The "people" of Sant'Egidio gathered in the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano suggests to is an image of universality - as Card. Gualtiero Bassetti said - both for different nationalities, but also with respect to the Gospel with its dream of peoples and generations living together in fraternity. It is a mosaic of all ages and peoples participating in the liturgy of thanksgiving for the 54th anniversary of the Community of Sant'Egidio, founded on 7 February 1968 by Andrea Riccardi.
Although the pandemic has required a large reduction in places, in the basilica there are all the "representations" of the family of the Community: elderly and young people, homeless, people with disabilities, migrants who arrived with the humanitarian corridors. The president of the Italian Episcopal Conference, who presided over the liturgy, drew attention to this latest initiative, a collaboration between Sant'Egidio and other communities and institutions, to "open bridges where there are walls and barbed wires”. The humanitarian corridors have rescued more than 4,300 people, refugees from Lebanon, Greece and the Horn of Africa. They too are 'peoples' to be taken to heart, who need the goodness of peace. Card. Bassetti recalled how the Community's dream went as far as Mozambique, leading to the 1992 Peace Agreement at Sant'Egidio. A dream nourished together with a sense of concreteness - as the cardinal explained, recalling Giorgio La Pira and his strength, drawn from prayer and the ability to scrutinise history in the light of the Word of God. An approach that Card. Bassetti sees in the Community: 'You have sought a solution for everyone, with affection but also with “patient practicality”.
In his greeting at the end of the liturgy, the President of the Community, Marco Impagliazzo, recalled the first reflections on society by that group of Roman students, which would lead to a global commitment for the poorest in four continents: “It strikes me that the theme of overcoming loneliness was raised at the very first meeting of the small community that was taking its first steps here in Rome". Reflection is pivotal and urgent in a world marked by pandemics, in which finding answers for the 'invisible' is essential: Marco Impagliazzo recalled the collaboration with the Extraordinary Commissioner Francesco Figliuolo, the Lazio Region and the Local Health Authority for the anti-Covid vaccine for the marginalised and, on the world stage, the Italian example of the Humanitarian Corridors set up with the Foreign and Interior Ministries. Now it’s time to choose for humanity while we are at a "turn in history" - quoting Andrea Riccardi - in which "to realise fraternity, as a social bond within cities and peripheries, among people, among those who fight". This is the perspective in which the Community of Sant'Egidio moves, the fraternity and social friendship of which Pope Francis speaks in the encyclical Fratelli Tutti, to find together the ability to rise better from the pandemic.
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