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History of the Movement1
The Focolare Movement is officially known as the Work of Mary, and since it is primarily a lay movement, it falls under the authority of the Congregation for the Laity. Its founder, Chiara Lubich,2 was born in Trent in 1920, the second of four children, into a close-knit family. Her mother was a devout daily Massgoing Catholic, her father, a socialist, uninterested in religion, but a man of principle, whose refusal to join the Fascist party lost him any chance of a regular job after the 1929 Depression.
In 1939, Chiara Lubich, then twenty-one, went on retreat with her Catholic Action group to Loreto. Every chance she got, she prayed in the Holy House of Loreto, meditating on the life of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. When she returned, she told her spiritual director she had found her direction in life. He asked was it to be a religious sister, or in marriage, or as a consecrated virgin living in the world. She answered that it was none of these vocations, but another way, inspired by the life of Mary at Nazareth: to be completely given to God; to live in a family; to live in the world. It was a 'fourth way' combining all of these vocations into one. This new vocation took concrete shape in 1943 in the middle of the Second World War. In her own words:
The real thunderbolt came when I was twenty-three years old, when this charism began to stir within me. I was teaching in a little orphanage and one day a priest came up to me and said: 'Young lady, could you give an hour of your time to God to help me in my ministry?' ... I had such faith in God and in the Church that I replied: 'You can have the whole day not just an hour.' He was surprised by this. He told me to kneel down and he said, 'God loves you immensely.' I was so deeply impressed by the thought of God loving me immensely that I told everyone: my friends, my mother, I wrote it in letters to my brother and my sisters. And that's how my first companions joined me. I'd say: 'Do you know...