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From the Need
to the Infinite
We offer here the story of the “School for Works of Charity,” which this year counted 1,300 registrants, offering assemblies on a wide range of topics (the most recent with Fr. Carrón), as well as courses, meetings, and guided tours.
A protagonist of the School recounts the journey begun three years ago to help those who manage social enterprises to go to the root of their work, from the starting point of experience

by Stefano Filippi

Ca’ Edimar, House of Edimar, a home for troubled youth in Italy, is an oasis in the midst of asphalt and cement, with the highway behind it, the bypass to the side, the Due Palazzi Prison not half a mile away, and houses here and there among fields. Ten years ago, on this strip of land at the outermost periphery of Padova, there were only two abandoned farmhouses; now they have been painstakingly restored and other buildings have been erected around a courtyard. Life pulses through a home for foster children, composed of two buildings that serve as a hub for a hospitality center for minors in trouble, a school, and a big warehouse with workshops–the “village of trades” complete with a shoemaker’s shop that smells of glue and a “music cantina” with a recording studio. There are meeting rooms, kitchens, a chapel, and a continual flow of happy people. “Make sure it’s a work that the city can see,” said Fr. Giussani when he came to Padova to visit the complex. Today, when you look around, you see a tidy lawn, bathrooms without even the tiniest bit of graffiti, the eagerness of the kids at the stove, and the care with which the roof tiles and the beams of the hay barns have been restored–in short, the order of a large structure where everything is beautiful. Mario Dupuis, the founder of Ca’ Edimar (which has branched out throughout the Veneto region, into the service sectors of formation, orientation, and tutoring), clarifies from the outset: “Here, there weren’t projects or objectives to attain–nothing. We followed an experience, the occasions that reality set before us. It has been a journey of learning, not the application of an exact behavior. We didn’t even want to do a charitable work, but we just found it right in front of us.” Putting experience front and center isn’t a method to take for granted. This same method guides the School for Works of Charity that Dupuis has headed since 2005. Promoted by the Foundation for Subsidiarity and the Companionship of Work’s Federation of Social Enterprises, it’s a school, a work, and a journey. “The beauty of this challenge is that nothing is preconstituted because, as Fr. Giussani said, it’s unthinkable that acting purely out of love can be imposed as a framework.” The School is made up of foundational lessons, specialist courses (according to the areas of intervention and the level of the operators), and guided tours, followed by a more detailed examination of specific problems, engaging those who are employed in works of charity to be both teachers and students.

The breadth of desire
It’s worthwhile to follow the journey of the past few years. In 2005, the theme of the School was, “The First Charity is Education.” “That year struck a central point of ambiguity,” recounts Dupuis, “that is, that we do a work of charity to respond to a need. Over time, we began to understand that this response is the circumstance from which another thing emerges. We don’t do the work just to respond to a particular need–in the long run, it won’t hold up, because the true need is infinite and you can’t satisfy it. This is the drama of so many tired, demoralized workers who’ve been wrung out by the harshness of daily reality.” Life is already full of problems… why take on those of others? Dupuis responds, “In the needs of those before me–a handicapped person, an elderly person without a home, a boy without a family–in reality, I encounter a person, an ‘I’ who wants to be re-awakened to the truth of herself or himself. And I myself rediscover the full breadth of my desire. This is why education among us is the first charity. We’ve shifted the gaze from the need to the person.” This is how he explains a phenomenon that has few equals: “Often, there’s high turnover among social workers, people stressed by the pressure of things, demoralized by the enormity of the needs, or simply those whose reasons for doing this work have dried up after so many years. Instead, in so many of our works, there isn’t this desire to flee. This is because we’re not determined by the number of things we do. Before boundless need, boundless charity is required. God is required. Ours is only a feeble attempt to imitate Him.”
The following year, the School further explored this passage, with the theme, “The need is a step toward the Infinite,” developing the journey begun in the preceding months, going “more deeply within the origin of the works, and even more deeply in the fact that the work is an enterprise that lives on concrete facts, on balance sheets, financing, and people who work. There we took another step,” explains Dupuis. “We understood that there isn’t a theoretical point of departure while the problems continue of their own accord. It’s an ambiguous position. It’s as if we think that our works are beautiful, but since Someone saves us, we have to do them even if we don’t have the money. Instead, my intervention is guided by what I can do, helping those I can, and the rest I offer. This limitation isn’t suffocating, but is the point at which I understand what I’m truly called to. This way, the desire to go to the origins has become the judgment on all the particulars of the work. There weren’t any ready-made solutions to apply; everything is always an open work-in-progress.”

