Fifty Years of Pilgrimage

Pilgrimage has repeatedly opened doors to encounter and deepened relationships with others. You will find such stories throughout these pages and the next. One began with the pilgrimage from which, unexpectedly, Fede e Luce was born, as Nanni Bertolini recalls. At Easter 1971, thousands arrived at Lourdes—about twelve thousand people, four thousand of them disabled—and when the event ended, they insisted they wanted to continue, back home, the path of friendship they had begun together.
In 1975, communities from many countries converged on Rome for the Jubilee of Reconciliation, marking the birth of the Fede e Luce movement in Italy and, above all, the Church's formal recognition of persons with intellectual disabilities as belonging fully to its body. 2025 is a milestone year for Italian communities—their fiftieth anniversary, to be celebrated in Pompeii next September. We find ourselves in a new jubilee year, called to shift our centers of gravity, to break free from routine, and to give new shape and meaning to our time.
"Inviting Fede e Luce friends on pilgrimage seemed to some a bold gesture," Mariangela Bertolini wrote in 1978, preparing for the one to Assisi, the first national event of its kind. "The word itself, so rarely used anymore, calls to mind a 'demonstration' that feels out of fashion, no longer something for us." So what meaning is there in walking again? "To show through concrete action our will to move forward together on a path of faith, hope, and love… in response to a call that pushes us beyond ourselves to meet the Other, and to turn ourselves toward a new horizon, beyond the boundaries we had set on our hope." OL