Their tremendous joy

Their tremendous joy

By Emilie Christy and Giovanna Pompele

It is generally accepted by Christians that all are called to holiness as individuals and as communities. Some give a special witness with their lives that can be an example of holiness in ordinary life and a source of light for many. A number of Focolare members (some of them featured here) are on their way to being recognized as saints by the Catholic Church. They themselves credited Chiara Lubich’s spirituality of unity for their personal thrust toward holiness.

There are many young people on this list, some just beyond the threshold of childhood. Many suffered for a period, but there are also a few sudden deaths. Men, women, married people, mothers and fathers — what sets these people apart was their tremendous joy.

To read these stories and see them as tales of sorrows is to miss the mark. We can almost hear Chiara Luce Badano or Daniela Zanetta say, “No, no, no, don’t look at the pain; we were happy!”

On her deathbed, Chiara Luce coached her mom to be happy, because she was.

1. Foco
Foco: Focolare co-founder
Igino Giordani (1894–1980), also known as Foco (fire), was born in Tivoli, near Rome. Married with four children, Giordani is a central figure in Italian and European history, politics and culture. He had humble origins but went on to become a prominent journalist, essayist, cultural critic and politician. Through his determined opposition to Fascism,
he lived in “civil and political exile.”

A profoundly committed Catholic, he had decided at the age of 22, while he lay wounded in a military hospital during World War I, that he wanted to be a saint. When he started his political career, Father Giovanni Sturzo, the founder of what would later become the leading centrist postwar political party, reassured him that being a politician and being a saint were compatible.

As a politician, Giordani aimed at being “chaste,” in the sense that he eschewed privileges, and in the difficult post-World War II years carried out his role as a parliamentary and constitutional father as a “social service, charity in action.” A strenuous defender of peace, he considered war to be “an act against the people, an insult to freedom, to democracy.”

As a journalist and writer, he left a cultural patrimony of close to 100 books and more than 4,000 articles on politics, culture and religion.

Chiara met Giordani at the Italian parliament in 1948, five years after the Focolare’s beginnings. Giordani was entirely transformed. She immediately saw in him an essential figure in the nascent movement. To her he represented humanity scarred by war, torn apart by division and succumbing to materialism, while at the same time thirsting for peace and fraternity and crying out for unity. Chiara considered him a co-founder of the Focolare.

After the death of his beloved wife Mya, and with the approval of his children, Giordani moved into a Focolare household for the final six years of his life. His remains are buried at Rocca di Papa next to Chiara’s. (iginogiordani.info)

2-3. Alberto and Carlo
Carlo GrisoliaAlberto Michelloti
Alberto Michelotti (1958–1980) and Carlo Grisolia (1960–1980) were friends and young members of the Focolare (Gen) in Genoa. They died within a month of each other. Alberto was in charge of the Focolare youth in his city. He had a great capacity to make everyone he met feel loved and always chose the last place in order to serve others. This love stemmed from his spiritual life.

“There was someone entering more and more deeply into my day. It was Jesus,” he wrote. Alberto was mountain climbing in the Alps with friends when he slipped on the ice and fell to his death on August 18, 1980.

The day after Alberto’s death, Carlo was diagnosed with a malignant tumor. With his extroverted character and love for God, he began a 40-day race to meet Jesus. The thought that Alberto was there with him sustained him. Before dying he said to his friends: “Be ready to give your life for one another. I offer my life for all of you, but above all for all those who suffer, for the young people in my neighborhood, for my parish and for a united world.” He died on September 29, 1980.

4. Daniela
Daniela Zanetta
Born in Maggiora, Italy, with a rare congenital skin disease that caused her body to be covered with sores, Daniela Zanetta (1962–1986) needed to have medication applied every three hours daily ever since her life began.

In spite of her serious illness and painful treatment, Daniela was able to go to school and obtain high grades, sustained by the love of her parents and two younger brothers. Her serious anemia required sudden hospitalizations and transfusions, but she was always more interested in the other children than in her own pain, and she would regularly tell her mother, “Mama, give this or bring that to the others...”

In 1971, at age 11, she encountered the spirituality of the Focolare and was very much taken by the possibility of Jesus’ presence through mutual love, as the Gospel promises (Mt 18:20). This gave her the strength to continue loving until the end.

In a letter to an Italian Catholic magazine, she wrote: “I would like to cry out to everyone that each person’s life is sacred and beautiful. I have a serious skin disease; I lost my hair, my nails and my teeth, but I believe in God, and I love him intensely. I thank him for having given me life, because every day he gives me is a further occasion to love him.”

