CL LIFE
From Around the World

“I’M THERE.
THAT’S IT.”
Witness is born from the simple fact of being truly oneself. Three stories–a missionary in Novosibirsk, a student in New York, and a young worker in Atyrau–tell of the freedom that comes from the experience of being loved, and the novelty that it brings into the world.   

by L. Fiore, A. Stoppa, and D. Perillo

SIBERIA
ALFREDO’S SPRING
“I had heard of it, but I had never been there. It’s in the territory of my second parish, and I decided to go there one Saturday.” Fr. Alfredo Fecondo, missionary of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Charles Borromeo, has been in Siberia since 1994. Last year, the Bishop of Novosibirsk asked him to take care of the Catholics of Berdsk, a city 30 miles from his home. It was a somewhat unlucky parish, whose small church had suffered not one, but two fires in recent years. “The place is called Lojòk,” explains Fr. Alfredo. “It was home to one of the most ferocious gulags in Soviet history. It is located next to a limestone quarry, where the prisoners were forced to work. Between the cold and the dust that filled their lungs, life expectancy there was no more than six months. Many priests and nuns were imprisoned there, too. On the spot where they were executed and buried, a miraculous spring began to flow. The people there call it the ‘Holy Fountain.’”
Lojòk is on the banks of a river enclosed in a ring of birch trees. Over the years, the Orthodox Church constructed a small shrine over the fountain, with a blue roof topped by a small, gold cupola. Pilgrims come there to pray, and to draw water with bottles. A little further inside, the brick factory where the prisoners worked is still in existence; witnesses state that its oven was also used to burn their cadavers.
“That Saturday morning, I was supposed to go to Moscow for the Assembly of CL Responsibles, but I stayed in Novosibirsk because of a problem with my knee. So, one after another, my dearest friends called me: Monsignor Pezzi, Fr. Pino, Jean-François Thiry, even Fr. Carrón... I was full of gratitude and, I’m not really sure why, it occurred to me to finally go to Lojòk, to the place where the spring wells up. When I arrived, I stayed there in prayer for a few minutes.” Fr. Alfredo’s mind was crowded with thoughts: the martyrs who were killed in that place, the voices of his friends, his own life, his vocation. “A question exploded, full of emotion: ‘Lord, why are You so merciful with me?’ I was really overcome. I was in front of the unknown presences of priests and nuns who–before me, like me–had given their lives to Christ. And yet, thinking once more about the affection of my friends, what prevailed in me was the sense of an embrace. I don’t know what else to call it. And I asked, ‘Why are You so full of mercy for me?’” He is moved again just talking about it. “And then it was about another spring–the one where, for me, everything began...”    

Jacob’s wound. Fr. Alfredo is thinking of a day in 1990. At that time, he taught religion at the 8th Scientific High School in Milan. It was September, between the end of the remedial exams and the beginning of school, and he found himself at his parents’ house in Pollutri, Abruzzo, for a few days. The town is spread out on a hill in the middle of two valleys, with two creeks running alongside. “I had always asked myself where one of these streams came from. At first, I thought that it came from the Majella mountain, but then I discovered that this couldn’t be the case. I decided to trace it back on foot. After almost three hours of walking, I came to a place where the spring had to be, hidden by a bush. I was seized with wonder, and I said, ‘I found the mysterious spring. I will live my whole life here, like a hermit.’ I’m a bit of a philosopher and a poet, and things come to me like that. But then I thought, ‘What is the true spring of my life?’ What came to my mind then was Fr. Giussani and my friendship with him. So, when I returned to Milan, I went to visit him in order to tell him about that spring, and the true spring. When I told him that I wanted to enter the seminary, he answered, ‘I would never have imagined that God’s mercy was so vast.’ That was the beginning of my vocation, and I see that the image of the spring is following me over the years, even here in Siberia.”
Many stories flow together in Lojòk: of martyrdom, of friendship, and the story that is within Fr. Alfredo’s history. But why be so moved by the perception of the mercy that God has toward us? Because we don’t deserve it? Because it’s unexpected? “Yes, we don’t deserve it... but there’s much more to it than that. Here, we deal with the fundamental questions. To respond immediately would perhaps diminish the question. I only know that I carry this thing in me like Jacob’s wound.” Fr. Alfredo stops to reflect for a few moments, then begins again. “There was a phrase of John Paul II that Fr. Giussani loved very much: ‘Mercy has a name in history–Jesus.’ This ‘name’ echoes in a face, a phone call, a particular accent in which you hear your name pronounced. And it unveils to you, all of a sudden, the unfathomable and infinite depth of His being and your being.”
Some months have gone by since that Saturday afternoon, but the repercussions persist–so much so that Fr. Alfredo responds to the question, “How are you?” by talking about the miraculous fountain. But in daily life, what has changed? “The other day, I went to the university, to Akademgorodok, where I teach a course in Italian History. I have a class of eight students, but only three of them were there. My first reaction was, ‘What? Only three?’ I fell back into my measure, like everyone else. Then I recovered, and I said to myself, ‘The mercy that I experience is so great that I hope that they can live it, too.’ It is a tension that puts a certain impatience in you. But it is an impatience that lives on expectation. The experience of being loved makes me free. It’s not that it makes you suffer any less–you would want all of the students to be there, because you have something big and beautiful to communicate to them. But if that doesn’t happen, it’s just as well–I am no less filled by this overwhelming mercy.”

