AN EVERYBODY CHANGES THE WOR-LD WITH THE SOLE STRENGTH OF HERDREAM AND BELIEF?Trento 1943. Chiara, a schoolteacher in her early twenties,experiences the comfort and despair generated by the bombing ofWorld War II. Amidst the rubble and devastation, everything seems tobe meaningless, everything collapses. But it is precisely in a shelter, bythe dim light of candles, that his search for meaning is finally fulfilledwhen, together with a few friends, he finds himself reading the Gospeland realises that therein lies the only ideal that does not collapse:God! “That all may be one” is the verse that most strikes Clare andthat becomes her life programme, scandalous and incomprehensibleto those who, exhausted by war, seek revenge before justice. Thosewords of Life read under the bombs become light in the darkness,hope in despair. So Chiara and her friends move in together, createa first focolare and begin to put those words into practice, helpingthe sick and needy, but above all loving anyone they meet on theirpath. Stubbornly seeking what unites and not what divides. More andmore people gathered around Clare, her became a movement, theFocolare Movement, but Clare’s radicalism and charisma began tobother. And not only because she is a woman. That “revolutionary”girl who shares everything with those in need and who reads theGospel without the presence of a priest, becomes so dangerous forthe society of the time that she is forced to give an account of herwork even to the Holy Office and to pass the most difficult test ofher life when she is asked to leave the leadership of the FocolareMovement. But the stone she has thrown into the pond is unstoppableand creates bigger and bigger circles, so that when, years later, PaulVI rehabilitates her, the Focolare Movement is now spread all overthe world, bringing everywhere the ideal of unity with the other as aprerequisite for dialogue and peace
