Jean meant so much to me. Really, so much. He was like a spiritual father to me." I'm at the Luna Park in Ostia, a place I'd crossed paths with many times but never truly seen until now. I came here for the first time because of Jean. This is where one of his closest friends lives: Geneviève Jeanningros. She's French, and like Jean, she has deep blue eyes that light up whenever she smiles. And fortunately, this Little Sister of Jesus smiles often.
After celebrating fifty years of religious vows in 2018, Sister Geneviève toasted another milestone last Easter: half a century spent living among circus and carnival artists across France, Switzerland, and finally Italy. Today she works and lives at the Luna Park in Ostia with two other sisters—Anna Amelia (the first carnival nun in Italy!) and Emma—alongside twelve families in small houses, caravans, and trailers.
"I met Jean many years ago," Geneviève tells me, "before the Chicco community—the Arca in Ciampino—was even founded. When he came to Rome, Jean would visit our mother house at Tre Fontane and speak with us. What he said enchanted me because it was the Gospel, it was simple, it was the love of Jesus, the love of the little ones. I spoke with him several times, and when I went through a difficult period, Sister Madeleine, our foundress, told me: 'Go to Jean at Trosly, he will help you.' I went, and I stayed a month at the Hermitage community." Gentleness and firmness both: "Jean was full of tenderness, but at the same time he told me things clearly. Yet he suggested things to me; he didn't want to impose them. After that, I made it a habit to go every year in November for a retreat with Jean. We'd close down for those weeks, and I'd take the chance to spend time with my family and do an eight-day retreat at Trosly. Then we moved here. We didn't close anymore, my parents had passed away by then, and I stopped going. But in October a letter arrived from Jean saying he wanted to see me again. So I decided I'd come in January, but in the meantime he was hospitalized."
A friendship only makes sense if it's mutual. Just as Sister Geneviève traveled to Trosly, Jean came to the Luna Park. That he was truly a friend to the carnival families is confirmed by Felice, a man I meet while sitting with the sisters. "We have a beautiful memory of Jean," he tells me. "In a sense, we lived alongside him. He was an exceptional person who radiated goodness. Yes, there were language barriers, but there were never any problems with communication—things just came through! When I close my eyes, I can still see that gentle giant in front of me."
As we talk, Geneviève shows me the caravan where she lives: it's clean, simple, welcoming. I'm moved often by people, rarely by places, but when I step into the most intimate part of her caravan, my eyes fill with tears. It's the chapel with the Blessed Sacrament. "For us it is the center. It is Jesus." If there is a beautiful Church, if there are beautiful people, it is also thanks to places like this. A small chapel that reminds me very much of the little church at Trosly. And standing before this tabernacle, I realize how many points of contact there are between the Little Sisters and the Arca. "It's true," Sister Geneviève says, "because the spirituality is the same: the spirituality is Nazareth. That's why the meeting with Jean was so natural! And in many countries, the sisters have helped the Arca start new houses. Since we were more embedded in the community, we could open the way. At Jean's funeral, for example, I went with a sister who had helped found the Arca in the Philippines."
But Sister Geneviève had sensed the Arca even before she knew its founder. "It was 1968, I was finishing my novitiate when I heard that some assistants of the Arca, who were very exhausted, were looking for a place to rest. Since the parish house in my native village had been empty since the last priest left, I asked the mayor and arranged it." Besides, Geneviève had already encountered difficulty in her own family. "My mother was paralyzed by illness for sixteen years. I was four and a half when she could no longer get out of bed. Perhaps that also made it easier for me to feel close to the Arca."
The points of contact between the Arca and the Little Sisters are many. "Because the spirituality is the same—the spirituality is Nazareth."
The points of contact between the Arca and the Little Sisters are many. "Because the spirituality is the same—the spirituality is Nazareth."
I venture a thought, suggesting to her that such a "predisposition" might have been inherited from her aunt, Léonie Duquet. Léonie was a professed member of the Sisters of Foreign Missions Notre-Dame de la Motte and arrived in 1949 among the poor of Buenos Aires. Less than thirty years later, between December 8 and 10, 1977, she disappeared along with her sister in community Alice Domon and other women, taken by agents of the regime. Sister Léonie, then sixty-one, became one of approximately thirty thousand desaparecidos—kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in Argentina between the late seventies and eighties. The two nuns were also the caregivers of a boy with Down syndrome, whose father is grimly famous: General Videla. This story of a man who murdered an staggering number of people yet showed no mercy even to those close to his own son has always struck me. Sister Geneviève gives me one of her deep, luminous smiles before speaking. "In truth, I learned that when the two sisters were captured, Videla was very upset. He would have wanted to release them, but they had been tortured too badly, and it was clear they would talk afterward. So it was too late." Is she telling me Videla was less evil than I think? "A little less evil," says the niece of one of the victims.
Her connection to Argentina brings us back to another visitor who came to see Geneviève at the Luna Park. It was May 3, 2015, when Bergoglio, during a visit to Ostia, made an unexpected stop to see friends among the carnival families. "Pope Francis reminds me so much of Jean," Sister Geneviève exclaims. "I think their message is the same: this closeness to people who are cast aside, to those set apart. This fascinated me in Jean, and it fascinates me in Pope Francis: the love of Jesus made concrete. Because Jesus is in the Eucharist—and Jean prayed so much—but he is also in the poor person, in the refugee, in the person with disability, in the carnival artist."
After all, Jean's entire life was an attempt to tear down walls—those genetic, political, religious, and racial walls we erect against those we do not know and who therefore frighten us. "Jean was always ahead of his time. I think of ecumenism, for example: a person with a disability can be Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Orthodox, but first and foremost they are a person. Jean saw people."
Jean often told me he would have many questions for God when they met. According to you, what was the first? "Surely this: why the suffering of the innocent? Of children? It's a question with no answer. When a child suffers, when a child dies, I think God cries."
Meanwhile my son runs toward me. This morning we were at the funeral of Paolo Bertolini, husband of Mariangela, the founder of Faith and Light in Italy. This afternoon we've spent it here among the carnival families of Ostia. Sister Anna Amelia gives my son one of the prize bags from their fishing game—the theme is Noah's Ark. Among other things, Glauco pulls out a little necklace and immediately puts it around my neck. He smiles, together with the Little Sisters of Luna Park. I look up, eyes wet with tears again, and thank Jean for this gift, one of so many.