SituationInmovement Faith Is a Life The “forced” meeting with a priest led to the discovery of Christianity as an event. Nicolino Pompei communicated this event to those he met on the streets of San Benedetto del Tronto, and thus began the Fides Vita movement by Riccardo Piol It was just another day at the Rossetti Scientific High School in San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy. For the seniors, it was time for their weekly hour of Religion class, and Nicolino, as always, left the classroom. The restless popular leader had burned his bridges with Christianity some time ago and didn’t see why he should stay for the lesson. He started his usual round, destination, bathroom, where he could keep a low profile for an hour. When he got there, though, Mayday! The Principal was making an inspection tour. And so, about face and run–before getting caught. Nicolino went back to the classroom, furious, and slammed the door because his usual routine had gone out the window, and now he’d have to spend an hour nailed to the chair listening to worthless stuff. And he knew that, first of all, what he was in for was the mother of all harangues. But Fr Silvano didn’t catechize him as he expected. Later in the lesson, Nicolino realized it wasn’t as bad as he’d thought; in fact, Fr Silvano had captured his attention. He’d never stayed to listen to the priest, he didn’t know him, and had imagined an entirely different thing. Above all, he had no idea that after his little scene, when the lesson ended, that Religion teacher would start talking with him, not to lecture him, but to invite him to a conference of Franciscan Youth in Assisi. The story of the Fides Vita movement began thus, one day in 1981, “with an encounter,” Nicolino tells today, “that had the fragile appearance of a chance meeting, and that over time has taken on the power of an event.” The encounter with Saint Francis The rebellious student at the Rossetti High School is now forty years old, teaches Religion, and finds himself with the responsibility of a small movement of young people that by now everybody in San Benedetto del Tronto knows, and that is beginning to be present in other Italian cities as well. A lot of things have happened since that day 23 years ago, and Nicolino Pompei tells about them, not with the tone of a founder, but speaking as the first who happened into something unique, that with time became a movement. After the encounter with Fr Silvano in Religion class that “forced me to consider Christianity as an event that corresponds to man’s heart, I found myself in front of that powerhouse of a man that is Saint Francis.” At the Assisi conference, where he met his Religion teacher again, Nicolino came up against what he defines as “an irresistible ‘flesh’ of man” who set forth Christianity as a real, concrete fact. And Nicolino experienced again a surprise. “Saint Francis set me in front of One, present. Not an attitude, not a devotion, but a man named Jesus,” who “not only forced me to ask about the meaning of my life and about my relationship with all of reality, but who claimed to be its full answer,” that “center of the cosmos and of history” of John Paul II’s first encyclical, Redemptor hominis, that shortly after struck Nicolino like lightning, confirming him in the road that, almost without being able to explain it, he had by now begun to walk, and in which he would involve others. From the parish to teaching The first was a group of “indescribable, wild kids,” who Nicolino found himself teaching between 1985 and 1986 in a catechism course entrusted to him in a parish. Then came the kids he met on the city streets–at that time, more maybe than today, San Benedetto was a city that lived on the streets. The rite of the stroll downtown, or the habit of hanging out with peers, led people to meet each other along the streets. And Nicolino spent a lot of time in those streets “only because of the desire,” he says, “to propose Christianity.” He began to spend time with very young kids in a simple way, “not with the idea of grouping them together to keep their free time occupied, like some end up doing, just to keep the kids out of bad company,” but with the pleasure of sharing life. There were kids from good families as well as delinquents; for most of them “Christianity was a factor far from life, abstract, reduced to a series of good precepts for priests, nuns, old people, and kids with no backbone.” Nicolino hung out with them, went out of his way to find them, and they began to look for him too. “From day to day,” he relates, “these kids became the fabric and the passion of my daily life.” Because of this “success,” Bishop Chiaretti, who was then bishop of the city, asked Nicolino to begin studying so he could teach Religion in the high schools. Nicolino accepted, not imagining that this invitation would mark decisively the road from which Fides Vita would be born. In fact, already in 1988-1989, with his first year of teaching at a technical-commercial institute for surveyors, Professor Pompei understood that he needed to think of a new way to be together with the kids who surrounded him in ever-increasing numbers. He understood that what he wanted to communicate, and the method he