Michela has shaped our lives
Your Eminence, our daughter Michela's handicap has shaped our lives. Luciana and I have felt ourselves bound, as in Saint Peter's prophecy, and carried where we never imagined we would go when we exchanged our marriage vows. Our faith, rooted in our daily lives, is tested continually by exhaustion—by never growing accustomed to Michela's epileptic seizures, by watching her become physically heavier with each passing year, and feeling that weight ourselves. We accumulate wounds in our struggle to assert the rights of children like Michela in a society that has marginalized and hurt them since kindergarten.
Yet nothing draws us closer and binds us more firmly than gathering at the same Table, all of us united around the Lord's Eucharist, sharing in His Bread. The solemn words of the Mass have shown us that this union is meant for everyone. They have made us feel united not only with those who have gone before us into heaven, but with the peoples at the furthest corners of the earth.
Now we wish to follow those important, formal words with simpler, more intimate ones—words that underscore this union is present first and foremost here and now, among us, so different in our life situations, our ages, our struggles, our hopes. These are simple, familiar words meant to help us know one another and therefore to love one another. We offer them to all, but especially to the Cardinal, whom we would most wish to know us and to love us as we are.
Our life in the parish community has also had its moments of great hardship. It was only when Fede e Luce was born in our parish that we witnessed testimony to the dignity and the right to participate in community life in its fullest sense—from inclusion to catechesis for our young people. For us, this was a true breath of friendship and grace.
Yet over time, this reality too has felt the weight of our secularizing society. We feel acutely the difficulty of sustaining friendships. Moreover, we who are members of our Fede e Luce community have ourselves, in recent years, strained our bonds with one another. We must feel more deeply our duty to protect the gift that Fede e Luce represents.
I conclude by saying that as we age, as our struggles grow heavier, these difficulties make us more fragile in facing our life as a couple. We are tested continually. We fear we may not endure.
Help us. Give us some direction so that we may align our lives with the Gospel, and so that hope may never abandon us.
Giacomo, a father from Milan
I am glad I changed him
Several years ago I went on pilgrimage to Assisi with my parish. It was a beautiful experience, full of spiritual emotion. I return willingly to this oasis of peace, this time with a personal testimony. In 1988 I met, through the "Arca" association to which I belong, a young man named Vito, and I am glad I changed him completely. Before, he was shy and fearful, he did not even care for himself, and he seemed to me like a lost lamb. As I came to know him, I discovered in him a spiritual affinity. We became excellent friends, both honest and straightforward, and we devote ourselves to our companions who face difficulties during our work activities. I follow one group of friends and he follows another. On Sundays when we go to Mass, we bring along a friend who is always completely alone.
I conclude by saying the world would be better if we all behaved as the poor man of Assisi did, who stripped himself of his possessions to dedicate himself with such humility to the poor and the sick.
Antonella, a young woman from Bari
For sustained commitment
I am a member of a Fede e Luce group. As we prepared for this pilgrimage, we asked ourselves about problems we encounter, and one concerns our young friends. Often young people come to our Fede e Luce communities, some very young. They arrive interested and enthusiastic about what they experience among us, but frequently, after an initial burst of excitement, we struggle to engage them deeply. We risk losing them along the way.
We ask you for help so that we can move beyond this first phase of great enthusiasm and foster more sustained commitment.
Pierpaola from Cuneo
What is small
The priests too are part of Fede e Luce. When I began this journey, I thought as I usually do that I would need to play a role, that I would come to do something for Fede e Luce, the work I ordinarily carry out in my own community. Instead, I was given the chance to recover what many of us have recovered: my own fragility and smallness. God has chosen what is small in the world, what the world considers useless and despicable. And so it seems to me that the living Gospel I hear each time, the Word that resounds whenever I am together with the young people and the families, is precisely this: the Lord speaks to me again, speaks I believe to all of us: "Remember that God continues to choose what is small, what the world considers absolutely useless." I think that for us priests, for our commitments, for our haste because there is so much to do, there is the temptation to forget this powerful word.
I believe we all need to be reminded by you as well—as teacher, as shepherd—of this truth.
Marco, a priest from Milan
The value of friendship
I have been part of the Fede e Luce group for several years and attend meetings held monthly at the Parish of San Ciro in a peripheral neighborhood of Bari. I have come to know many people in this group, especially young people. With some of them I have developed a more private, personal friendship. Sometimes I see them outside the meetings as well—visiting their homes or meeting them in other places and circumstances—and we talk together about different things, different topics, including the more personal aspects of our lives. I almost always attend the meetings, and I am content to do so, even though at times I feel the desire to step back from others and spend some moments alone with my own thoughts, reflecting on more personal matters.
Overall, it is a good experience for me to participate in the Fede e Luce group because I discover the value of friendship, and I hope to be able to continue doing so in the future.
Michele, a young man from Bari
How shall we live?
Your Eminence, we too—brothers and sisters of young people with handicaps—participate in celebrating twenty years of Fede e Luce in Italy, and we are grateful for the gifts we have received through this great family.
We have come to see that many young people and adults are marked by this presence in the family, and we have become aware of the profound differences in how this reality is received. We know many who have welcomed their disabled brother or sister and the mystery of grace he or she carries. The deep spiritual and emotional richness with such a sibling has led them to openness of mind and heart, to serious and sustained commitment in the Fede e Luce community and in the struggle against marginalization in general. Others, by contrast, live with deep discomfort in the presence of a brother or sister who can sometimes feel like too much of a burden. They feel crushed, prevented from growing and realizing themselves as persons. They do not feel free to face their own lives. Many of them prefer to ignore their difficult situation, living as if their brother or sister did not exist. For them, the difficult relationships created in a family that feels itself different have become unbearable.
Still others perceive themselves as neglected, left to themselves, deprived of attention and affection, because the real problem is embodied in the more fragile child, and so it seems impossible to establish dialogue—there are too many resistances, too many painful histories. And how many siblings still, through fear of negative reactions or through guilt, have not been involved, so that caring for their disabled brother or sister is something that does not concern them, something for parents alone. Faced with these and other such complex and difficult situations, some inevitable questions arise:
- How do we accept the presence of a disabled sibling and the mystery he or she carries within our sibling relationships?
- How do we help sustain not only our parents, but all members of the family?
- How do we affirm the value of our role and that of our handicapped siblings within the Church community?
- How do we understand the pressures and guilt feelings that so often weigh upon us?
- How do we live our vocation to marriage or to consecrated life with freedom?
Today we celebrate twenty years of Fede e Luce in Italy. In those twenty years Fede e Luce has grown. We have all grown with it. But we parents in particular have also aged or are aging. In this phase of our lives, amid the thousand daily problems large and small, there is one of immense proportions that occupies our thoughts constantly and troubles our nights: the question of "what comes after," when we are no longer at our children's side to love them and care for them. What will they do? Who will be there for them? And most urgently, where and with whom will they live?
Can you, Cardinal Martini, tell us today something that might ease this inevitable anguish? Something that is more than an exhortation to trust—because all of us parents, from the experience of a lifetime, know that trust is crucial, it is essential, but by itself it is not enough to accomplish something concrete for our children.
And above all, can you, Cardinal Martini, do something in this area, today and tomorrow, for our sons and daughters?
Giacomo, a brother from Fidenza