The work of the Movement

Fraternity stories from all over the world

Kenya/Nairobi
A Stronger Bond
People set in motion not because of an effort, but by the need to share their lives, their work, and the way they raise their children, describe their experience.
A revolution in Africa: the end of solitude
by Nunzia Capriglione
“I still remember the first time I got invited to the Fraternity. I was surprised by the fact that the topic of the discussion was real-life problems. At the time, Stefano Pizzi had to decide whether or not to go work in Ethiopia. I was impressed because they didn’t face the problem just within the family but together with their friends, which for me was really something exceptional, a true revolution. These are issues that usually get discussed by the family, between a husband and a wife.” So begins Romana Jepto Koech, who belongs to the Nairobi Fraternity group, founded more or less six years ago by an Italian family and an Italian-German family–the Pizzis and the Diefenhardts. Since 2001, many things have changed. The Pizzis first and then the Diefenhardts left Kenya, to move respectively to Ethiopia and Germany. Today, the Fraternity includes four families, with a total of eleven children. “Still, every time we meet again with Elena, Marigió, and their families, it feels like they never left.... Even today they are an important point of reference for me, in the way I face my everyday life and, most of all, in the relationship with my family.” Those who know African society and its history can’t but be struck by this small group of friends, who are so aware of the Event that grabbed their lives-changing them-and that alone can change the society they live in.

The urgent need to share
“At the beginning, when the two families left, we thought that things would never be the same,” adds Joakim, a high school teacher. “On the contrary, the desire and the urgent need to have a place where we could share our lives were so strong that getting together became indispensable. To make a long story short, we were not set in motion because of an effort, but by the need to share our lives. The relationship with the Pizzis and the Diefenhardts has been important, without doubt, for the care and attention they showed toward their families, most of all with respect to their children’s upbringing. So, as for a process of osmosis, that same care and attention was generated within us, too.” “In fact, it is precisely the help I get in the Fraternity with the raising of my children that accompanied me the most for the past two years,” explains Henry Kamande, one of the first to join the Movement in Kenya. “The choice of which school to send our children to has always been a delicate and important one, but thanks to our friendship and the experience we share, everything is simpler now, and I’m more certain of my own choices.” Joakim adds, “As a matter of fact, in choosing the school, we can’t but start from the experience we live. We want for our children a school where they can be looked at as human beings.”
Keep in mind that as of today in Kenya, precisely in Nairobi, there is a kindergarten, two elementary schools, a high school, and a trade school, founded by parents and teachers who are living the experience of the Movement.
“It’s truly beautiful to see how the Fraternity has become important even for our children,” explains Consolata. “For example, if by chance we don’t get together, my daughter wants to know what’s going on. A beautiful friendship has started among the kids, too; they seek each other out. The Fraternity has been a revolution for me as well. At the beginning, I was a bit uneasy–the schedule of our meetings and the fact that Elena moved to Ethiopia discouraged me. Then I decided to commit to these relationships, so now, when I have difficulties, these are the people I go to, while before I used to go to my parents! It is truly something exceptional, because we share our lives. Today, it’s difficult to find any other place where my ‘I,’ as it is, is taken seriously.”

USA/HOUSTON
The Rose of Texas Always Starting Anew
The everyday life of a group of Americans, with lots of Italians “passing through”: judging life and sticking together, to open up to the world while not getting lost in it
by Maurizio Maniscalco
The small groups of Fraternity may be the most beautiful bloom of the flowering of the life of the Movement in the United States. The blossoms are all different, but they all sink their roots in the fertile ground of our companionship, whether they bloom among the skyscrapers of New York, the snows of Minnesota, or the sun-scorched land of the South–like in Houston, Texas. My wife Doni and I are particularly fond of the small group in Houston; when we can, we go to visit, we keep in touch, we accompany each other. And we have seen it coming to life. Paolo and Lisi, Jay and Stacey, Michele and Rossana, Marco and Francesca, Kristine, Amy, Eveline: a group made up of families collected from around the world (as often happens in this country) with small children, and a few “young workers.”
“A number of Italian families have passed through over the years,” says Paolo, an engineer who works for a company that produces valves for oil plants. “Unlike us, they all eventually had to go back to Italy. At a certain point, getting closer to those who stayed here became indispensable for us.”

