March 26,
2001
Andrea Riccardi,
Sant'Egidio Community founder,
to receive Notre Dame Award
The Notre Dame Award for international humanitarian service will be given to Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Community of Sant'Egidio. Riccardi will receive the award at a ceremony on campus March 27 (Tues.).
"Andrea Riccardi and his companions are truly evangelists of deed," said Notre Dame's president, Rev. Edward A. Malloy, C.S.C., in announcing the award. "He and they preach the Gospel by living it, and by living it, they soften hearts the world had known to be hardened, resolve quarrels the world had known to be intractable, and win friends the world had known to be enemies. We are privileged to honor their witness."
Riccardi is a professor of contemporary history at the Third University of Studies in Rome, where he teaches courses in modern church history. He also has taught at the Sapienza University and the University of Bari. He specializes in relationships among the world's religions and has written or edited several books, including "French Catholicism, Neo-Gallicanism and Bourgeois Catholicism"; "Rome From the Conciliation to the Sturzo Operation"; "The Roman Party after World War II"; "The Power of the Pope from Pius XII to John Paul II"; "The Mediterranean of the 20th Century"; "The Mediterranean: Christianity and Islam Between Cohabitation and Conflict"; and "A Century of Blood and Faith: Christians in the 20th Century."
Riccardi is internationally known as the founder of the Sant'Egidio Community, whose mediation was instrumental in the 1992 agreement which brought a fragile peace to Mozambique after 16 years of civil war. The community, begun in 1968 by Riccardi and a few of his classmates from Rome's Virgilio High School, today has 40,000 members in 60 countries on four continents. Opposed to all forms of violence, whether legal or illegal, Sant'Egidio members have attempted to mediate and resolve conflicts in Albania, Angola, Guatemala, Kosovo, Lebanon, Somalia and, most recently, in Burundi. The community also has been active in recent international efforts to abolish capital punishment, gathering 2.7 million of the 3.2 million signatures on a petition to that end which recently was presented to Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations. The Sant'Egidio Community has received numerous awards for its witness and accomplishments and was a candidate for the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize.
The Sant'Egidio ("St. Giles" in English) Community is named for the Carmelite convent in Rome's Trastevere neighborhood where Riccardi and his friends first began to gather to pray, run a soup kitchen, and tutor the children of the neighborhood's poor people. Among their inspirations was Pope John XXIII's insistence that the Catholic Church is "for everyone, especially the poor." The community's soup kitchen, widely believed to be Rome's best and sometimes compared to an elegant restaurant, today serves some 1,500 guests every day. The community also is active in ministry to old people, developmentally disabled people and people with AIDS.
Every evening, members of the Sant'Egidio Community gather for vespers in Trastevere's Basilica of Santa Maria, drawing large crowds of young people. Since 1986, when Pope John Paul II convened the first Day of Prayer for World Peace in Assisi, the community has sponsored similar ecumenical meetings annually at various European sites.
The Notre Dame Award was established in 1992, in celebration of the University's Sesquicentennial, to honor persons "within and without the Catholic Church, citizens of every nation, whose religious faith has quickened learning, whose learning has engendered deeds, and whose deeds give witness to God's kingdom among us." The award has been given previously to Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter; Mother Theresa of Calcutta; Jean Vanier, founder of the international l'Arche communities for the mentally handicapped; Helen Suzman, South African anti-apartheid politician; John Hume, peace advocate and leader of Northern Ireland's Social Democratic and Labour Party; Brother Roger, founder and prior of the ecumenical Taiz� Community in France; Cardinal Vinco Puljic, archbishop of Sarajevo; and civil rights activist Rev. Leon Sullivan.
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