In his book, Desire of the Everlasting Hills, The World Before and After Jesus, historian Thomas Cahill tells the story of The Community of Sant Egidio. For Cahill, the worldwide movement of Sant Egidio provided a living capstone to his book on the legacy of Jesus.
A group of Roman high school students founded the community in 1968 to do something revolutionary, something that would have a permanent effect, not something that would vanish without a trace. They wished to live in Rome as the early Christians had lived there. By 1998, there were 10,000 members in Italy and 10,000 more outside Italy. Today it is a movement of lay people and has more than 50,000 members, dedicated to evangelization and charity, in Rome, Italy and in more than 70 countries throughout the world.
According to their website, The Community of Sant’Egidio is a “Church public lay association“. The different communities, spread throughout the world, share the same spirituality and principles which characterize the way of Sant’Egidio:
- Prayer, which is an essential part of the life of the community in Rome and communities throughout the world. Prayer is central to the overall direction of community life.
- Communicating the Gospel, the heart of the life of the Community, which extends to all those who seek and ask for a meaning for their life.
- Solidarity with the poor, lived as a voluntary and free service, in the evangelical spirit of a Church that is the “Church for all and particularly the poor” (Pope John XXIII)
- Ecumenism, lived as a friendship, prayer and search for unity among Christians of the whole world.
- Dialogue, recommended by Vatican II as a way of peace and co-operation among the religions, and also a way of life and as a means of resolving conflicts.
Cahill writes the following: (bold and italics are mine).
They have only one slogan The Gospel and Freedom.
Though they gather to read the Gospel and pray together in small communities throughout the world, usually several nights each week, no member is obliged to attend anything. [Each night, the original community] is filled to capacity, often to bursting. The prayer is the most beautiful I have ever heard, modeled on the sonorous chant of the Russian church and sung from the gut with reverence and feeling. There is a quiet but pervasive sense of community; and following the half-hour service, people linger in the piazza outside to renew friendship and go off in small groups to dine together.
Friendship is a profound experience for these people: they are true friends to one another, and they wish to be friends to the world.
There are more than a hundred satellite communities in and around Rome…
Each night
- fifteen hundred homeless people are fed, not on soup lines but at sit-down dinners, served with style and graciousness
- The [Sant’Egidio] community runs three refuges for old people, two AIDS hospices, and a home for abused and abandoned children
- There are free language programs for immigrants, outreach programs for gypsies, and biweekly visits to prisoners, all organized by Sant’Egidio
Several years ago, members of the community, believing they had a Gospel mandate to act as peacemakers, undertook a series of quiet, amateur efforts and succeeded in arranging a peace in Mozambique between the guerrillas and the government (after sixteen years of war and one million casualties). The peace has held, as has a similar peace that the community has helped achieve in Guatemala.
In this new mission of peace, the community has at its disposal only its own part-time volunteers (almost no one at Sant’Egidio is salaried) and what it calls the weak strength of the Gospel.(Submitted by Marrty Dormish)