"Through Fede e Luce, Sabina made friends for the first time in her life. Until then, she had known only family and professionals. She found people who loved her for who she was—a person with her own limits, her own needs, her own peculiarities. Sabina received her First Communion, began taking part in religious activities, and at eighteen was confirmed in her parish alongside girls her own age. Sabina's entry into the Christian community changed my husband and me as well. We too were converted. I came to know God through Fede e Luce." (Olga Gammarelli Burrows, 1986, from For All the Sabinas in the World, p. 55, Fede e Luce ed. 2015)
A small, deeply human parable. Thirty years later, it fills with living, concrete meaning everything I read now in the themes set for the coming Ecclesial Conference in Florence—"In Jesus Christ, the New Humanism"—themes drawn from the paths Pope Francis has shown us: go forth, proclaim, dwell, educate, transfigure. These are calls to the ecclesial community, to all of us, to each of us, to find new life in seeking and showing the face of Jesus. To seek and find it in whoever stands beside us—man or woman, child, elder, wounded, fragile, poor, rich—so that we become the "[...]Church 'in exodus': a community of missionary disciples who take the initiative, who involve themselves, who accompany, who bear fruit and celebrate.[...]" (Evangelii Gaudium, 24).
In Olga's story, it was Fede e Luce that embodied that Christian community. She herself became a witness—someone who sought Christ's face, capable of accompanying the spiritual formation of countless young people in her parish and in Fede e Luce, of supporting other parents.
The pilgrimage from Rome to Assisi, to which this issue is dedicated, and all that we have lived through these forty years in Italy, should keep alive in our hearts this gift, which we hope to go on receiving: to see the face of Christ, even through the faces of Olga and Sabina—and so many other parents, children, friends like them—so that we discover it, at last, in ourselves as well.