A few days before December 7, 1943, Chiara, then called Silvia, had responded to a request from her mother to go and get milk on a nearby farm. Her two younger sisters were reluctant to leave the house because of the cold, and Chiara decided to do this act of love. On her way, she had felt a clear and strong calling: “Give yourself completely to me”. Back home, Silvia had written an ardent letter to the priest who had accompanied her spiritually and, after putting her to the test, he granted her permission to give herself to God forever.

Chiara narrates: “It all seemed to say that the act I was about to carry out would meet with many obstacles. The fury of the rain and the wind against my body seemed to signify that ‘someone’ was against me. Arriving t the boarding school, there was a different scene, with the huge church doors automatically opening. I had a sense of welcome and relief. I imagined the open arms of that God who was there waiting for me.”

Thus, on that 7th December 1943, before dawn, during a morning Mass celebrated for the occasion, Silvia, secretly “married God,” as she herself would say.

This is how she narrated this moment: “Just before Holy Communion, I saw in a moment what I was about to do. With this consecration to God, I had crossed a bridge, and the bridge collapsed behind me. I was marrying God. And this didn’t merely mean purity and a non-human marriage. It meant leaving everything behind: parents, studies, school – everything that up until then I had loved in my own little world.”

And Chiara would later write: “Imagine a young girl in love, in love with a love which is the first love, the purest one, a love which is still undeclared, but which begins to enflame her heart. But there’s one difference. Here on earth, a young girl, who is in love in this way, has the image of her beloved in front of her; instead this girl doesn’t see him, doesn’t hear him, doesn’t touch him or sense his fragrance with the senses of the body, but rather with the senses of her soul, through which Love entered in and invaded all her being. Because of this, she feels a joy which is so special, difficult to experience again in life, a joy which is secret, serene, and jubilant.”

In 2003, Chiara looked back and this is what she said: “Looking back today, we can understand what December 7, 1943, the day the Movement began decades ago, can tell us. It tells us that a charism of the Holy Spirit, a new light, came down on earth during those days, a light which, in the mind of God, was destined to quench the burning thirst of this world with the water of Wisdom, to warm it with divine love and thus give life to a new people nourished by the Gospel…

“This is what it is, first and foremost. And because God acts concretely, he immediately provided the first brick for the building that would serve his purposes, which is our Movement. He decided to call me, a girl like many others, and thus my consecration to him, my “yes” to God, soon followed by the “yes” of many other young women and men. That day speaks of light, then, and of our giving of ourselves to God as instruments in his hands for the achievement of his goals.”

“Let’s go ahead then… within our hearts the treasures we received on December 7th.”

Sources: focolare.org; CH Conference Call, Castel Gandolfo, December 11, 2003; A Biography by Armando Torno, NCP, 2016