An unexpected boom
The 2007 School, which closed in February with an assembly with Fr. Carrón, marks a third way station, “Charity at the root of the need of the ‘I.’” There were 1,300 registrants for the basic formation, an unexpected boom, since registration in previous years has been around 700 or 800. Dupuis clarifies: “There were two reasons for the spike. First, we inaugurated video conferences with a series of cities of southern and central Italy, which enabled the participation of many who couldn’t make the trip all the way to Milan every year.” The 2008 School will offer video conference to Perugia, Porto San Giorgio, Pescara, Naples, Bari, Brindisi, Foggia, Lecce, Taranto, Lamezia Terme, Palermo, and Catania. “The other reason is that many registrants weren’t employed in works, but did volunteer charity work.” This interesting issue clarified an important point: “It was useful for all these people to come, because it allowed us to clarify that charitable work isn’t assistance to a work. The goal is the opposite, as Carrón continually and vigorously asserts: education–learning gratuitousness and being educated to sharing, not just ‘helping the work.’ (The place to carry out this verification is the School of Community.) So we’ve decided that from this year on, registration for the School for Works will be only for those who are employed in these works, not those who do volunteer charitable work.”

Itineraries and questions
A rich variety of impressive experiences flows into the School for Works of Charity. There are the families of the Cometa center in the city of Como, a “city within the city” swarming with kids to whom for the first time someone has said, “You are of value.” There are the Sisters of Charity of the Assumption of Via Martinengo, engaged in the dramas of the families of a district on the outskirts of Milan. There are the social cooperatives of the Pinocchio group in Franciacorta, near Brescia, dedicated to helping ex-convicts, drug addicts, the mentally ill, and the marginalized re-enter society. There’s the impressive presence of the Food Counter, and a hundred other experiences, all together a beautiful spectacle of people who show that charity isn’t a thought, a good inspiration, a generous impetus. Each initiative has its own professional itineraries and questions. Why do so many works become mere assistance? Are we failures if we can’t succeed in liberating the people we assist from their evil? What’s the use of helping someone who’ll never heal? What’s the relationship with politics and institutions? So many questions, and so many experiences from which to learn. Walter Sabattoli (Pinocchio) says that often the professional itinerary means discovering that certain ills can never be eliminated and that you have to learn to live with them.

No user’s manuals
Sister Gelsomina Angrisano shares that the experience of the families in difficulty shapes the form of the work. Stefano Giorgi (In-presa) explains how a great idea can be affirmed even when bound by restrictive laws. Marco Lucchini (Food Counter) illustrates how, while accepting the rules of politics, one can work to change them, so that politics becomes as subsidiary as possible.
There are no experts expounding theories, just reflection upon experience. The full implications of this method will be pursued in this year’s School, beginning May 17th, on the theme, “Charity Will Always Be Necessary,” when the foundational formative meetings will center on direct contact and comparison with some social works.
“Not generic testimonies,” clarifies Dupuis, “but the description of the entire journey of the work, from its origin to its development, covering its legal status and its charitable, cultural, and political presence. We’ve asked speakers to lay out the difficulties, problems, strengths, and weaknesses, because we want our starting point to be the limitation, the restless question we carry within. There’ll be no user’s manuals provided here.”