The small seed. In the parish near the university, a small group of young people has begun to form around him. There are not many of them. And yet, he looks at them with amazement as he sees their friendship growing. “Usually, what happens is that they get attached to me personally, but nothing happens among them. Instead, in recent months, I’ve seen something different. What is being born is a small...” He hesitates to use the word “community.” Maybe it sticks in his mouth, or perhaps he doesn’t dare to employ it. “Everything is small here. A small seed, which will grow if God wills it.” It will grow, just as the walls of the new church at Berdsk are rising, the one that burned twice and that now the Bishop wants Fr. Alfredo to rebuild. He already has a plan in mind: “I will get the bricks from Lojòk, next to the miraculous fountain.”

UNITED STATES
IS THIS REALLY
FOR ME?
No problems, no theatrical hostility–on the contrary, the world around him seems innocuous and high profile: New York, Columbia University, high academic level, good thesis project, great professor. Giacomo Nicolini arrived from Bologna, Italy, in March, for a thesis in Engineering about emergency management after Hurricane Sandy. He immediately threw himself into his studies, working hard all day and returning only in the evening to the International House, where he lived with 700 other students from all over the world. His lodging included a cafeteria and shared bathrooms, and the cramped little room where he stayed only long enough to sleep. But it was no problem because, outside, everything was an opportunity. He was going at a thousand miles an hour.
And so a stealthy judgment quickly penetrated him, one that was not at all innocuous: you are what you do. And, “without really realizing it,” he started to make calculations. “At times, I became aware of certain ways of thinking that I used with my friends, or in thinking about the decisions that awaited me–work, marriage, where to live... That judgment defined the way I looked at myself.”
In April, the dizziness started. It bothered him, but Giacomo forged ahead. His girlfriend came from Italy to visit and, as a gift, he took her to a Mass with a Gospel choir. While in the church, he fainted. “After various tests, they diagnosed me with labyrinthitis [an inflammation of the inner ear]. Nothing serious, thank God. But it kept me in bed for a month.” He felt gypped. Stuck in that cramped little room, night and day, he couldn’t do anything. Picking up a glass made him fall down. “I’m the sort of person who never sits still. And what’s more, I was across the ocean from home, having come there on purpose with a specific project, a big opportunity... I asked myself, why now, why here? Everything was against me.” The more he thought about it, the more he convinced himself that there was no worse time or place to feel like this. “The real struggle was not putting up with the discomfort of the illness. I could grit my teeth, and I coped. It was that I didn’t recognize it as a call, but as something that had to pass, in order for me to start living again. I began to ask the Lord to convert me.” His friends started to ask with him.

