16/05/2008

Sant'Egidio at 40
Sant'Egidio: Linking friendship and service in world-changing ways

The Piazza of Santa Maria in Trastevere is about as picturesque as you�d expect of any Roman piazza. There�s a fountain in the middle, ringed by steps where Roman youth lounge and loiter. From inside the basilica that dominates the square, one can hear the teenagers outside, improbably singing Irish drinking songs to guitar accompaniment. And beneath the basilica�s outer columns, as in many parks, piazzas and train stations throughout Rome tonight, a beggar huddles in the still-chilly March evening, beseeching passersby for pity and euros.

Dusk here sees the recommencement of a 40-year-old ritual as hundreds of worshipers filter into the basilica to pray together. Every evening, members of a Catholic lay organization, the Community of Sant�Egidio, sing prayers in unison, praying for peace, for the poor, for the sick. For most of the service, no one officiates -- the congregation instead faces a Russian icon of Jesus� placid face.

Copies of this icon face community members worldwide, as versions of this scene play out on evenings in several languages in more than 70 countries. Community members -- now numbering roughly 50,000 -- range in age from the very young to the very old, and represent a wide range of professions among their ranks, including students, professors, physicians and journalists. They pair prayer with public service, spirituality with day jobs. None of them are paid for work they do on the community�s behalf; none pay membership dues. And yet members have marshaled resources from governments, philanthropic organizations and private individuals to broker peace accords in war-ravaged countries, pressure the United Nations to pass a worldwide moratorium on the death penalty, and run one of the most successful anti-AIDS programs in sub-Saharan Africa.

Armando Guebuza of Mozambique (now president) and rebel leader Raul Domingos shake on a peace pact in 1992Although several small chapters have sprung up around the United States in recent years, often based on or near college campuses, it is probably safe to say that most Catholics in the United States know little about the movement, if they have even heard of it. You would have to have been paying close attention to have noticed it mentioned in an editorial in The New York Times in December, giving the movement much credit for the United Nations moratorium on the death penalty, or to have counted the times (three) the organization has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, or to have connected Sant�Egidio to a 1992 peace pact ending a civil war in Mozambique that had raged for more than a decade, or to have noticed that Pope Benedict XVI paid a special visit to the community April 7 to commemorate its 40th anniversary.

Such worldwide influence was hardly the goal or even the wild utopian dream when a small clutch of high school students led by the 18-year-old Andrea Riccardi began meeting to pray and read the Gospel together in Rome in 1968. The membership numbered about four in the first few meetings; the students shared the not-that-modest goal of puzzling out what Jesus could possibly want from them. The answer they settled upon was service, and they began seeking out the poor -- not terribly difficult in Rome then or now -- to ask how to help. It was the early days after Vatican II. Public service and liberal politics were in the air, and as word spread through Roman high schools of this curious attempt to live spirituality and service simultaneously, the group gathered more young members. It wasn�t until five years later that they found a permanent place to pray in the abandoned Church of Sant�Egidio (Italian for St. Giles), from which they now take their name. By 1986, the Holy See had recognized them as an international public association of laypeople.

Seeing Rome with new eyes

In the intervening years, as the community�s numbers have soared worldwide, often to the surprise of its early members, local chapters have maintained the focus on the poor and the marginalized from which all of their other initiatives have grown. As the prayer concludes and the faithful exchange ciaos and dinner invitations and meander into the Mediterranean evening, many stop to greet and kiss a disheveled, cheerful woman -- a refugee from the breakup of Yugoslavia -- resting just outside the door.