One small step at a time
We are on a bus, on our way to visit the Franciscan Mission in San Diego. We are all squeezed in the back and trying, between road bumps, to tell how it all came to be: “Inch by inch, row by row,” a small step at a time, with a couple of false starts, because one has to have a simple heart in order to understand what it is that one really desires. Jay and Stacey, respectively a computer programmer for an oil company and a “country mom,” who are also the parents of two children, tell us how getting together at their house became a habit. Amy, an elementary school teacher, explains, “What we did had a name, Fraternity, but it took us a while to become aware of it.”
Paolo continues, “We knew that getting together was important, but we were a bit confused...” Then, laughing, they all start talking about their ironic attempts: the first few meetings, the “prayer rule” they gave each other (which not even a cloistered monk would have been able to keep up with), the tendency to slide down the slippery slope of pseudo-psychological discussions...
But after the Fraternity Exercises and the summer vacation things became more gripping, as the small but vibrant community started to grow. A few new School of Community groups were born out of the one original group, and each one of the friends started to boldly invite new people.
“By then, learning and living the method of the Movement had become essential,” they say almost in chorus.

Companions on the adventure
Thus, without pushing it, the meetings resumed once a month with those who really wanted to adhere, praying the Angelus in the morning and the Memorare in the evening, keeping the gaze and the heart fixed on Father Giussani and on the companions on the adventure. “Stacey always reminds me of the rule. And when, for some reason, that doesn’t happen, I feel like there’s something missing, because this is what keeps me tied to the others,” says Jay. And Stacey adds, “Many times, friendship is not easy. The Fraternity always gives me the possibility to start anew. That’s why I stay attached.”
“I would get lost without a point of reference,” insists Francesca. “Here, one learns to judge life, to open up to everything and everyone.” “You learn to judge even things that would seem banal,” goes on Eveline, a young research scientist and a woman with an all-encompassing passion. “This ‘judging together’ brings an unimaginable fruit. For example, in putting together the New Year’s Eve party, we asked ourselves what we really wanted. In the end, we found ourselves with some fifty people who wanted to celebrate with us!”
“I would not be able to stay here, so far from the place where I was born and raised, if it weren’t for this small group of Fraternity. It is like the root that keeps my life and my family together,” concludes Lisi.

A Few Surprises
The monthly gathering is the occasion to work on the text of the Fraternity Exercises, play with the children, sing, and have dinner together. The last meeting was spent preparing for the National Diaconia, reflecting on the questions that were posed.
On December 7th, the small group was received by the new Archbishop of Houston, Daniel Di Nardo–a big step for such a newly formed group. It was a simple and beautiful encounter, replete with some offerings for the Archbishop from us–first of all, the CL Christmas poster and second, an invitation to dinner.
A few days later, two surprises: a quote from the Christmas poster in the diocesan weekly paper, and a phone call from the Secretary of the Archbishop: “What about that dinner...?” As the most popular song in this neck of the woods says, “The rose of Texas is the sweetest little rosebud that Texas ever knew.”

