After nine years, at the end of May I completed my two terms as coordinator of the Mari e Vulcani province, which brings together the Fede e Luce communities of southern Italy (we are present in Puglia, Campania and Sicily). It was 9 years rather than 8, as our movement's rules would normally require, because the pandemic got in the way. So I've chosen to tell the story of these nine years through three moments of crisis.
The first, of course, was Covid. Managing that crisis truly made me feel, first-hand, how important it is to work together: together with the coordinators of the other provinces, and also – in this case I would say especially – together with the board of directors of Fede e Luce. We tried to stay #CloseAtADistance (remember that hashtag?), using shared tools. For the sake of brevity, I won't list them all. But that crisis, which caused enormous losses and grief in our communities – made up of people who are often fragile in health too – left us with two things. On one hand, the awareness of how resilient our bonds with the people closest to us really are. On the other, the sense of a movement that, precisely because it is spread across the whole world, lives and is nourished not by physical closeness but by closeness of heart. Anyone who has taken part, even just once, in an international gathering comes home saying to themselves and to others: «We were so different, and so alike!»
The second crisis was the posthumous inquiry into Jean Vanier and the accusations of sexual abuse he committed. A shock that will never fade. And precisely because we know it will never fade, that shock forced us to rethink, down to the deepest roots, the origins of our charism and our movement. Those events dragged us – through anguished phone calls and furious arguments – back to a basic truth of faith: we are instruments in the hands of God. The value of the work God accomplishes only partly reveals the value of the instruments themselves. Of course, a surgical operation succeeds thanks in part to a modern, efficient scalpel, but without the surgeon's brain and hand that scalpel is useless. Fede e Luce is not the work of one man or one woman, but an idea of the Spirit that today walks on the legs of thousands of people around the world.
The third crisis concerns the Mari e Vulcani province directly. In early December of last year, tragedy struck the community of Corleone, in Sicily, a tragedy involving Lucia Pecoraro and her daughter Giuseppina. We had met them both during the Pompei pilgrimage in September 2025, and that was probably the last peaceful moment of Lucia's life. Then the loss of her husband and the prospect of Giuseppina's illness, with the growing difficulty of caring for her, took away all hope, leading to the terrible outcome of a murder-suicide. This tragedy, whose gravity hardly needs underlining, opened up a deep debate within Fede e Luce. That family was not neglected, nor was it abandoned. The community coordinator was even a close relative of the victims. So this is not a «tragedy of isolation», as one might hastily assume. The real issue is that our communities are aging. And while, when Fede e Luce was founded, the isolation of people with disabilities was due to social stigma – a stigma we fought against for fifty years, successfully – today it is increasingly due to the loneliness of caregivers. And perhaps this is the horizon within which Fede e Luce will build its future.
In conclusion, take heart! If I have chosen to speak of the difficult moments rather than the many celebrations, the friends found again, and the new ones discovered over these nine years, it is because in all these situations – delicate, to say the least – we first experienced disorientation, then the drive to respond that comes from being a community, and finally the decisive help of the comforting Spirit in whom we believe.