The prophetic insight of Chiara Lubich : the word that is love

Abstract

Chiara Lubich possessed “an almost prophetic capacity to intuit and actualise beforehand ‘the thought of the Pope’.” These significant words of Benedict XVI appear in a letter, read out by the Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, at Chiara Lubich’s funeral Mass in 2008, following the Pope’s mention of her uninterrupted bond with his predecessors from John XXIII to John Paul II. Saint John Paul II, born in the same year as Chiara and whose papacy was the longest to run in parallel with her action as Founder and President of the Focolare Movement, would surely have agreed on several counts. In his 1984 visit to the International Centre of the Focolare in Rocca di Papa, he had put his finger on one example recognising “the radicalism of love of Chiara, of the Focolarini,” – a “Gospel radicalism of love” – as an answer to what had long been his concern for a hate-dominated world. He saw it as a source of renewal in the direction of the vision of Church outlined in the Vatican Constitutions Lumen gentium and Gaudium et spes. [excerpt]