MILAN
No Alibis Friends for the World
A place exists that supports the hope and the toil of each person, in which people remind each other that Christ isn’t different from a human reality, like the life of the Movement
by Carlo Dignola
When Davide Prosperi graduated from college, the Fraternity was not the first thing on his mind. “I’ll tell you the truth. The 1994 CLU Exercises were a turning point for me. I met Giussani and I was beginning a friendship with Cesana and Fr. Pino. They had asked me to help my friend Binocolo, who was following the Movement in Europe as a CL ‘visitor.’ Then, Binocolo was asked to do something else and they proposed that I take his place. I was in almost daily contact with the people who guided the Movement, and I sincerely didn’t feel the urgent need for a Fraternity group. I resisted, saying to my friends, ‘You do it.’” But Daria Frigerio, from Brianza, insisted, and in the end Davide told her, “All right, you lead it, and count me in.” In the beginning, there were five or six members. “Then, someone moved to Russia and another went elsewhere, following his own road.” In the meantime, others joined, even younger members. Now, notwithstanding the efforts to limit it, they have a multi-generational Fraternity of 50 people, and multiple formats, so that sometimes everyone meets together, and other times, they gather in smaller groups. They also invite people who aren’t in CL. “If someone wants to understand the Movement better, it’s not like I give them a flyer to read,” explains Davide.
Chiara Marinzi, a chemical researcher at Bicocca University, explains that this friendship doesn’t serve “to put all the pieces in place, as my insane character would have it, but to question me, to help me grow more attached to those around me.” This “happens often in a very simple way, speaking of the normal things of life, in all its apparent paltriness.” Silvia Ronchi, who has been participating in the Fraternity for only a short time, confesses that she finds it difficult to overcome “embarrassment and shyness” in submitting certain questions to everyone, but that deep down she knows that “there, if they saw me throwing away my life, there are people who wouldn’t just sit still and let me do it. It may seem banal, but this interest, this non-indifference, is what struck me at the beginning, and what keeps me bound to them. It’s what makes this environment different from the rest,” where people ignore each other in the name of “freedom.”
A friendship that gives hope
Daria says that what most impresses her, thinking of the heavy-duty situations many have experienced or are going through, is that the Fraternity “isn’t there to solve your problems; it’s a friendship that gives hope.” It helps you to live your circumstances, drawing strength from the others, giving each other a hand. For example, when Silvia Pedralli, who was pregnant, was hospitalized with hemorrhaging, she was caught between fury and fear of losing her child. “In those terrible hours, before giving in to desperation,” she started writing e-mails from her hospital bed, and she received words that were “good water to drink, that gave me hope, that set me back on the road, that told me where to look.”
Davide says, “It isn’t that we often explicitly talk about Christ,” and yet everyone is sure that the bond with the Fraternity is exactly this, “because you understand that Christ isn’t something different from a human reality where you see the power of change in a person. Before Christmas, a Fraternity friend came over for lunch, a salesman in a company. He had this problem: he was about to close a deal, and had discovered that his competition was a CL member. That evening, he decided to call this fellow to ask just how important this sale was for him. Well, for me, it was surprising that he even asked himself this question, that he picked up the phone and called. It’s something beyond the pale of the logic of profit; you just don’t do something like that. It’s clear that someone operates like this only because of a conception of communion that’s stronger than any other logic.” But the Fraternity isn’t a “Little Movement” within CL: “We wanted to live the reality of the Movement deep down, to the fullest. There was never the idea that the Fraternity group was something unto itself, although there is that risk. At a certain point, you can create a way of referring to the Movement that is only ideal, but your life goes along its merry way. You can feel like you’ve got everything in place: I have my Fraternity group; a wife; two, three, four kids; I go to Sunday Mass… You have your reference points and you understand that certain things are wrong and certain things are right. We have so many instruments–School of Community, Giussani’s works and now those of Carrón, the books of the month, and so on. And yet all this could still be an alibi for not accepting Christ’s challenge in this moment that you are living. On the contrary, we’re always challenging each other on this. You realize that you don’t have everything in order, and this provokes an entreaty in you. We’ve begun to ask.”
And the surprise is that, in discovering Christ as the object of your desire, you discover a greater friendship. “We got together because of a friendship we already had, but we began to truly grasp this friendship when we understood that it was ‘for the world.’” Today, Davide travels throughout Europe as a CL visitor, and his Fraternity friends take to heart the situations of people he meets–for example, in following a nation with him. They help his family when he’s away, which is often on the weekends. “It has always moved me that, being in this friendship, nothing is lacking. There’s always someone who helps you, both with the companionship he gives and with his material help.”

