For Some Windows
Author: Philippe Vaillancourt
Date : July 25, 2020

(Quebec City, Qc) - Even today I find myself humming Monde à l'envers, that old Gen Rosso hit. It seems to me that the programmatic lyrics of the song are still relevant despite the passing years. Changing the system and dreaming of an "altra umanità" (other humanity), to use the title of the original Italian version, "the heart without borders", is something that can be supported.

I am one of those children who was practically born into the Movement - as was my wife. The FamilyFest of 1993 and the Supercongress of 1997, in Rome, summarize the essential part of my international experience of the Movement. For the rest, I have a very Canadian experience, between the Mariapolis of Kingston, Ontario, then of Bromptonville, near Sherbrooke, and occasional days here and there. I avoid the Collegamento and pay little attention to what is being done elsewhere, believing that the challenge of cultural anchoring is still present here.

The centenary of Chiara Lubich's birth is an opportunity to take stock of the state of the Movement she launched, to situate it in history and in our own history, personal and social.

A visionary Movement, it was the forerunner in the 1940s of the spiritual currents, carried by lay people, that would be so important for the post-conciliar Church. Its international character places it in the right line of a Roman Catholicism in full expansion, between missions and globetrotting popes.

Born the same year as John Paul II, Chiara was, like him, deeply marked by the experience of war. Their Christology shares a common concern for peace, the blossoming of families and fraternity integrated into the life of nations. And if this is generally manifested in joy, it is no less true that suffering occupies a large place in their theology.

The twentieth century is not the only one to suffer, far from it. But it industrialized it and subjected it to forces that, all too often, reduced the human being to a mere resource like any other in unprecedented experiences of massification and anonymization. However, Chiara evokes a "new man", taking up one of the key injunctions of a century in search of meaning.

Today, the movement cannot escape the difficulty of surviving its founder, an experience common to all religious foundations built around a strong charism. For Quebecers, this challenge is coupled with that of the future of the Church, invited to take a "missionary turn". More than an administrative and organizational challenge, in both cases it is a question of responding to the questions of meaning of our contemporaries in a language - be careful, not just a vocabulary! - that is clear and frank.

Unity and reflection on suffering, based on the abandoned Jesus, which are the two main features of the spirituality proposed by the Focolare, may hold the key to the future of Christianity in a country like ours. Why? Because they constitute a valid and graspable entry point to speak of resurrection.

Neither the Church nor the Christian faith exist for themselves: they exist as long as the resurrection continues to be articulated in a cosmology acceptable to our societies. However, what was for a long time a cultural achievement is no longer so. The resurrection has ceased to be self-evident and requires a sustained effort to offer itself as an answer, sometimes soothing, sometimes disturbing, to the questions of meaning that are always there.

Rather than being confined to an over-spiritualized theory, or wallowing in the nostalgic comfort of the certainties of yesteryear, the spirituality of Chiara Lubich, centered on the relational, allows us to see an astonishing actualization of many of the words of the Gospel on the coming of the Kingdom, since it goes before the present world. It opens windows and dares to bring elements of response to the questions that lodge in the heart of each person.

It is thanks to the fresh air coming in through these windows that I remain a Catholic, at ease in a post-Christian world, confident that - as the song says - "hope is on the way".

—30—

Reflection offered on the occasion of the Centenary in 2020 of Chiara Lubich, founder of the Focolare Movement.