28/10/2000

A Christian community that embraces life's outsiders

It is dusk in the piazza in Trastevere and people are gathering. The waiters clear outdoor tables and roll back awnings. On a loudspeaker system there is music from Schindler's List.

Gypsies wander through the crowd; a pretty, pregnant young woman with a baby in her arms is begging. The evening is warm and on the basilica side of the piazza a middle-aged man commands his household of plastic bags. He will sleep there tonight, he says. Tomorrow, who knows?

Trastevere, he tells me, was once the place where outsiders holed up, those not deemed to be Roman. So Jews and later Christians lived there, outside ancient Rome's Aurelian Wall, then artists, dancers and bohemians. Now that the margins have acquired a gloss, the rich from across the Tiber are moving in and the poor must move on.

The crowd is large now, 10,000. The music stops. "Cari amici", says a speaker. Dear friends, we are here to remember a day of shame, October 16, 1943, when German troops used Fascist address lists to round up 1022 Roman Jews. When they got to Auschwitz all but 183 were sent straight to the gas chambers. Only four of these Romans came back. One of them, says my neighbor, is that old woman sitting over there. The speaker finishes: we must remember this day, to transmit to the next generations the conviction that such a thing must never happen again.

People in the crowd have lit candles and we begin to walk. We are tracing in reverse the route of the betrayed. People speak softly, in many languages. Roman traffic stops to let us by. We cross the river and walk by the synagogue, where Jewish children sing and Rome's second rabbi speaks, then the vice-president of the Council of the Italian State. They call for a national day of remembrance and speak of solidarity. There is a great buzz as the speeches end. The survivor is surrounded. Ciao! Ciao! People press upon her. Yes, she was screaming and crying, she says - she was just a little girl. Ciao! Ciao! The manifestazione is over.

A day or two later I go back to Trastevere. The Basilica is quiet inside; the mosaics glow, the pews are full. Singing begins, long and low Byzantine style, now together, now alternating men and women. I am offered headphones for simultaneous translation. There is an explosion of talk and laughter, then it's over.

Around from the piazza is the little square of St Giles, or Sant'Egidio. Curling away from a corner is a Renaissance convent, with whitewashed walls and dark woods, echoey floors and internal courtyards. This is the home of the Community of Sant'Egidio, whose members I had met on the march and in the basilica.

The community is a movement, part of a church of proliferating movements, many born or fostered in Italy and exported. In the early '70s a group of students came here to Trastevere. They wanted to hold to the "red line" of "faithfulness to the Gospel and the profound desire of living as Jesus had lived". They had been high school students in 1968, 10 friends infected with the prevailing belief in change. It wasn't enough to cry "unjust!"; they had to be different themselves and the Gospels had clear words for this.

At the edge of their middle-class vision was Pasolini's Rome of shanty towns and hovels, and after school they headed there on their Vespas. Faced with huge problems of sanitation, housing and education, they began to work out their ideas about the need for a different church, one present among the poor.

Every day they prayed together. They ran schools, built houses, washed lousy children, fed people. They demonstrated, put pressure on politicians, got hauled home by irate parents. They went to university, did military service, took jobs, married, but they kept meeting, praying, reflecting on Scripture and their experiences, and working with the poor. Their community grew. Piazza Sant'Egidio became a meeting place.

At some point they decided to pray in public: they opened the door of the church. It is possible, they say, to lead ordinary lives, to live in the full range of relationships, have jobs and professions, and be this kind of Christian.

It's hard to see the edges of the Community of Sant'Egidio, in part because they are blurred by a growing category of "friends", but also because there are no real walls. To become a member you find yourself at home in a certain spirituality and you are accepted. There are 30,000 now, with no shortage of men or young people, the two groups least represented in Western European churches on Sunday mornings. There are communities spread throughout Italy and the rest of Europe, including Eastern Europe, and in various African countries. Indonesia has three Sant'Egidio communities and over the years President Abdurrahman Wahid has attended meetings at the Rome headquarters.

IN ITALY the community is famous, not just for the obvious works of charity: feeding thousands, caring for AIDS patients, looking after the elderly, educating gypsy children and and so on, but for the edge they bring to this. You can sum it up in the word solidarity. They have learnt how to "stand with the poor", including in activism.

A great deal of talking must go on in the community itself because there are no obvious signs of splits or leadership struggles, and there is no bureaucracy. They talk with other church movements, even those suspicious of them, drawing them in, for example, to support their campaign against the death penalty that sees the Colosseum lit up for a week every time a death penalty is commuted.

They have had a lot of practice talking to killers. Years of learning techniques of solidarity led them in the 1980s to the 14-year war in Mozambique in which a million people had died and two million had been made refugees. Rhodesian and then South African-backed Renamo rebels were razing the country in an effort to oust the moderate Marxist Frelimo government.

The Community of Sant'Egidio knew its food aid was not getting past the cities and that only peace would make that happen. They persuaded the rebel leaders and the government to come to Sant'Egidio, invited them to sit in the old convent dining-room, Renamo on one side, Frelimo on the other.

In between, near the door leading into the kitchen, sat the Sant'Egidio people. It took two-and-a-half years of meetings like this. The Italian Government gave support, as did the British entrepreneur "Tiny" Rowland who assuaged the Renamo leader with shopping trips and flights in his private jet. But the community held the talks that helped to end the war, in October, 1992. There are 1000 members of the community in Mozambique and the peace holds.

The community also advocates for the stream of refugees from Albania and countries of the old Soviet bloc, from Africa and the subcontinent. Italy can take a lot more refugees, says the community, and it is not true immigrants take work from Italians.

"I think the presence of foreigners, of immigrants, who are bringing their bits and pieces of culture can help," says Claudio Mario Betti, a community leader.

"Cultures that receive new life survive," he says.

How do you explain this freedom of spirit? Rome must have something to do with it, if you see Rome through a long lens as an ancient cosmopolitan crossroads. Early on, the community's leader, Andrea Riccardi, was struck, he says, by a line in a Godard film: "You have to move from existence to history". History, he was told by the theologian, Yves Congar, creates a profound sensitivity to reality. History teaches complexity. The church itself is a reality based on memory and therefore on history. Less ideology, more history, that's the way, Riccardi says.

You can understand then how daily reading of Scripture illuminates the problems the community confronts. The Bible is a history. To read it is, in Riccardi's terms, to restore reality and complexity. Scripture gives reality to all-too-easily simplified community experiences with "the poor", "the homeless", "the working class", "the Muslims", "the church". In meeting for prayer each evening, says Riccardi, the community is protected from ideology. "It's a source of hope and love. We live strongly the sense of the gift of the day of the Lord."

Margaret Coffey