family
world meeting

A Treasure To Be Cherished
At the beginning just as after 40 years of married life the question remains the same: Why are we together? No affinity, no plan, no good intentions are enough to sustain the relationship, but only the total gift of self, for the love of an Other. Five families tell us their stories.

by Paola Bergamini, Anna Leonardi, Paola Ronconi

Anna Lisa and Pasquale
Everything seemed well-defined for Pasquale and Anna Lisa, an interview for a job as a magistrate for him, an exam for a job as an attorney for her. There was the problem of the 500 miles between Salerno and Milan where he would have to do his training; meeting only once a month was not exactly ideal, but things would be resolved once he got back to her own town. Maybe they would decide to get married. Instead, in March 2008, over lunch, Pasquale met Alessandro Mele who told him about the families who take care of needy children at the Cometa community in Como, of which he is the director (see Traces, Vol. 6, No. 11, 2004). In the end, the invitation arrived: “When you are in Milan, come and see me.” He went one Sunday with Anna Lisa. They saw how lovely the place is, the children, and so on, but what struck both of them was the relationship between the couples who gave birth to the Cometa–between Erasmo and Serena, Cente and Marina, between husband and wife. Pasquale tells us, “I thought, ‘In 20 years’ time, I want to have that look in my eyes.’” An attraction was in the making. They went back there every time she came to Milan. Anna Lisa adds, “The image we had of our relationship, closed in on him and me, was slowly falling apart. In that place, with those people, was the fulfillment of our happiness.” Everything changed, to the point of deciding, once they had finished their series of examinations, not to return to Salerno. On October 4, 2009, they married in Como.
After 20 days came the first request to accommodate a boy who was attending the Cometa’s “Oliver Twist” school. A few others followed for several weeks, then came the first request for fostering. It was Mahmoud, a 17-year-old Egyptian Muslim boy who had arrived in Italy all alone. He had no one to care for him and was looking for a family. “He wanted someone to help him to become a man,” Pasquale explains. And this young married couple accepted. Anna Lisa continues, “Fostering is an experience of total giving; unlike simple hospitality there is the request for parenthood, paternity. The ‘yes’ has the grace of God within it, and this changes your measure. With the help of the companionship of the Cometa families, everything became possible. The relationship between husband and wife becomes extremely radical.” Mahmoud asks them the reasons for their choices, for every decision. It’s not always easy to answer his provocations. Some months later, in the school newspaper, he wrote, ‘I thank my foster parents because they taught me what it means to love the truth.’ This is paternity. To a natural child or a foster child, the only thing you can offer is to meet what makes life worth living.”
In July of the same year, their family welcomed Marco (not his real name), seven days old. There are no reasons to give, nothing to discuss. Marco needs everything. “I didn’t even know how to change a diaper and I found myself staying up with him at night,” Anna Lisa recalls. “You see him grow, saying his first words, but you know that you are accompanying him to enter into another family. Humanly, it would be impossible without the awareness that that child’s good is not you.” Marco stayed one year with them. Then came the break with him. The pain is there but they are not scandalized by it. It comes with accompanying a child toward his destiny, and this means helping his new adoptive parents to know him, to be with him. “The paradox of fostering is this: you succeed when you disappear.” They saw him three months later with his adoptive family. Marco reached for the arms of his new mother, not those of Anna Lisa. “It seems impossible, yet in that moment my heart was at peace.”
Today, Anna Lisa and Pasquale are expecting their own child. They laugh when someone remarks, “Now, at last, you have your own child.”