wanted to offer them had to be formulated in a journey that was specific and autonomous compared to the reality of Youth Community 2000 of the Friars Minor Conventual, which he had met in Assisi and followed up to that time. The first Conference On October 30, 1991, the company of young people that had grown around Nicolino presented itself on the streets, as always, but this time with a name, Fides Vita. It was their first Conference, lasting three days, and held in a permanent circus tent, “proposed on the street,” Nicolino explains, “as an expression of the way many of us bumped into Christianity and of where we wanted to propose it and affirm it.” The Conference was made up of meetings, testimonies, exhibits, and parties. “From the very beginning, it was organized as an annual appointment and place that could express concisely our company and at the same time support our daily walk of deeper understanding and reasonable adherence to Christianity.” From 1991 to date, many friends have accompanied the history of the young movement along this walk. Skimming the programs of the thirteen Conferences, you can find the names of people linked to the experience of CL, who Fr Armando, ecclesiastical assistant of Fides Vita, defines as “the biggest friends we found before us as examples of the passion for Christ. Fr Giussani himself,” he notes, “has never missed sending us his personal greetings for the Conference.” A train trip From 1991 to date, the Conference has never been skipped in the life of San Benedetto del Tronto and it has grown–more days, more spaces, many guests and exhibits–along with the expressivity of Fides Vita, which continues to involve kids in San Benedetto and has begun to set roots around Italy as well, first in Ancona, then in other cities of the Marches Region such as Macerata and Urbino, and following the road marked by simple encounters, also in Rome and Milan, and in the regions of Puglia and Sicily. How this has come about, and the reason why kids who meet Fides Vita remain attached to this experience, can be understood through the story Fr Armando relates as an example. “Our presence in Palermo was born in an entirely chance way. One of us, traveling by train, met a girl who lived in Sicily. In the course of their conversation, he couldn’t help but talk about our company. They exchanged phone numbers and out of this was born a friendship that led this girl, too, into Fides Vita, and from thence began our presence in Palermo.” He also tells the story of a young man, “passing in front of a church where we were having the movement Mass. He came in to see who was singing such beautiful songs. He was struck by a particular, and from there, a friendship was born.” This is a friendship that takes over all aspects of life, and that today in San Benedetto involves hundreds of kids, high school and university students, young men and women and adults between the ages of 20 and 40, with their children, and a few grandparents as well. Daily friendship “ Ours,” says Nicolino, “is a little people inside the event of Christianity,” a reality of people who want to live and testify to their faith in all the particulars of life. “The challenge that Nicolino always gives us,” says Fr Armando, “is that of communicating what happens to us in this walk of continuous generation that forms our company.” This walk is an education, made up of gestures together that mark the life of this movement, and of initiatives that express the attempt to judge reality, such as the flyer written after the Madrid terrorist attacks, or the one on the debate following the approval of the law regulating medically assisted procreation. These gestures and initiatives, as well as the magazine Nel Frammento [In the Fragment], the posters produced for Easter and Christmas, and the summer meetings of the “Happening in the Streets,” “are a way of saying who we are,” explains Fr Armando, “a way of meeting people in the universities, in the schools, and at work. We say who we are and we offer a friendship.” This friendship, over the course of a week, is made up of regular gestures such as the moment of prayer together, called “Entrusting,” and that of meeting and dialogue called “Echo.” “It’s not that once an appointment is over, we say we’ll meet again at the next one,” explains Fr Armando. “We live a daily friendship that is always bringing us together,” but, as a flyer from the 1990s said, “Nemo dat quod non habet” (“No one gives what he doesn’t have”). For this reason, over the years there has been a growing awareness that the friendship called Fides Vita needed a continuous generation made up of precise gestures. “The summer vacations,” says Fr Armando, “are, for example, a fundamental occasion for deepening what we are living. There are those for middle and high school students, for university students, and for adults, all aimed at encompassing in seven days the steps of the normal walk. The hikes, the games, and the meetings are paradigmatic moments for rediscovering what it means to be together in the history of our company,” and for learning to have the world for a horizon “because the proprium of our friendship is to bring Christ everywhere and to everybody, to every man we happen to meet.”