In 1981, just before martial law was declared, Mariangela Bertolini arrived in Poland. In less than three hours, she had traveled from a world of sunshine, ballet flats, and abundance to a bleak Polish winter—snow up to her knees, empty shops, a grim sky. She would laugh telling us how she crunched snow in her almost-summer shoes, and how she ate boiled potatoes three times a day.
We laughed with her because we were used to potatoes, and we found it delightful that someone would wear such shoes in winter. After that, Mariangela made many trips to Poland. When the Wall fell for good, she came to us in Moscow in 1993. She arrived angry and upset because Paolo, her husband, had been stopped at the airport for lacking the proper documents to enter Russia. "It seems that for some people, this is no longer Europe! As if we were truly different!" she said indignantly. We were different, but it made no difference to her. Because a mother's heart was always the same.
That visit to Moscow, Mariangela talked at length about herself, about Chicca, about the journey of love. Many years later, I heard one of our mothers from those days tell newer members: "Mariangela had the courage to name things I didn't dare speak of, even to myself. My guilt, my fears, my depression. Her experience and her courage to speak of it freed me." Mariangela brought us the structure of encounter, belonging to the larger family of Faith and Light, community songs. But above all, she brought an experience of a depth of sharing and honesty we had not known anywhere else. For many, that was the reason to stay in the community. For some, it was reason to leave right away. Yesterday we began preparing to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Faith and Light in Russia.
The national council asked everyone's opinion on whom to invite to speak. Many responses began with a reproach: "How many times have we told you to invite Mariangela!" Twenty-one years have passed, but everyone who remembers still appeals to what Mariangela said back then. In a way, she laid the foundation on which we built our communities. Perhaps that is why our life in Faith and Light so closely resembles that of the Italian communities, yet is so different from those elsewhere.
A year later, Mariangela invited a delegation from Moscow to join a pilgrimage to Assisi for the twentieth anniversary of Faith and Light in Italy in 1995. The undertaking was so audacious that its success made us all believe in miracles. First of all, there was no money here at the time.
None at all. Three thousand dollars for plane tickets seemed such an astronomically dangerous sum that we didn't dare exchange it all at one bank. We went to many, changing it in small portions. My Latin professor brought the money from Italy, hidden in the crutches he walked on. Mariangela promised him she would pray during the flight.
Then we were denied visas on suspicion of smuggling. Mariangela organized a bombardment of phone calls to the consulate from every bishop she knew. We were supposed to leave on Holy Friday (Orthodox calendar). Wednesday morning she called me: "The Lord does everything in His own time." That afternoon we had our visas. In one day we bought tickets, did everything, and Friday morning we arrived in Rome.
All ten of us slept and ate at Mariangela's house. She despaired over our arriving two hours late while she had cooked risotto that had turned to mush by then. She sighed when we found a strike notice at the bus stop in the morning and called her friends to drive us into the city. I look at the photo of the long table at her house—she is talking, and you see interest and communion in the weaving of all our eyes. It is one of the moments of paradise I have lived.
Now a third of those who sat at that table have passed beyond, to encounter the new gathering. As we were leaving, I said to her: "You see, there was a miracle." "It was all as it should have been," she answered, because witnessing the miracle was her gift.
Olga Gurevitch, 2014
Excerpt from the editorial of Ombre e Luci no. 5, 1984
In our churches we see few people with handicaps. Why don't they come forward? Why don't they come on their own? It is true that the church door is open to all. But for them to come and take part in the "celebration" to which Jesus has invited everyone, someone must go and find them, help them understand that they are expected, that in fact—we say it so often and so well—the first place is for them.
The truth is something else, sadly: many of them and their parents stand outside because that open door says nothing more to those who have lost the sense of "celebration."
(...) What caused the break is the open wound in our hearts as mothers and fathers, which cries out in silence, in fear, in desperation—and finds no answer. Jesus gave that answer to our brothers and sisters: "Do this in memory of me." "Whatever you did for the least of these..." Here, then, is something we can all do together. Some have already started on this path and know well how easy it is to come to know one another, to share, to hold hands, and then to celebrate together. Because if we parents need friends to meet the Lord again, how much more do our friends need to meet the gaze of our handicapped children in order to rediscover the gaze of God. That answer then, without which we are disconsolate, we will seek together, because only when we are all together—and no one is left outside—will it be possible to build the true Church and ensure that the one sent "to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor" (Luke 4:18) was not sent in vain.
Mariangela Bertolini, 1984