TERESA and ALDO
The first time they met was in 1966 at a meeting of the Italian Communist Party. “She was the prettiest,” says Aldo. “She” is Teresa De Grado, the daughter of Raffaele, a famous art critic, an outspoken exponent of the Party, born and bred in it. “He” is Aldo Brandirali, Communist to the bone, founder of “Serve the People,” an extremist Marxist movement born in 1968. For both of them, the Party was the ideal incarnation of a good for which to give everything. This led Teresa, putting into action the “principle of collectivization,” with her father’s approval, gave up all her inheritance. Paintings, works of art, even her apartment were sold, to the great scandal of Milanese society. For her, it was not important; everything was to be dedicated to that ideal.
In 1972, they married. Not in church, not civilly. Aldo himself celebrated the rite of marriage in the presence of his companions. Teresa recalls: “We wanted to affirm that our relationship would serve to increase our capacity for the revolution, for others. So it was forever.” Aldo insists, “There was a tension for humanity, which, though the form was mistaken, aimed at the truth.” But the ideal doesn’t really have flesh; it is only ideology, which loses consistency and risks becoming eversive. Aldo realized this and in 1975 he dissolved “Serve the People.” The world seemed to fall to pieces. “I wanted to leave everything, even Teresa, but she kept on fighting and telling me that there are certainties in life, that the truth exists. Why did we get married? Passion comes to an end. Our relationship was giving ourselves to each other. What we were tending toward was perhaps a confused ideal, without a name.” They had no money, no job, no home. They started over again.
In 1982, Aldo invited Fr. Giussani to a basement on via Torino to discuss the theme “The Relationship between Revolution and Religion.” After a few exchanges, Fr. Giussani exclaimed, “The finest thing you have is enthusiasm.” Aldo recalls, “It’s exactly what I felt was dying in me. He knew me better than I knew myself. That look had pierced my heart.” He would never leave him again. Friendship and fiery discussions followed with his new companions. It was a journey of conversion. Teresa followed at a distance. “I was rather diffident, but I was happy because it was a more human ambit. There were those important questions: Why are we in the world? Who am I? I read and re-read The Religious Sense and loved it. I would follow Aldo to Mass, for weddings, baptisms, or other things. There was always a phrase of the Gospel that touched me.”
In 1994, they were married in the Church, a mixed marriage, since Teresa was not yet converted. “We followed the pre-nuptial course and I recognized that conversion and faith had given Aldo a richer, more complete humanity.” Teresa wept throughout the ceremony. “I re-lived our history. And when I saw him take the sacrament, I understood that the Lord was taking me by the hand, too.” Some days later, she told Fr. Giussani, “I have married Aldo, but I am not converted.” He replied, “You must feel free.” For Teresa, it was turning point. “I was no longer the daughter of De Grada, the wife of Brandirali. I was Teresa, embraced by a loving paternity. You can trust, you do trust, because someone is watching over you–someone who wanted us together, we who are so different. There is nothing more to invent.” That human tension they had always felt had found its road. Teresa made her Confession, First Communion, and Confirmation. It was a time of peace, she had always sought, and finally it was given, and it continues. Today, Aldo has left behind institutional politics, but still lives it as a commitment in the present. He is dedicated to other things. Teresa is President of an association called “Diversamente,” supporting the families of people with psychic disorders.

