When we met Giordani[1] in 1948, our Movement, which presented itself as a “renewed Christian community,” had seen a particular vocation stand out in its bosom: that of the focolarini, and there were male and female focolarini that constituted the heart, the soul of the community.

The encounter with Giordani matured a new composition of the Movement: the focolarine formed the female branch; the focolarini the male branch; and the people who benefited from the new spirit of the Focolare unfolded as a Movement: that is, a portion of humanity, of every vocation, age, called by God to compose with the focolarini this Movement. Giordani was the figure as well as the cause of this new aspect.

But in this same Movement in which all members were equally present, various other vocations soon took shape. The first was that of the so-called married focolarini, people who, though married, felt the attraction to perfection, to the focolare life, at least as far as it was possible for them, to bind themselves with vows or promises, on a par with the other focolarini, formulated according to their state in life.

Chiara Lubich meets Igino Giordani in the Chamber of Deputies.

“The meeting was surprising and decisive for both of us. I was struck by the intelligence and at the same time the concreteness of the aims of the community called Focolare, which were to ignite among the people a revolution of love, in reaction to the recent fratricide. The limpid, simple exposition made by Lubich,” Giordani recalls, “attracted me”[2].

Chiara turned to him for advice on mutual friendship. She was looking for help in finding an apartment in Rome[3], at a time like the post-war period, when the undertaking was particularly arduous, especially for girls with little money. Accompanied by religious from three different Franciscan orders, instead of expounding her request, Chiara recounted her experience and what she had seen emerge from the lived Gospel. Igino Giordani, who had expected to meet an idealist, with her head perhaps a bit in the clouds, who came to ask a favour like others, is confused. ‘Upset’ is the word he uses several times to express the state he finds himself in after that first meeting. “It seemed to me that I had finally found the connection of me, a layman, with the people who live the state of perfection. To me,” Giordani recounted in 1979, “it seemed that I was living the state of imperfection, that the laity were unholy and the others were the consecrated persons. Now it seemed to me that I had found a way to hook up with people who were living the state of perfection. And so I began to hang out with Chiara, to go to Trent. Giordani found ways to stay in touch with her and the first focolarine. He lived a bond with Chiara that takes the form and character willed by God and that overcame, by understanding them, their respective human and personal aspirations.

Giordani was the first of the married focolarini. He had always maintained, as St. John Chrysostom said, that married people should live like monks, with celibacy as a minus. It was Giordani who always repeated that these married focolarini were to be part of the male and female focolares respectively, thus beginning an original community of virgins and married people that was unknown in the Church at that time.

His previous searches for as complete and vital an insertion as possible in already existing movements in the Church, such as the various Third Orders he had contacted, had been a symptom of this vocation, which in our Movement had been foreseen, but which only with him could be realized.

From these married focolarini was then to be born the wide-ranging Movement, an offshoot of the Focolare Movement called New Families, where the couple, while not having a particular consecration to God, live out as fully as possible the spirit of unity, proper to the Movement, making the family cell a small living and open church.

It often happens that in narrating her story, to mark the beginning of a new reality that is outlined in the founding work, or to contextualize a certain understanding, Chiara refers to circumstances and persons as providential instruments for the manifestation of the charism given to her.[4] There are some that in a very special way remain associated with her, because of the charismatic vitality received from God through Chiara herself. Foco[5] is one of these.

It was 1954. In that year, about sixty young men and women had asked and obtained from the Assistant of the Movement to be able to consecrate themselves to God in virginity.

Giordani, present in a women’s focolare, magnified with great humility, the state of virginity that he saw as unattainable.

He said that what counted before God was love, and that no one could prevent him, even if married, from loving as much and as well as those who consecrated themselves to God in those days. If his state of life was different from these young people, he could set everything in love and be, with that, pure, obedient and poor.

Later these intentions became concrete in promises that he made: promises of chastity according to his state; of obedience to those in charge of the Focolare who would take into account the duties of his state; of poverty, as far as his person was concerned, poverty commensurate with his social condition.[6]

In 1939, in Loreto, Chiara had sensed the birth of a new pathway of consecration that would have to do with the Family of Nazareth. The intuition is outlined in the focolare and with Foco’s vocation, it takes on new form.

In Chiara and through his relationship with the focolarine, Igino Giordani found the kind of Christian life he was looking for: “I understood the teaching of the Focolare, a teaching that was this: to bring God into society, to live God. Each baptized person must live Christ 24 hours a day, not only in the Mass, not only in the days of spiritual exercises. We are in God 24 hours a day, so we are always with Him. And I could see that even the focolarine who were sweeping the floor, for example, were doing it with God in mind. And their talks were always the talk of the family, the family who were Jesus, Mary, the saints. This amazed me, it did me a great deal of good, because I found fulfilled, in a perfect way, what I had vaguely dreamed of: to be able to live a perfect Christian life, being in the world, living like others.”[7]

Foco fits fully into the life of the focolare, and others, after him, come fully into the composition of that coexistence, in the midst of the world, of virgins and married people, all given, though in different ways, to God.

With her consecration on December 7, 1943, Chiara achieved a first goal, the total gift of self to God. The little house in Piazza Cappuccini became the place where God provided for a first group of girls to experience the possibility of living together, as in a convent, but in the midst of the world. The living together that is made up, modelled, on the family of Nazareth, shows more explicitly the features of the new way to which Chiara first, was called. In the 1950s, with the arrival of Foco, the “fourth way” was opened to humanity and the focolare was configured as a community in which virgins and married people, according to their state, follow the evangelical counsels and commit themselves first of all to keep always alive in their midst the presence of Jesus promised by Him where two or more are united in His name (Cf. Mt. 18:20) [8].