Tears of joy.“Now that you are improving, the more walking you do, the better,” was the doctor’s practical recommendation at his last appointment. Giacomo decided to take a walk by himself, since his girlfriend, who had been looking after him for three weeks, had left. “It was the first day that I found myself alone.” In the small park in front of his dormitory, he went along slowly, staggering a bit, and looking around. All of a sudden, “really, all of a sudden,” the darkness vanished. “I’m walking!” It only took a moment, and the whole struggle melted away. “I lived again the experience that there is One who loves me. I was putting up with this situation, while God wanted to give my life back to me, to make me recognize that everything is given to me. I was moved–did He give this specifically to me? This labyrinthitis, this test, small as it may be, did He think it up precisely for me? I cried tears of joy.” He calls it a “gift that I won,” “because the struggle was a constant request. It was within a loyalty–to the Movement and to letting myself be accompanied, even from a distance, by the Fraternity Exercises.”  
Fr. Carrón’s words on the phone resounded in his heart: “What’s important is not the circumstance in which you find yourself; everything can be dealt with. The important thing is to be in the right position.” And then, “This is why we need Christ and the Church–not to heal us, but to put us in the right position.”

The walk and Bart. After that walk, nothing changed at Columbia. But Giacomo was no longer separated from himself. “The judgment was new: without recognizing Jesus’ presence, I don’t know how to look at myself.” And that wasn’t the only thing he had learned. “Only if I know how to look at myself, can I know how to look at others. More than that, I feel the desire to look at them.” When he had arrived, he hadn’t had this openness. “Instead, afterward, I stayed in the student residence, there where I had been placed, and I didn’t try to escape. I started to sit at the table and engage with whomever was there, talking, asking. This would not have been possible without having realized that I was overflowing with this good for myself. Many encounters came out of this.”
The dearest to him was with Bart, a doctoral student in Law from Leuven, Belgium. One night at dinner, they found themselves at the same table. One by one, the others left, until they were the only two at the table. “He had a beautiful humanity, that boy. A dialogue grew, intense and honest, from the most banal things to the fundamental questions.” They got up, and Bart invited him over for a glass of wine. And they went on talking for hours, stammering heatedly in English. “It was so beautiful that I brought him The Religious Sense.” Bart devoured it in three days and then turned up again, book in hand, all underlined. “The thing that strikes me the most is the reasonableness. We need to get together for a beer.” They did, and Bart bombarded Giacomo with questions. “He said to me, ‘I want to go forward, because it’s just too beautiful.’” Giacomo gave him the second book (At the Origin of the Christian Claim) and invited him: “Come with us, because there is a place in which these things are lived.” 
Bart started to go to School of Community. Upon hearing them talk about the experience of the disciples, he spoke up: “In the encounter with all of you, I am living the same thing.” After two months of this, he returned to Belgium. Giacomo, who had gone back to Italy, invited him to the Rimini Meeting, and he immediately accepted. “He came like a child, wide-eyed. He wanted to see everything, and it was all I could do to keep up with him.” It is a friendship that goes beyond him, and he cannot forget its origin. “I am expansive, but the openness that I lived was not a character trait. I don’t act a certain way because ‘that’s how I am,’ but only because I live all of my need; I am truly myself. This makes me a bearer of novelty.” He discovered it reflected in Bart’s face.
Previously, Giacomo had looked up the CL community in Belgium for him, and had sent his friend’s contact information to a certain Mauro, so that they could meet each other. But it had never worked out. And yet, on the plane ride from Belgium to Italy, Bart saw that the man sitting beside him was reading The Religious Sense.
“Are you from CL?”
“Are you Bart?”