MARCIE and PETER
Marcie remembers her tears as she stood in the midst of about a hundred people gathered on the shore of Minnesota’s Serpent Lake. They had come from Crosby, St. Paul, and Rochester for a gigantic barbecue on the occasion of Fr. Julián Carrón’s visit in the summer of 2011. Later on, Marcie recounts: “They were all around the bonfire, children and grownups, singing together. Looking at that moment of time, I understood myself and my family as part of a people–that’s why I was moved.” On that day, her mind went back with gratitude to another day, in 1984, when she and Peter got married. Through the years, Marcie and Peter had seven children, many happy times, and some difficult ones; yet, in their stories about the life of their family, another protagonist always steals the scene. Marcie relates, “An Other, with a capital O, came to stay with us; this is what lasted in time. When our life started to become more complicated, He was faithful to us and did not allow our hearts to stop desiring.”
In 1998, the Stokmans–who were then living in Crosby, MN–were relocated to St. Paul because of Pete’s work. Marcie goes on, “At that point, we already had six children; Jim, the eldest, was twelve, and Margaret, the youngest, was only four months old. Pete was very busy getting his cardiology specialty, and I thought that he was more interested in his work than in our family. On top of that, I was suffering a lot because of my father’s recent passing. I felt abandoned, stuck. We were looking for a parish where we could find friends. I wanted more, I desired a place to belong to. Every morning, I would pray: ‘Lord, give me a place for my family within Your great Church!’” That’s exactly what happened. Just a few weeks later, Marcie, Peter, and their six kids were driving to Rochester. Bill Vouk, whom they had met a few days earlier at a Baptism, had invited them to a Communion and Liberation meeting. “There was a talk about wonder, followed by a hike. Driving back home, I asked myself who on earth those people could be, and what was the connection between all that talk about the human factor and faith. Without a doubt, we had a good time, but I was still perplexed.” Unlike Marcie, Pete didn’t have the same fears. “He told me I needed to seriously consider the concrete answer to our need. That was the most important decision that our family ever made, because it gave rise to consequences that we could have never imagined.” They opened the door of their home to friends, and started reading Fr. Giussani’s The Religious Sense together, calling that moment a “book club” meeting. “We had more questions than answers, and that was fascinating. Furthermore, our children looked at us and they could see we were living for something bigger than our family. Pete and I left behind our preoccupations about having a perfect family. I’m not saying that our life to that point had been fake, but maybe we were not certain about this Other with us, and we thought that being Christians meant striving to be good.”
For Marcie, this became clear above all in the relationship with her kids: “For a while, we endured a tough time with one of our children. He went through a wild year. Pete and I fought about how to handle him. I was scandalized by the situation. What changed the situation was seeing how friends continued to embrace him. This helped me to embrace him, too.”

FIORELLA and ORESTE
“Why aren’t you in the hotel with the others?” Fiorella was sitting on a wall in front of the church of Varigotti, in Liguria, and returned the stern look of the boy talking to her. She had never seen him before and she didn’t like his tone. She challenged him: “We didn’t have the money for the hotel, but we wanted to follow the Holy Week Triduum with Fr. Giussani. We are sleeping in Finale. We hitchhike back and forth.” Actually, they didn’t have money problems, but she preferred the alternative, quite unlike Oreste, who, the following day, sought her out to give her some fruit to eat. Two years later, on February 25, 1967, they climbed the path from Varigotti to the Church of San Lorenzo for their wedding. Little more than 20 years old, with quite different characters, and only one thing in common–the encounter with Christianity. But for them it is everything, because it took their life in an unexpected way, completely fulfilling it. “After all, Fio, this is the only reason we are still married after 45 years,” Oreste whispers.
They went to live in the Olmi quarter on the outskirts of Milan, Italy. “It was a radical change, hidden in that corner, far from our friends. I felt lost.” At once the differences between them exploded and life together was hard. Living together every day was grating on their nerves. The idyllic dream of married life in which understanding is something immediate, love as a chosen affinity, gradually began to fall apart, along with the idea that one is enough for the other. Then came the fights and the heavy silences. Fiorella tried to organize the home, work, and the children who had arrived in the meantime as well as she could. Their two lives seemed to be running parallel–meetings, Spiritual Exercises, friendships... but “it was not living, it was surviving.” And this won’t do, it suffocates. Fr. Giussani’s fatherly company kept them going, since he understood their pain, and didn’t let go of the desire for good that they had encountered. They wanted answers from him, rules to put back some order in their relationship. But he never told them what to do. One day, when Fiorella was discontented with everything and wanted to give up, Fr. Giussani told her, “Falling in love is the clue that the Lord gives you to make you notice the other. Without Oreste, you would not be happy. Without him, you will not be saved.” It is a sword that shatters the idea that you can change the other person according to your dreams–because Oreste is more. “I thought: there is no affinity, no common tastes that could hold up like the love I have for that man. How can I not trust him? I told myself: this is my treasure.” Life is not smooth, but neither is it flat. The claims you have on the other collapse, and in total freedom, because you no longer make a claim to anything. You rediscover a sincerity, an irony in your arguments and problems that once made you get mad. It’s a road that leads you to be essential in yourself and in relationships. It’s not always easy, and not always so clear.
One day, Fiorella met with Fr. Giussani. The room was cold and she lit the stove in the corner. “That’s what you have to do with Oreste–light the stove, love him for what he is. A gratuitous action that arises from the other’s good.”
Four years ago, Oreste fell ill. For both of them, it was the moment for lighting the stove. The illness threw them into each others’ arms. They found themselves talking, eating, laughing, arguing once again... looking after each other. “Now I can say I have no regrets. This was the best way, because I was not the one who chose it. My dreams were much poorer than the reality.” And you, Oreste? “Without her, I would have drowned in the mud.”