Sr. Helen Prejean and Srgian Kerim, U.N. General Assembly president, and Mario Marazziti with a book containing millions of signatures from death penalty opponents worldwideIt was awareness of �a Third World outside our homes,� as community members describe it, that led the young Romans to the poor peripheries of their city to do what little they could. In the early days, this meant simply visiting and helping children with homework. Not earth-shattering stuff, to be sure, but facing the tragic challenge of worldwide poverty had to begin with a focus on the possible. �Our desire was to change the world, but our world was Rome, so first we had to change Rome,� Riccardi told TIME in 2003. Prayer and friendship, both with each other and with the poor, drove the group�s activities. Paola Piscitelli, who joined the community as a teenager in its early years, recalls that the simple act of acknowledging the poor meant seeing Rome �with new eyes.�

When Piscitelli moved to New York in 1992 to pursue a master�s degree, she brought this awareness with her, seeing her new city with the community�s eyes. By then, the community had seeped out of Italy to several European capitals and Africa, as members moved from Rome and started their own chapters or as visitors to Rome brought Sant�Egidio�s practices to groups of friends in their home countries. Spreading the community was simple, for there were friends to be had, prayers to be said, and service to be done all over the world. But the United States had yet to sprout its own Egidio outgrowth, and Piscitelli was looking for a place to help. She found it in a nursing home on the Lower East Side, where she and a few friends would, like the early members in Rome�s periphery, simply show up and stay awhile.

In 1999, a Boston College senior named Brian Lee visited a Sant�Egidio prayer session in New York and brought it back to school. The Boston community is now one of the largest in the United States, comprising dozens, though there are also chapters in a few other cities including Berkeley, Calif., Washington, D.C., and Minnesota�s Twin Cities. In contrast to the community�s thousands of members in Europe and Africa, community members in the United States number only in the hundreds, and the small chapters in many ways resemble the original Rome chapter in its infancy, as close-knit groups of students and professionals who pray and serve together, focusing on poor students and the elderly.

Kerri Marmol, who joined the Boston community in 1999 when she was a sophomore, had as a lifelong Catholic been attracted to the opportunities for public service at Boston College, but found them lacking in a spiritual element. There were prayer groups and service groups but there seemed no way to combine the two. When a friend, now her husband, told her about Sant�Egidio, she recalls thinking, �Of course!� She said the community�s philosophy and practice was �putting words to what my heart was already desiring for many years. � I was like, yep, that�s what I�ve been looking for all my life, let�s do it.�

In addition to praying together three times a week, the Boston College students began visiting the elderly in the low-income housing near school. The elderly are �a poor population that�s very hidden from our sight,� notes Marmol -- the isolated lives they often lead are practically invisible. In 2002, the Boston community expanded its mission as members began tutoring students in another poor neighborhood nearby, which is a practice many branches undertake worldwide in initiatives called �Schools of Peace.� On Saturdays, members would visit students to help with homework, though Marmol says that the focus �isn�t really the homework ... [it�s] the sense of how to help a child grow up well� whether in their school life, home life or social life. The Boston community hopes soon to begin introducing the older kids they tutor to service to the elderly. This for Marmol exemplifies the community�s gifts. �Who takes the time to take an inner-city kid to visit inner-city elderlies?�

Worldwide ministry

The community never intended to do much more than this -- ministering to the poor in their midst. �We had never decided to grow beyond Italy or even Rome,� recalls Mario Marazziti, a community spokesman and one of its early members. So how, spreading in such a haphazard way and focusing on what was locally possible, did the community end up in conflict resolution? How did they go from helping with homework in the Third World outside their homes to ending a civil war in the actual Third World? When did a comprehensive African AIDS treatment program and a moratorium on the death penalty become possible?

The initial answer you�ll typically get to all of these questions is �friendship.� Today, a third to half the community�s membership resides in Africa, and this presence, which inspired the group�s work in conflict resolution and AIDS treatment, can be traced back to a personal connection. It began when a Mozambican bishop, in Rome seeking counsel about the civil war raging at home, passed by the evening prayer in Rome�s Trastevere neighborhood and made contact with members, eventually going on to establish a community in Mozambique. When two members of the Mozambique community died in the civil war that had raged there since 1977, the Roman community stepped in. The result, after two years of negotiations, was a peace deal, signed in Rome in 1992. Sant�Egidio mediators have since done similar work toward peace in Burundi, Kosovo and Sudan. Writing in the Catholic publication Avvenire on the occasion of the Mozambique peace accords, founder Andrea Riccardi explained that the community had come to recognize peacemaking as yet another facet of caring for the poor. �Who is poorer than those who lack even peace?� he asked.

