When Chiara started the Focolare, Natalia was the first girl to follow her. Today, she is also the first companion to join her in the other life. She played a decisive role in the spread of the ideal of unity behind the Iron Curtain, as well as in the Movement’s interreligious dialogue.

She was 19 years old when her path crossed with that of Chiara Lubich, who was 23 years old then. It was June 1943 in Trent. Her family had moved to the city of Furnace, in the mountainous region where she was born, to follow-up their family business. Her childhood had been uneventful, until her father was struck down by a serious illness, leading to his death at only 47 years old. Together with an older brother also attending school, Natalia had to work to support the family. There were three other little sisters. They didn’t lack the basic necessities, but she suffered deeply due to the absence of her father, whom she had been very close to. She remembered him as a happy person, a very lively one, who loved his life and job, and had a special affection for his gentle daughter who was fond of music and painting. She certainly didn’t like the business school she attended, but she was resigned to it so as to be useful to her family.

At 19, Natalia was going through a critical moment in her life. This suffering purified her heart and opened her soul up to God. In her, Chiara found a soul that welcomed without reservations the first early intuitions of the charism of unity. It was also because of this ability to listen that Chiara later entrusted her with the aspect of prayer and spiritual life for the whole movement. “One day,” Natalia recounted, “after my confession, the priest suggested that I participate in a one-day spiritual retreat. ‘Come,’ he told me, ‘a young lady will be speaking.’ Chiara was that young lady, and she spoke to us about love.” “There are so many beautiful things in life,” she began, “the flowers, the stars, children; but more beautiful than all of these is love.” She described motherly, fatherly, filial love, as well as the love between spouses. “But, if love is the most beautiful thing that exists on earth, how much more so is God who created all these things?” Yes, the idea of a God who was goodness, mercy, but also beauty, satisfied her soul’s thirst for beautiful things. She no longer wanted to lose contact with this young woman. These circumstances led her to say yes to the experience of the first Focolare.

Then following the terrible bombardment of May 13, 1944 Chiara’s house was seriously damaged. Her family retreated to the mountains while she remained in the city. In September 1944, she was able to find a small apartment in Piazza Cappuccini. Natalia was the first girl to come live with her, and the first to join the adventure of this new life. Since then, Natalia has always been besides Chiara. They shared the pains of giving birth to a new movement within the Church. Hers also were the joys in the growth and expansion of this small seed in the most unexpected places—a humble seed, which makes itself one with the sufferings of the people and the places which it reached. But there was an impenetrable point, a border that seemed impossible to cross. It was the height of the Cold War—of the Iron Curtain dividing Europe, or even dividing the world, into two blocs.

Chiara Lubich had the chance to visit West Berlin in 1960, and at the Caritas headquarters she spoke about the mysterious cry of Christ, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” to 200 people: priests, families, seminarians, young people, all assembled together with the greatest caution and from diverse places of East Germany. It was that cry of Jesus which was now mirrored by the Church in silence. To be at the service of these Christians, Chiara thought of opening a Focolare house in West Berlin to keep in contact with these friends from Eastern Germany. For this very delicate task, Natalia was sent.

Natalia described that period in an interview with New City in 1991, immediately after the fall of the Berlin wall. “From the East, people were continually coming to visit us. There was a big street leading to the house, because the people could not tell us ahead of time, so they arrived all of a sudden, but never in big groups, for naturally it would have been dangerous. Meanwhile, on August 13 1961, the political situation worsened. The invisible wall among the two Berlins became a reality of stone to prevent people escaping to the west—to freedom. Instead, strangely enough, an invitation came for us to go east.” Those who did go were two Italian medical doctors, a surgeon and an anesthetist. They were Enzo Fondi and Joseph Santanché, two focolarinos, who found work in a hospital in Lipsia. Instead, at 62 Epiphany Street, lived Doctor Margareth Frish and her assistant Elisabeth. They were asked to even open a clinic in the city of East Germany. The friend to accompany them who would look after the house was none other than Natalia. This lady doctor and her assistant, both of them Germans, didn’t meet big bureaucratic obstacles. It was not the same for their Italian friend, who had to spend two weeks in a jail near Berlin. Natalia had a motto that helped her: My prudence will be to love everybody. She soon earned the respect of none other than the warders in jail. “I have made friends with so many people,” Natalia recounts, “above all, with a young woman expecting a baby. I remember that, seeing her great weakness, I volunteered to do her cleaning jobs. After ten days they then released me.”

After that woman Himgard whom Natalia helped in prison was freed, she knocked at their clinic door one night, with a little baby called Mercedes. Shortly afterwards Himgard got sick from leukemia and died. Natalia and her companions then took care of the small baby. For some years she lived with them in the Focolare, up to the moment she could be entrusted to a family.

But it was the story of Mercedes—rather, of the father of Mercedes, in jail for political reasons—which aroused the suspicious police to question Natalia again. Here is the account of those questionings, and of the consequent police report: The most important person (among them) who is well-known is a woman called Natalia. She is treated by the whole group with great respect. She is very intelligent and she behaves in a very delicate way. She entered East Germany in a very original way. She came together with Dr. Frisch. Living with the doctor, she had the excuse of passing as household help, but in reality she is not. Practically she is the person responsible for the women’s Focolare and perhaps even for the whole Eastern Germany and Czechoslovakia, and there is a certain woman whose surname is Lubich who founded the whole Movement of the Focolare.

The clinic they opened in Lipsia, which was their excuse for crossing behind the Iron Curtain, was transformed, Natalia says, “into a center of love.” From there, slowly but inexorably, the small seed spread to other countries of the East.

In 1976, Natalia returned to Rome, to the Center of the movement. Her health required it. After a year, another step was taken. The Movement was starting a dialogue with the great religions. The founding event was the Templeton Prize that Chiara had received for Progress in Religion at the Guild Hall of London in 1977. It was a new opening.

“When I arrived in Rocca di Papa,” Natalia recalls, “Chiara had just met with some collaborators to draw some conclusions and to determine what had to be done. The first thing was to start a small center, an office to gather news of the contacts with people of other religions which came from every part of the world. Chiara entrusted me with this assignment. She told me: ‘There you have to love!’” For thirty years, Natalia believed in this trust that Chiara gave her.

Then on the afternoon of last April 1, 2008, Christina Lee and Stella Chiu, Natalia’s collaborators in interreligious dialogue, went to see her to discuss the program of the Christian-Buddhist Symposium in preparation for the April 27-30 meeting. As always they were welcomed with great warmth and affection by Natalia. “She listened to us,” Christina remarks, “with interest, and she even offered us some chocolates.” At 9 pm that same day, surrounded by Graziella De Luca, Doriana Zamboni, Aletta Salizzoni and Valeria Ronchetti, her companions at the time when the Focolare was beginning, she passed on to the Other Life. Then they remembered that, while Chiara’s health had been failing, Natalia had confided to them how she had asked Jesus not to take her before Chiara: “Let’s not give her this pain.” Jesus had granted her wish.

Caterina Ruggiu