CHIARA and SAMUELE
The wedding preparations were going on, the menu to be chosen, the dress to be fitted... He is an agronomist, she a biologist, and they are preparing to begin their life together. Then the unexpected happens: a job offer, working for AVSI in Burundi, a project for improving agricultural productivity. All of a sudden, Chiara and Samuele find the priorities of their day overturned. “We had only a short time to decide, and a thousand doubts in our heads,” Chiara tells us, over coffee in her parents’ home in Varese, Italy.
Their hearts are lifted up by their friend Fr. Michele and by Patrizia, who has lived in Africa with her husband Alberto for several years–a companionship that does not leave you feeling alone before an occasion greater than all your expectations.
Chiara and Samuele made their decision. In September 2010, two months after their wedding, they were already in Ngozi, north of the capital Bujumbura; lots of poverty, no friends, a job to be invented, and two newlyweds–a condition, as Samuel reports by telephone, that “forces you to take your wife for what she is. In Italy, I had a thousand things to do, my own spaces. In Africa, I have a lot of time.” Either one is the instrument for the other for recognizing the Lord, or the African adventure is just a big waste of time. Fr. Michele went to visit them. “You don’t have to change Africa,” he told me. You just have to respond to what is there, with patience.”
One of the first people they made friends with was Sr. Bruna, who keeps a center for children and street girls, “one of the few places well looked after and kept clean,” says Chiara. “The center is called Giriteka [meaning “regaining your dignity”] because she wants these children to grow into human persons.” She is one of the reasons they decided to live in Ngozi and not in the capital.
“In December, I found out I was expecting a child. I had to rest and stop working for the distance adoptions. I kept thinking that I was useless but, at home, I slowly understood what mission is: not so much ‘doing’ but being where and how the Lord places you.” In August, Giacomo was born, in Italy. As soon as Chiara learned how to “manage” the new arrival, she left again for Africa. Life is different when there are three of you. Giacomo would go along with his mother when she went to help Sr. Bruna with the bureaucratic questions of her center.
Then, in January, as they were setting off to visit their friends in Uganda, Giacomo got ill, and it turned out to be a heart problem. He was taken by air to Nairobi and then to Italy. Once again, the game changes. Why? “What is the Lord asking from me, here, far from my husband?” Chiara asked herself. She had been living with her child in their home in Varese, while Samuele was there, in the middle of Africa. He was seldom able to come to see them and for very short visits. “Before I got married, I had quite a different idea of my life with Samuele. But today, I can say that marriage is not what we had in mind.” Despite the difficulties and the distances, “this year and a half has not been a wash-out, and we have never thought, ‘If only we had done things differently.’” Samuele says, “I am never alone. For example, I now have a university student here for his thesis. But my place is with my family. We want to come back all three of us to stay in Ngozi because of the people we have met, the things that have happened. As Fr. Michele said, here we have experienced the fullness of Christ’s love. We soon have to decide for Africa or for Italy. Much will depend on Giacomo’s health. But one thing is for sure–we will go where the Lord wants to lead us.”