A Different Story Altogether

Human beings need stories almost as much as food, Pope Francis once said in his 2020 message for World Communications Day. At Ombre e Luci, we believe deeply in the power of telling stories and reflections about fragility and disability—told as truthfully as we can. "We need to breathe in the truth of good stories," Francis said, "stories that build us up rather than tear us down; stories that help us recover our roots and the strength to move forward together. We need a narrative that reveals the threads connecting us to one another." More recently, the Pope has called on communicators to tell the truth of lived life as story, stepping away from "the comfortable presumption of already knowing," from prejudice itself, and moving into places nobody else wants to go—"communicating by meeting people where and as they are." So let us take time to know and listen to the hidden stories: of Eva Rodrigues, a Brazilian woman fighting stubbornly to free herself from the image others have, for convenience, sewn onto her; of Eufemia Giuliani, a 74-year-old Apulian mother of three children with psychiatric disabilities, who with warmth and humor questions God and keeps throwing herself into life; of Carlo Maria Fornari, who at Ponte Lambro turned a vision into reality—a community welcoming those in the vulnerable years "after us"—all because of the enthusiasm planted in him by friendship with a priest, Dario Madaschi, whose brief life was spent searching for the meaning of true living. In the focus curated by Giulia Galeotti, we search for these lives in History itself, full of "stumbles and steps forward" with which we have still not finished reckoning. Because those lives and their stories—so often forgotten, deliberately excluded—carry "an inalienable dignity." To draw near to them is to heal and redeem, at last together, our invisibly fragile and wounded humanity.