IReland/DUBLIN
The Dubliners The Wager
The vicissitudes of a group of friends in the Irish capital, beginning in the 1980s and still going strong, always in movement in a country in transformation
by Anna Leonardi
So much water has passed under Dublin’s Ha’ Penny Bridge since Mauro Biondi, a university student, landed on the shores of the Liffey River for the first time in 1980. A true Sicilian, he arrived in the city to continue his studies in Political Science and to respond to Fr. Giussani’s invitation, expressed in a 1982 card: “It would be beautiful if a seed of the Movement could be transplanted to Ireland, totally mingling with that land, bringing the clarity and passion for the faith that was there in olden times, and now is no longer.” Looking back, it’s heart-warming to see that things really did work out that way. During these twenty-seven years, Mauro got married and started a family, created a job for himself (the Emerald Cultural Institute), and got involved in a series of relationships that over time have consolidated into belonging to the Fraternity. “With the friends we’ve met here in Ireland,” says Mauro, “at a certain point, it was a natural and profoundly free transition to living the experience of the Movement in the form that this history had generated.”

Economic development
Today’s Dublin differs greatly from the one that, years ago, baptized the newborn little Fraternity group. In the mid-1990s, the Emerald Isle surged into rollicking economic development that lifted it out of the poverty and unemployment that had condemned it to lag behind the other European nations. Driving the recovery were the multinationals like Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Google that established themselves in the capital. “Our Fraternity group,” Mauro continues, “inevitably had to deal with this change. When we began, some of us were worried about work. I was the black sheep of the group, because I was an immigrant in search of work in a country with a very high emigration rate, with youth unemployment in some areas as high as 70%. Thanks to the help of friends in Italy, we were able to take a risk on an idea that sounded crazy to a lot of folks: an English school for foreigners.” Today, the Institute, with 170 employees, welcomes about 5,000 students a year from all over the world. “Among the friends of the Movement who work at the Emerald Institute,” explains Mauro, “we often say that sharing our workplace is a gift, because it gives us the chance to engage our friendship here, shaping it according to the ideal we’ve encountered.” This is possible if you start anew every morning, well equipped “with the desire of the heart,” Mauro continues.
As the economic boom has transformed the physiognomy of Ireland–in the last few years 100,000 Poles have arrived–so too the Fraternity group has changed. “We’ve met many newly arrived people, and gotten involved in their lives, in their problems with getting established. If there was the need, we welcomed them into our homes and offered them the possibility of a friendship, including through the experience of the Fraternity.”

A profound lack
The economic boom hasn’t been the only cyclone to hit the island–another, more menacing one, looms over the heads of those whose homeland was once one of the last bulwarks of Christianity. “In lockstep with the rebirth of the country,” explains Mauro, “there has been a progressive de-Christianization. The Fraternity is continually grappling with this profound change as well.” The first problem the friends of the Fraternity encountered was the educative void, the dearth of a clear Christian proposal in a society that previously had always provided it. One example is catechism. “Historically, the school has always been responsible for the Christian formation of the kids,” Mauro recounts. “The parishes don’t do the catechism; it’s part of the normal school syllabus. So, in second grade the children are prepared for their First Communion, and in sixth grade for Confirmation. The problem is that, today, you can’t take for granted that the teachers are still believers. The educative subject is missing. Often, young people are given only hypocritical rules for limiting alcohol abuse, which is very widespread among them, starting even with twelve-year-olds.” In this circumstance as well, the Fraternity has rolled up its shirt-sleeves, not out of mere activism, but simply for the good of their own children. And so the outlook of the group has generated the experience of the “Grail” kids, a swarm of exuberant 11- to 14-year-olds, led by two adults, who set aside their respective school uniforms after school and help each other study, organize outings, sing in the choir, and attend Mass together, involving other peers as well.
Thus, the borders of the group go well beyond its members. It’s a continual blurring together, mixing, and getting involved with the work of the whole Movement. “We’re subject to an incessant dynamism,” concludes Mauro, “that forces us to change constantly and prevents us from getting fossilized in our idea of what a Fraternity group should be.” Though they are too modest to say so, it’s precisely this friendship lived as openness and service that has launched a great public gesture in “pagan” Dublin: a very well-attended formal dinner organized at Christmas to raise funds for AVSI projects, and a Way of the Cross last Easter, followed by 1,500 people and led by Archbishop Martin. Hardly trifling signs of Christian renewal.

