Through "Ombre e Luci" I met Mariangela 32 years ago. At first with some wariness—the same caution I felt toward Faith and Light itself.
A friend, Manuela Bartesaghi, full of boundless enthusiasm, had told me about Jean Vanier, the Arches, and Faith and Light's "communities of encounter"—built on friendship with handicapped young people and their parents. The idea struck me as charitable theater, a bit hypocritical. It seemed more honest to call it a good deed for the handicapped and their families living such difficult lives. But months later, when I first visited the newly formed Saint Francis community, I saw I was wrong.
When Manuela told me that someone named Mariangela, a guiding figure in Faith and Light, wanted to start a small magazine and needed help—printing being my trade—I went.
And so I began to know Mariangela, through editorial meetings, through the choice of themes, how we cut articles, the tone of headlines, which photographs to run. I heard her speak of Chicca, her daughter, severely disabled, dead not long before at fifteen. I heard her speak of other parents and their children bearing heavy disabilities. She knew from hard experience, not from reading or charitable sentiment, the grinding exhaustion and suffering of parents whose children carry mental disability (often physical too), the sorrow of seeing children marked as "ugly" and met with irritation and suspicion, the anguish over what will become of the child you love when you can no longer care, when you are gone. The rage of questions hurled at God.
"I have questions to ask God when I see Him," she would say.
That knowledge—profound, earned through suffering, shared—was the root of so many of her choices and her stubbornness. Often about headlines and photographs. For me, what mattered was impact: did they communicate with force, did they pull the reader in? Mariangela would add an uncompromising "only if." Only if the page didn't wound any parent or friend, didn't diminish their hope, didn't show as "ugly" someone marked by disability, amplifying the idea that disabled people themselves are ugly. To this she added (thankfully) a certain hardness, a disdain for the mawkish tone—the "treacly stuff," as she called it—she saw in pious little magazines and pious articles.
She always preferred texts and images that made parents feel less sorrowful, less discouraged, less victims of dark forces and false guilt. So came articles about institutes that improve the psychophysical condition of young people, accounts of genuine, welcoming communities, exposés of scientific research explaining the "limitations" of these children and finding ways to help them.
I don't recall articles about God's love for these young people and their parents. But there were stories of parishes and dioceses working to bring these children closer to the sacraments beyond baptism—something prohibited until just a few years before.
To communicate these things to parents, friends, priests and religious, to anyone willing to understand the human, scientific, and spiritual reality of people marked directly or indirectly by mental disability, Mariangela was the driving force of this small magazine for 32 years—born from faith, meant to give light, never to show off.
Sergio Sciascia, 2014