had to overcome her “nights”, or ‘the storms’ as she followed Christ’s footsteps. She faced them as a true disciple of Jesus, with heroic charity. Deeply united with Vale Ronchetti, one of the first Focolarinas, she pressed on in the midst of much miscomprehension: ‘How can a nun belong to a movement with so many lay people in it?’ she was often asked; and there were other small or great persecutions that from a human viewpoint were completely absurd.
Yet, in some mysterious way, God made use of these things to make Sister Benedetta more and more a Sister, more and more a spiritual daughter of Chiara (as Benedetta often said), and an apostle of unity. She leaves a legacy of love and gentleness, of sweetness and strength, as well as of loving service to the least.
She left us with that smile on her face, so typical of those who have experienced that it is possible to transform suffering into Love and make that Love their reason for living. Sister Benedetta ‘flew” to Heaven at the age of ninety, after listening again to the Focolare song that she loved: ‘Solo grazie’ (Only Thanks to You).
She passed away in 2015 physically consumed but quite calm, just as she had always lived: in peace because she was certain that the ‘arms’ that had embraced her from her childhood (as an orphan) and carried her throughout life as a Religious, were now awaiting for her on this last stretch of her journey.
