Founded in 1903 to accompany the sick to Lourdes and other international shrines, Unitalsi has always sought out every avenue that allows people who suffer to live fully and encounter Christ the Redeemer.
This time the focus turned to floral art for the liturgy. The conviction was simple: this form of expression could help disabled people become more active participants in worship, leading them along the path of beauty—the via pulchritudinis—that Pope Francis referenced in his recent apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium.
The project brought together people with physical and mental disabilities from across Italy. They were invited to attend a residential course structured in three levels, each unfolding over four days. Every day, Unitalsi volunteers demonstrated the creation of a floral composition—starting with basic techniques and progressing to more complex arrangements. The work drew inspiration from Scripture, poetry, and literature. The project's title carries a double meaning: on one hand, the floral and plant material itself (the "buds"), and on the other, the participants—often labeled as differently abled—who drew inspiration from verse before beginning their own creations. After watching the demonstration, each person crafted a floral composition according to his or her own abilities.
Alongside the creative work, Unitalsi offered a foundation in botany, color theory, and liturgical principles, helping participants understand their creations and place them properly in the sacred space. Ceramic decoration accompanied the floral work, allowing people who found floral arrangement more difficult to participate through ceramics instead. The verses and liturgical texts that inspired the flower arrangements also inspired the ceramic designs.
The "Different Buds" project ran from September 3, 2012, through August 31, 2013. Seventy participants came from Unitalsi sections throughout Italy, divided into three working groups by region. The initiative rested on a conviction: that floral art has genuine therapeutic value, but also represents a professional opportunity for unemployed young people with disabilities, and a meaningful way for others—especially the elderly—to spend their time. Those who participated developed their manual and creative skills. They learned techniques they could teach to others. They acquired knowledge they could pass on.
Floral art offered participants the prospect of work with established businesses, the chance to start their own enterprises, or membership in the Cultural Association "Different Buds"—the project's culmination. On September 6, 2013, that association was formally established, with the goal of using the skills participants had gained in the workplace when possible. The creation of a cultural association had been part of the original project design, which was funded by the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy.
The association operates on a nonprofit basis. Its primary purpose is to promote cultural, artistic, and recreational activities, fostering the personal and social development of its members. "Different Buds" positions itself as a cultural presence—a source of ideas, projects, exchanges, and exhibitions in the fields of craftsmanship, theater, dance, music, floral art, ceramics, and the visual arts. It works in the social sphere to integrate people of different abilities.
What remains is to consider several dimensions of this project and grasp its deeper meaning—its connection to service for people with disabilities.
A Disabled Beauty? To participate in the liturgy is to encounter divine Beauty, a beauty that calls the faithful to recognize in it the traces of the Creator who shaped all things with such generosity (cf. Gen. 1:31). Yet how can we believe this when certain features are labeled as "flaws" against some standard notion of what is beautiful? The divine Beauty that every liturgy means to communicate comes straight from the authentic source—that mysterious and ineffable source that did not reject spittle, insults, and suffering. When it manifests itself, it often exposes the limits of our categories, showing them to be distorted and foolish. All creation participates in the liturgy; all creatures have a role. If floral art for the liturgy aims to open access to everyone, it cannot exclude the disabled. Far from diminishing or lowering the aesthetic, disability actually deepens the fullness of participation itself.
A Formative Beauty. Floral art for the liturgy does not merely chase technical perfection. Rather, it seeks to reflect the Word the Lord speaks in every celebration, evoking those "epiphanies of beauty" to which John Paul II referred in his Letter to Artists.
Floral art for the liturgy helps renew our commitment to answer the world's despair and broken trust with beauty. The disabled person is not a passive spectator watching others celebrate; his or her presence recalls the unremovable suffering that marks the face of Christ. The disabled brother or sister is an active subject—a full member of the body of Christ—and a protagonist in the contribution his or her condition allows (cf. Rom. 12:4–5). Floral art for the liturgy is by nature an openness to difference. It is a search for, appreciation of, and elevation of the many colors, forms, and scents that creation offers. It is a harmonious arrangement of the floral and plant material that nature gives in abundance.
A Healing Beauty. Scripture bears witness that the passage of "the fairest of the sons of men" (Ps. 44:3) through the folds of our history is an encounter that heals the wounds of soul and body. The Church, as a healing community, is the extension of his hand and the announcement of a beauty that, in giving itself, never runs dry. Floral art becomes therapeutic when it orients the faithful—the sick, the disabled, the suffering—toward a dimension of worship that speaks of the transience of their pain and gives them a foretaste of their pilgrimage's end. It points them toward Jesus, the Beauty that heals all things. It is therapeutic too when it awakens in the disabled brother or sister an awareness of creation itself—that manifold, varied nature so beloved by the Creator. That nature may raise questions and doubts at times, yet it always leads back to hope when it turns our gaze toward the One from whom all things come and toward whom all things tend (cf. Rev. 21:6).
Don Danilo Priori, 2014
National Ecclesiastical Assistant, Unitalsi