The family grows

   BJ Funk was a small child when the Focolare’s first members came to the Philippines. His dad and mom were among the first to get to know the Ideal of Unity. What he remembers were not so much the meetings, but those days at the beach together with the focolarinos. “I felt at home with them, playing, running, swimming. We were truly a family.”
   This characteristic of the Focolare would continue down the years. Although their meetings and activities kept on multiplying, it was very clear to everyone that the most important thing was to keep reciprocal love alive. This was the kind of witness people were waiting for. And how quickly they responded!
   After just a few months, the very first Mariapolises took place, New City magazine started its first issues, and meetings were everywhere. The small apartments of the two Focolare centers were filled with people, day and night. Rich—and those very rich came—together with the poor—and those quite poor. Already then the Focolare community had this peculiar characteristic: people of every walk of life, wealthy and needy, were attracted by the same ideal, and since this ideal is founded on love, they could not but love one another.

   Irene de los Angeles comes from a wealthy and powerful clan. She met the Focolare one sunny day in August 1966, having been invited by her daughter to a one-day meeting. “I experienced a very strong presence of God’s love,” she recalls. “He was talking to me, and I didn’t know how to respond. That very same night, somebody told me that there was only one thing to do: to love. And so I started.” After some time she went to the focolarinas with a box full of jewels. “Please take them, I don’t need them anymore,” she said. As the focolarinas didn’t know what to do with them, they put them in a safety box. These would later be sold and used to pay for trips to other Asian countries, where the Focolare was just starting.
   At the same time the poor continued to flock to the Focolares, because they felt at home. In fact, the first two Focolare houses were located among the poor. Sometimes they came looking for help, like that evening when Silvio and Cengia were preparing for dinner. A very poor man knocked at the door and begged for something to eat for his family. The two focolarinos had a chicken ready, and nothing else.    They looked at each other and neither of them had any doubts about what to do. Carefully they wrapped up the chicken and handed it to the astonished man, convinced they would have gone to bed without supper. Only a few moments later, they heard another knock at the door. One of their new acquaintances had sent his driver over, for no reason at all, with lots of fruit and meat.
But the poor did not come only to look for help; actually they were the ones helping! The first women’s Focolare Center had no chairs, so for every meeting they had to borrow from their neighbors. And little by little many of their neighbors also came to know the ideal of unity.

The first Mariapolises
   This community made up of people of such different backgrounds eventually came together at the Mariapolises in May and June 1966—the first in Vigan, the others in Tagaytay, Lucena and Cebu. There were some coming in full vacation gear, others escaping from difficult situations, and priests and religious curious to know what the Focolare had to say or who had been encouraged by their bishops to participate. What all these people still remember today is the joyful family atmosphere and the clear impression that God was asking them to start a new life, by loving their neighbors. Already early on, the Focolare vocation to build unity with all was evident: after the Rector of the Union Theological Seminary (UTS) and three professors spent some time in the Mariapolis in Tagaytay, one of them invited a priest to speak about the Focolare to a group of about 40 Protestant leaders.    Today, UTS continues its contact with the Focolare’s little town in Tagaytay—a relationship started in 1966!

The Church
   This diffusion in so many different environments is not unusual. Unity means bringing everyone together, be they a judge, a worker, a mother, or a priest. This is also the vocation of the Church as one of the participants commented at the end of the Mariapolis: “It seems to me that I have never made an experience of the Church as I have in these days.”
   We can say that from the very beginning the local Church welcomed the spirituality of unity with open arms. In fact, it was Rufino Card. Santos, the Archbishop of Manila, who invited the focolarinos to the Philippines. And he continued to encourage the movement throughout the years. Other bishops were no less welcoming. They felt that unity was what the Vatican Council desired from the local churches, as one of them clearly stated in Vigan.
   Later on, at the end of the 70s, the whole Filipino Bishops’ Conference would write to Chiara Lubich to ask for a school for priests in Tagaytay. In 1996 they would all sign a petition letter to the University of Sto. Tomas to award her an Honorary Degree in Theology.
   The religious orders were also on the frontline in bringing the charism of unity everywhere in the Philippines. Fr. Joseph Taschner, the very first to share the life of Focolare in our country, is an SVD priest, and Mother Deolindis was a Holy Spirit Sister before founding her own congregation. True, the new charism needed the help of all the other charisms. This is truly the Church in action.