Fabio Ciardi O.M.I. shares his personal reflections on this year’s anniversary of the 16th of July 1949
A full page of Avvenire (Italian National Catholic Newspaper) was dedicated to 16th July 1949, which was celebrated in Fiera di Primiero with the local council’s presentation of the international “Tonadico, City of the Pact” award to Gerhard Pross, a founder of “Together for Europe”. This Focolare family celebration is marked throughout the world. Once again we tell the story of that strong, indestructible bond through which Jesus in the Eucharist united Chiara and Foco (Igino Giordani) forever and immediately afterwards the first women focolarini, and then many others, in a cascade, extending that pact throughout the whole world.
The Avvenire page, written by Italian journalist Carla Cotignoli, features at its centre a most beautiful photograph of Chiara, the same one I chose for the cover of my book Lacrime e Stelle (Tears and Stars). It portrays her looking radiant, at Baita Segantini, with the Pale di San Martino mountains behind her. It is a luminous photograph, taken in 1951, which expresses the light of those summers of Paradise that continued from July 1949 to October 1951. And it is a “choral” photograph, with Chiara surrounded by her first companions, almost confirming that this experience was not that of an isolated mystic, but of an entire group of which we too, if we wish, can become part.
I celebrated the anniversary at Loppiano, where I had been invited to speak. It was beautiful to recall the first Mariapolis in the first “permanent Mariapolis”, which keeps alive the legacy of the beginnings. Before me was a varied audience, from witnesses of the early days to young people who knew nothing about 1949 and families from the four corners of the world, requiring six simultaneous translations.
Why tell family stories? Because it is the most beautiful way to strengthen the unity of a family. Like when my mother told us about the time my father went to see her father to ask for her hand in marriage. “We cannot give her a dowry,” my grandfather said, as his family was very modest. “But I don’t want a dowry; I want Rosanna,” my father replied. And my mother confided to us the quiet joy she felt on hearing those words!
Why begin with a family story? To recall the value of family stories, but above all to introduce the subject of the “dowry”, a word and a theme unknown to most young people. So I told the story of a marriage, of the “mystical wedding” in which the Word married the Soul, with a capital “S”, because it was not a single “soul”, but a “company” of souls! It did not take place on 16 July, but the following day… Yes, on that day, 17th July 1949, the Word married the Soul in a mystical wedding, just as has happened many times throughout the history of the Church; only this time the bride is the Church, the unity of many souls.
And then, as was customary in the past, the honeymoon begins. We know the expression “travelling Paradise”. I have written a book about it! One does not travel “in” Paradise, but “travels Paradise”, that is, one enters into and lives every reality present within it, allowing oneself to be transformed by it. Well, this journey is a “honeymoon”. Chiara has the impression of being led into the realities of Heaven by the Bridegroom, who shows her, as his bride, what now belongs to her, enabling her to see Paradise through his own eyes.
“My sweetest Bridegroom,” we hear her exclaim, “Heaven is too beautiful and You, like a divine Lover, after the Mystical Wedding… show me your possessions, which are mine.” For months, the Bridegroom showed the bride what now belonged to her; he enabled her to see Paradise through his own eyes. The bride, she writes, “loves, sees and desires what the Bridegroom loves, sees and desires.”
But there is, of course, also the famous dowry! What does the Bridegroom bring as a dowry to the bride? Nothing less than “all of Paradise”. He shows it to her and gives it to her. But the bride, too, must bring a dowry to her Bridegroom. And he has his demands! He requires nothing less than all of creation as his dowry. It is an invitation to enter the worlds of work, politics, social life and family life, and to take them fully into our everyday reality.
A mysticism that is not vague, ethereal or all about Heaven… a mysticism that enters into the realities of the earth, embraces them and transforms them.
I look once again at that radiant photograph from 1951, and it seems to me that I can see Heaven transferred to earth.
Fr Fabio Ciardi O.M.I.
Source: fabiociardi.blogspot.com
English version first published on the Focolare Ireland website:
https://focolareireland.org/2026/07/22/fr-fabios-reflections-on-this-years-16th-july/