SPAin/MADRID
The Things of Life The Heart Reawakened
The story of twelve Spanish friends whose experience in the Movement began during college days and continues in their adult life, resisting the easy tendency to banalize and “bourgeoisify”
by Rafael Gerez
About a dozen of us–young thirty-something couples, with small children and stable economic situations–have been in the Movement for years, having lived the CLU experience. Lately, life has taken us through a variety of circumstances: success and professional recognition for some, job loss for others; the joy of parenthood, and the pain of miscarriage; marital stability, and complicated family situations. During all these years of shared life, we’ve come against not a few temptations and we have even given in to some of them–for examples, the most decisive, the banalization of our friendship and its “bourgeoisification” (the acceptance of middle-class values), what Carras often warned against in the early years.
The former, born of the thought, “We already know everything we need,” makes our relationships sterile and transforms the Fraternity into a group of friends who share without risking almost anything with each other, and who mask the dissatisfaction of their hearts with the “things of life” (work, children, home). This thought can fill the life of the Fraternity with incessant and empty reflections on the most suitable way to organize meetings or the way we should treat each other, in sentimental terms. The second tendency, to become bourgeois, is characterized by suffocating the desires of the heart as time goes by, which prevents the bursting forth of the Event in our lives. This is also evidenced by living the Movement “à la carte,” choosing according to one’s own measure.

The change
In the past year, three facts have profoundly transformed our Fraternity, or, to be more exact, some people of our Fraternity. Paradoxically, in spite of how “under control” and submissive reality seemed, some dramatic events opened a passageway through the narrow chinks in our hearts, obliging us to engage our reason. The most significant example of this provocation from reality was the illness of one of the Fraternity children. This not only forced his parents to profoundly redefine their life, with his mother sacrificing a promising career, but it also meant, for all of us, the rediscovery of the dimension of entreaty.
Another new fact is the presence of a priest in the Fraternity, which has raised our awareness of sequela, one of the aspects of the Movement that runs the risk of getting watered down as we grow older. He has helped us deal with life from a new perspective, to the point of transforming decisions that seemed definitive. This was the case with one of us who had broken off relations with his father sixteen years ago. His testimony speaks for itself: “The first step was putting this difficulty before a friend–the young priest–who asked me, ‘Don’t you want to forgive your father? Wouldn’t you like to begin seeing him again?’ I answered, ‘This is impossible.’ He corrected me, ‘I didn’t ask you whether this was possible or not. I asked you whether you desired it.’ I said I did. He continued, ‘Let’s ask insistently for this miracle…’ So, after some time passed, I decided to call my father and see him once again. When someone says ‘yes’ to Christ, the hundredfold becomes evident through this cry. In my case, I have begun to experience it.”
The third fact has been our adherence to the indications of the Movement: working for “EncuentroMadrid” (“Madrid Meeting”), participating in the summer vacations after many years of not going, returning to a commitment to charitable work, and, most importantly, seriously preparing and participating in School of Community, which is becoming the criterion of judgment with which we face reality together and the objective point of reference for our relationship.