Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini is now in the great heavenly Jerusalem, which he longed for throughout his life as a scholar, as a priest of the universal Church, as a pastor open to dialogue with every man and woman of goodwill. Much has been written, and many have shared their memories of him. It will not be easy, then, to add something more—yet I do so out of gratitude for the great gift I received by being part of Faith and Light for so many years.
In 1982, when Jean Vanier asked Francesco Gammarelli and me (then the Italian coordinators of Faith and Light) to take steps to contact the new Bishop of Milan, His Excellency Carlo Maria Martini, it seemed to me—as so often with Jean Vanier's requests—one of his typical "shoot for the moon" ideas. Yet these requests were pressing and demanded a positive response. He told us: "the people of Faith and Light desperately needed this."
And so it was that in a small reserved room of an immense palazzo near the Vatican, a place that inspired both awe and reverence the moment one entered, Francesco and I met the Bishop. We asked him to become a "Friend" to all the people of Faith and Light, and to serve as the "Bishop representative" in our relations with the institutional Church: for the young people first and foremost, for the parents often desperate and worn down by repeated rejection of their children, for the friends—not always exemplary in following the rules of good Christians who frequented parishes and youth centers.
Francesco and I talked and talked and talked about our needs, about our suffering, about the certainty of the human and spiritual friendship that formed in our groups, so far outside the norm. We were not charity groups, nor educational ones, nor forums for cultural study. Our members—so different from one another, adults and young people, people with varying disabilities—were brought together by nothing but friendship and by letting ourselves be guided by the smallest among us. It seemed we were speaking in vain: probably our words would not have convinced someone as educated and learned as a Doctor of the Church standing before us.
But after listening—which we had taken for polite indifference—he told us yes, he would accept becoming our Bishop. He said that no one, however learned, could know what God himself might say personally to even the least of our brothers and sisters with disabilities. And no one—believer or atheist alike—could know what God wished to communicate to each person through this world of Faith and Light.
And so began for Faith and Light a long practice of having a Bishop (later a Cardinal) as our "Friend." Whenever we organized a significant event—a pilgrimage, a national or international gathering—Cardinal Martini would come, participate, spend time with us, and bring the gift of his reflection, uniting wisdom with lived experience. I remember his reflection during a pilgrimage to Assisi on the terrible and unfathomable mystery of suffering brought by a child with such serious difficulties as those we encountered in Faith and Light. It was a demanding meditation for parents: "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents...? ...He was born blind so that God's works might be displayed in him" (John 9:2-3).
As the National Council, we also had the privilege and responsibility of meeting with him once a year for an entire afternoon in Milan. These meetings continued from that first time in 1983 until the Cardinal left the Diocese of Milan in 2005.
We would arrive from different cities, often hurried, having each set aside our other pressing commitments. He too would set aside, for a few hours, the demanding care of his Diocese—surely his priority as a Bishop.
And from the first greeting, his welcome was informal: his gaze turned personally toward each of us, his ear attentive to our progress and our fears, his mind quick to grasp and reframe our problems in a wider, more spiritual, more open perspective—to providence and its mysterious ways. As he greeted us, a sense of peace settled over everyone, born of a shared certainty: we had contributed to a small but essential work of nurturing a sturdy plant—not grand, not famous, not held in great regard in Italian society or the Church. This is what lives on in memory for those who were able to meet with him in person, and also through the words that remain in the writings that came from this experience.
In recent years I had brief contact with Cardinal Martini because we had "shared" the hard experience of Parkinson's disease—he lived with it for more than fifteen years, and I as the wife of someone still living with this difficult condition. A disease that imprisons the body and sometimes the mind, that offers no hope of improvement, that must be accepted with patience and determination, day by day, minute by minute.
Every time I hear the prayer of the Mass, when the priest prays "for our Pope and our Bishop," since then and still today, I—doing no disservice to the Bishop of my diocese—add the name "Carlo Maria." And I know that he, now as then, prays for each of us in the fullness of Life.
Valeria Levi Della Vida, 2012