Her last words were, “Thank you, thank you for everything.” (danielazanetta.it)

5. Luminosa
Margarita Bavosi
Margarita “Luminosa” Bavosi (1941–1985) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the youngest of three children. At age 10 her mother died, and she prayed to the Blessed Virgin Mary, “You are the woman who must take her place.” Little by little her desire for an absolute love that could satisfy her thirst for the infinite grew. At 21 she gave herself to God in the Focolare. Her spontaneous and optimistic nature, her look, both profound and full of light, were motives for the new name she took: Luminosa.

The spirituality of unity was at the very center of her being. Those who knew her could see that she embodied all that she received from Chiara and faithfully transmitted it to others. In 1981, when she first became sick, she told Chiara that she wanted “to become saints together.” She spent the last four years of her life perfecting love in the midst of suffering.

She would say: “Why is there fear of death? Death doesn’t exist; it is only a passage, but one needs to do it well.
You have to prepare for it with your life.”

Luminosa died in Rome at age 44, leaving as a testament a simple phrase, “Now it’s your turn,” as if to pass the baton of a life lived fully for the realization of Jesus’ prayer, “May all be one.” The Focolare permanent mariapolis in New York’s Hudson Valley carries her name. (Luminosa: She Kept on Playing, New City Press)

6. Jerzy
Jerzy Ciesielski
Jerzy Ciesielski (1929–1970), born in Krakow, Poland, was married with three children. A university professor with a Ph.D. in engineering, he built the foundations for a large sports complex in Katowice and invented a way of binding structural cracks in cement.

John Paul II, with whom he had a close friendship, said that Jerzy “used his service as a scientist, his understanding of reason as a mode of service, as a path to holiness.”

Ciesielski saw his family life in the same way in which he saw his life as a scientist, as a response to a calling from God. The then Cardinal Karol Wojtyla gave him credit for being a source of inspiration for his book Love and Responsibility, which deals with sexuality, love and marriage.

In 1968 Ciesielski met the Focolare in Krakow and immediately embraced its spirituality. Struck by the love he saw among its members,
he joined them as a married focolarino.
The following year he learned that Sudan was in dire need of engineers and left Poland for Khartoum, where he took a position as university lecturer. There he earned the love and respect of his students, Christians and Muslims alike. Some of his Muslim students called him a “man of God.”

On October 9, 1970, he and two of his children drowned in a boating accident on the Nile. He was 41.

7. Ginetta
Ginetta Calliari
“Unity is the gift which characterized Luigia “Ginetta” Calliari (1918–2001), the most genuine, authentic, perfect, strong unity lived out and accomplished with an exclusive and persevering love for Jesus crucified and forsaken,” wrote Chiara. Ginetta was one of her first companions, having met her in 1944 in Trent.

In 1959 Calliari went to Brazil to give her contribution to what had become the Magna Carta of their life: the fulfillment of Jesus prayer, “May all be one” (Jn 17:21). More than 280,000 people met the Focolare spirituality of unity through her;
among them government officials and religious leaders.

Calliari was astonished by the enormous gap between the rich and the poor in Brazil. She was convinced that the presence of Jesus among those united in his name would convince the rich and the poor to share what they have. When Chiara visited the country in 1991 and launched the Economy of Communion in Freedom, 82 of the 700 businesses that were started were based in Brazil. She was a true evangelizer through her witness and concrete works. (ginettacalliari.blogspot.com)

8. Maria Orsola
Maria Orsola Bussone
Born in a small town near Turin, Maria Orsola Bussone (1954–1970) met the Focolare through her pastor when she was 13. She had always been a strikingly good girl, and this encounter with the spirituality of unity had a strong effect on her. Soon after she attended an international Focolare gathering for young people and wrote to Chiara:

“These days I understood that the key to happiness is the cross, Jesus forsaken. I want to love, love always, love first, love without expecting anything. I want to let God use me as he likes and to do all my part, because that is the only thing that makes life worth living.”

Full of life, she sang, played the guitar and was much involved with the youth of her parish.

“Everything is love,” she wrote, “because God loves us immensely.”
In 1970, at 16, she went with a group of 40 children and teenagers to a summer camp as one of the counselors. There she was electrocuted when a hairdryer malfunctioned. A few months before dying she had written, “I am willing to sacrifice my life so that youth might understand
how beautiful it is to love God!”