The community�s presence in Mozambique, meanwhile, alerted members to the tragedy of AIDS in Africa, and Sant�Egidio�s DREAM (Drug Resource Enhancement against AIDS and Malnutrition) program, launched in 2002, grew out of their concern. Marazziti recalls being appalled that millions of people were going without anti-retroviral treatment in Africa while international organizations focused on prevention to the exclusion of treatment. Sponsored by such organizations as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, and the United Nations World Food Program, DREAM has achieved some stunning successes, with 95 percent adherence to the anti-retroviral regimen among patients; 98 percent of children in the program born to HIV positive-mothers are born without HIV themselves, according to the community�s statistics. Mark Dybul, the U.S. Global AIDS coordinator in charge of the President�s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, has on numerous occasions consulted Sant�Egidio�s leaders for advice, and President Bush himself met with Sant�Egidio representatives in June 2007 to commend their work.

A Third World outside home

Other forays into what Riccardi has called �freelance� diplomacy and international activism have similarly begun with personal connections. At the helm of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty -- an organization stitched together in Rome in 2002 out of 48 other anti-death penalty organizations including nongovernmental organizations, local and municipal governments and religious organizations -- the community pressured the United Nations to vote on a moratorium on the death penalty, which passed last December on a 104-54 vote. But the project began with a single death row inmate, Dominique Green, who was incarcerated in Texas for murder (NCR, Oct. 15, 2004). Desperate for companionship, Green wrote an appeal that appeared in Italian newspapers, and a community member struck up a correspondence with him that lasted until his execution in 2004.

Over the intervening years, more community members began corresponding with death row inmates as consensus grew from within that the organization could and should work to stop the death penalty. In 1994 and again in 1999, European-led efforts to impose a worldwide moratorium on the death penalty stalled on accusations of neocolonialist meddling in other nations� sovereign laws. (Capital punishment is outlawed throughout the European Union.) The Sant�Egidio community�s response to this criticism was a petition that in the end held the signatures of 5 million people from 153 countries, demonstrating worldwide disgust with capital punishment. Meanwhile, through a community-promoted program called Cities for Life, public monuments in more than 700 cities in more than 56 countries are illuminated on Nov. 30 every year to commemorate the first statewide abolition of the death penalty in Tuscany in 1786. On these days, as well as whenever a country or state abolishes the death penalty on its own, the Colosseum lights up with a thumbs-up sign. This is not the American sign of approval, but the ancient Roman gesture a gladiator�s audience would display urging him to spare his opponent�s life.

Marazziti said he hopes that though the U.N. death penalty moratorium is nonbinding, it can provide room for countries to avoid imposing the death penalty when their laws make outright abolition difficult. In the meantime, several countries have taken steps on their own to banish the death penalty from their books, including Gabon, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Rwanda. And although the United States voted against the moratorium, New Jersey that week abolished the death penalty on its own.

Over coffee in a caf� not far from the church of Sant�Egidio, Marazziti admits he is relieved and tired. �It was like a dream,� he says of the moratorium�s passage. �You have been working on something for 10 or 15 years, and it happens.� As news spread, his Blackberry was inundated with calls and e-mails through which Marazziti said he could feel the happiness from all over the world. When it was over and the moratorium was passed, he thought he understood how Santa Claus must feel after delivering gifts all over the world. �He goes home, and he�s just tired.�

Meanwhile, Sant�Egidio -- the community in Rome and the movement worldwide -- continues to attract members, so much so that the organization�s original home, the Church of Sant�Egidio, can no longer accommodate the congregation that meets in Rome for evening prayer. It remains the international headquarters, the seat of much of members� diplomatic and mediation work, and a touchstone of the movement�s spirituality. Some members still use the space for personal prayer and reflection, perhaps because it houses important symbols of the community�s philosophy and work. One of these is a somewhat puzzling wooden crucifix lacking seemingly crucial elements -- a cross and Jesus� arms.

Community member Paolo Mancinelli, who joined in the 1970s at age 14, explains why another member rescued this discarded crucifix from a sacristy. It demonstrates, he says, that �we are called to be the arms of Jesus in the world.� In the lingo of Sant�Egidio, that means folding hands in prayer, extending them in friendship.

Kathy Gilsinan