It's a September morning. Jean Vanier and I are sitting in a small sitting room at Santa Marta, the Vatican hotel that suddenly became famous after Francis chose it as his home. We catch up on what's happened since we last saw each other. One story—something we both know—darkens our eyes. And so, on these chairs so grand yet so simple, we find ourselves praying for Mariangela.
Grand and simple. Infinitely tender and granite-hard. This is the paradox that, in my eyes, tells the story of Mariangela Bertolini. True to who she was and to the legacy she left us, the first time I met Mariangela, she spoke through her actions. We were on a train, returning from Lourdes, from the last international pilgrimage that Fede e Luce ever held in its history. Easter 2001. I had joined the San Roberto community in Rome only a few years before, and those days—so rich, so full—had left me a tangle of conflicting emotions.
I don't remember what sparked it, but while I was talking with a mother from another community, a woman with white hair and clear eyes stepped into the conversation.
I was irritated at first. I had gone to Lourdes full of intellectual prejudice, convinced I would experience some sort of extended spring festival tinged with superstition. Instead, so many things had thrown me off balance. Beyond a clear and deep sense of peace, I couldn't make sense of anything I was feeling. Yet in just a few words—tender but also blunt—this unknown woman, whom I hadn't even noticed before, had managed to name and give voice to so many things. A mother? A friend? A relative? A community leader? Someone who could read my thoughts?
Once we got off the train, Vella told me: "She's the founder."
Over the years, Mariangela became for me an example of how to live out membership in Fede e Luce in daily life, with simple, unpretentious welcome. Maybe it was the way she was both friend and mother, both founder and woman of faith? I'm not sure. But I know this with certainty: our conversations—on the phone, in the car driving through Rome traffic, while waiting for her to be honored, in the margins of so many opening celebrations—gradually enriched my life. Because what Mariangela taught me, through her actions, is this: Fede e Luce sinks beneath your skin and changes, miraculously, the very tone of who you are forever.
A movement is like a plant. It becomes something far different from the seed, yet it owes everything to that seed. "Every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit; a good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.... Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them" (Matthew 7:17, 20). Mariangela Bertolini is all here, in this passage from the Gospel.
Giulia Galeotti, 2014