Love, Marriage and the Call to Holiness

New Families’ Anna Maria and Danilo Zanzucchi discuss their Focolare calling, a balancing act between participating in a spiritual community and conserving a rich home life.
If you look at a calendar of saints, you won’t find the names of many married people. Over the centuries, the Roman Catholic Church has emphasized the calling to a celibate life, and this consequently resulted in a kind of second-class citizenship for married people.

The Second Vatican Council addressed this situation, raising the call to follow God in the married state to its rightful place. Among the changes wrought by the council, there is one that most people are unfamiliar with. At the heart of the Focolare Movement is Chiara Lubich’s understanding of the focolare household as a spiritual community of both single and married people. Married people are full-fledged members of the small community of the focolare, with all members dedicating themselves fully to God, albeit in different ways.

Anna Maria and Danilo Zanzucchi are married focolarini who have headed the New Families Movement for many years. From the beginning they worked closely with Focolare’s founder, Chiara Lubich, and Igino Giordani, the first married focolarino and co-founder of the movement. What follows is a conversation I had with the Zanzucchis about their calling.

What is the difference between your family and any other good, healthy family?

Danilo: There are two additional, fundamental characteristics: the fact that we are personally consecrated to God and that we are part of a focolare community that also contains single focolarini. The married focolarini live at home with their spouse and children; they work like everyone else, and whenever possible—usually once a week—go to the focolare center, where they make a strong, spiritual experience of unity. It includes mutual respect, admiration and friendship as well as the experience of a love whose measure is to give one’s life for each other.

From what you say, the choice of God should come before the choice of each other in marriage.

Anna Maria: I actually think that this should be true of every marriage. If the spouses are not whole people in themselves, the marriage will be shaky. The fullness of a marriage requires the dialectic between unity and distinction. Sharing in the life of a focolare increases and improves the ability to love that a married focolarino then brings back home.

How did this begin for you?

Danilo: I grew up with the idea that marriage consists of a man leaning on a woman, and a woman leaning on a man. When Anna Maria and I met the movement, we found ourselves deeply attracted by the different idea of marriage it presented. Some time later in 1953, Anna Maria showed me a letter she had received. She was invited to a meeting for married focolarine in Rome. Why, I wonder, is she invited and I, who introduced her to the movement, am not? It was a milestone for me, because I realized that God calls people individually, one by one. A month later I received my own invitation, but that day’s realization had already had its effect on me. Of course, someone will want to share this ideal with their spouse, and sometimes this will result in the formation of a so-called “focolare family.” Yet looking at Focolare history we see that, for example, Igino Giordani’s wife did not share his choice. You can ask yourself: why did God choose to make things this way? Maybe it is to show us that the choice of Him is the foundation of everything else. If one is not rooted in God, the love for one’s spouse may weaken and disappear. But if one is rooted in God, then love is not only about one’s personal satisfaction: it is a gift to the other.

So it is possible to be a married focolarino even if one’s spouse does not share the same calling. I imagine that would be more difficult.

Anna Maria: It is more difficult to have a palpable, explicit sense of God’s presence between spouses, but this depends on how you look at it. God sees things in a different way. His presence is a mystery. In a family where both spouses are focolarini, one would expect constant love and the constant presence of Jesus in their midst. But that’s not the way it works. It’s always a struggle, because sometimes it is easy to lean on the other, expect things from him or her. In a way, when the spouse does not follow the same spirituality it is an extra gift, because you are called to love in such a way that everything is a result of love and not just because you have the same ideas.

Is this a calling for super-men and super-women?

Danilo: No, no, we are ordinary people! Look, as with all callings, our vocation comes with a special grace. But it’s a journey for all of us, and there are many detours and wasted opportunities for each and every one. At the end of the day, being married focolarini is just trying to achieve the perfection we all are called to, but in a married state.

How about the children? Don’t they see their parents torn between home and the focolare?

Anna Maria: It depends on the way you talk to them. You have to be with them in whatever they are going through. The important thing is to keep the communication open at all times—to say “yes” to God’s will in each present moment. It’s not easy; the responsibility is yours. You have to judge whether you are building unity in your family or not, and whether God wants you to stay home in that moment.

You have been doing this for 50 years. How are the children of married focolarini? Are they healthy men and women?

Danilo: We were in the 1956 summer Mariapolis in the Dolomite Mountains with our two little girls whom we loved dearly. One day one of the first focolarine, looking at the way I was dealing with them, said to me: “Don’t you know that Jesus is in them?” That made me see a new dignity in my daughters. You tend to think of your children as yours: you love them tremendously and feel this huge responsibility to raise them right. You see yourself in them. Once you realize that there is Jesus in them, everything changes. God’s plan for them is not necessarily mine. I gave them life, but they belong to God.

Anna Maria: I am always struck by how children always come back even after a rupture in the relationship with their parents. It may take years, but they do come back. Why is that? Perhaps they miss their parents’ love. But you can’t be in a hurry. God is not in a hurry! Living in the present moment is tremendously helpful.

There seems to be a model for everyone to reach holiness through your way of life.

We have to understand what holiness means. This is not the kind of holiness of the individual who, for example, founds a congregation. The way here is to respond to God’s love very concretely in your family life, in being a gift for each other with tenderness, with affection, and in our sexual lives. Chiara Lubich’s great insight was to open the doors of the focolare to everyone, single or married, because the road to holiness is the same: to answer God’s call to each of us.

Yours is a calling that is open to the whole world.

Danilo: Our vocation is not to be at home or in the focolare, but to be a presence of love in society and in the Church. We are called to bring the way to sanctity out of convents and into the streets, the workplace and in everyday life.