KAZAKHSTAN
THE FLOWER
ON THE CASPIAN
“It’s not a question of words or thoughts. I’m there. That’s it.” She’s there. And that’s enough to cause a bud of life to flower, even where you wouldn’t expect it. Atyrau, Kazakhstan, is a city of 170,000 people on the Caspian Sea, in an area of petroleum, gas, and elegant but sparsely populated mosques–Islam is embraced by seven out of ten inhabitants here, but is not very decisive in everyday life. The Orthodox faith did not count for much in Julia Mashina’s home, either. Today she is 35 and works for a petroleum company, but she had just started to study languages at the university in Karaganda when she met two Italian priests, Fr. Edo Canetta and Fr. Adelio Dell’Oro. “It was 1996. Communism had just collapsed, but no one here, or almost no one, practiced religion. Maybe an ‘Our Father’ and the celebration of Easter; nothing more. I basically considered myself an atheist. No sense of belonging.”
Those two priests, instead, belonged to something. “I was struck by how they stayed with us. They were different from all the others, full of life. They still are today, in their sixties.” Julia stayed with that ragtag little group of Catholics. She started to go to church, to receive Communion. She lived a friendship “that was something stable, something that was always there, like a family.” She looked for the same thing in Astana, where she moved a few years later, and in Saint Petersburg, when she wound up working as an interpreter in Russia. “Even there I could find these friends who always reminded me that life is not just work, that I am made for something more.” And it is something big, which works through small gestures: encounters, parties, School of Community, and “charitable work, which was to clean the meeting rooms where we got together... nothing momentous. But it was a presence.” Why? “Being with them was like being in church during Mass–it was God present for me.”
The turning point came in February 2006, when she started a new job in Atyrau. All of a sudden, her friends were 1,200 miles away. She was alone, in a city that “was still post-Soviet, gray, dirty; only now is it getting a new face. The first months after my arrival, I was caught up in work and meeting new colleagues. I thought they would be enough. Or rather, I lived as if they were enough.” She even stopped going to church. “I didn’t feel that it was necessary. It didn’t seem that way, at least.” “As if”... “seem”... These words were the clues that something that wasn’t right, inside. “Life, like this, was not in order. Something was missing. I don’t know how to explain what it was... The backbone, the center where everything comes and goes.” It was a void made of empty evenings, outings with colleagues that left a bitter taste in her mouth, relationships “that didn’t truly help me. People became cynical quickly. During certain evenings, we talked about everything, with no limits–sex, romantic flings. I laughed but, inside, I thought: ‘This doesn’t interest me. What interests me?’”

Winning the lottery. Slowly, Julia started to seek out her other friends again, the ones from Karaganda (“I went home every three months and went to visit them”). She began to attend Mass again (“There was a choir started by an Italian teacher”). And then there was the appearance of Nastja, a friend who came to work with her. “She was Orthodox, not from CL, but she knew who we were and what School of Community was.” For Julia, this was the occasion for the simplest gesture–to propose doing it together. “I had understood that everything was linked: Church and Movement. I read the book for School of Community almost every day, and I asked God for a companionship. The friendship with Nastja was like a point of light.” In what sense? “A first step out of sadness.”
The second arrived with Nicola, a friend who came to Atyrau from Italy. “Fr. Adelio had given him my number.” And so their School of Community expanded to three. “Then we invited some girls from the choir. A pair of them came.” She met some others while organizing Italian courses, “because many people want to study it here.” The idea had been Nicola’s (he had eventually returned to Italy), but it allowed Julia to meet girls like Muldir, who was studying Water Resources, and Anara, a Chemistry student. “Both Muslim, both extremely faithful to the School of Community.” Why? “Anara once told me that she had found in Christianity a God who participates in our life, who makes us meet people and situations that are made just for us.” What about those colleagues? “They look at me differently. There is a great respect, and less idle chatter.”
All in all, it looks like a presence is blooming on the banks of the Caspian. It’s miniscule, but it’s there–made of five people who get together every week (“even in the summer, because we’re behind on the text. Anara and Muldir can’t read it at home, so we have to do it together...”) and, for some months now, of a surprise addition: the Bishop. It is none other than Fr. Adelio Dell’Oro, sent by the Pope to the same country where he had been a missionary before. “When they told me he was coming, I felt like I had won the lottery. I thought, now everything will change. It will become easier, deeper–more.” And is it? “Yes, because I feel more loved.” But have you changed in these years? “When I say ‘Christ’ now, it’s something more concrete. I can see it in how I started to appreciate even the bad moments.” How? “I cry out more. I don’t say, ‘Save me from these pains,’ but, ‘Thank you for giving them to me, so that I can remember You.’”