“Does it seem beautiful to you to have Jesus wait?”. It was 2019 and this question of Fr. Antonio Anastasio -Anas, for his friends- broke through the last fears that held me captive: someone had sought me out, had come to meet me and was not indifferent to my response. The Omnipotent God was interested in my yes!
I have known His preference for me from the time I was a girl thanks to my parents: they were the ones who opened for me the path of the Church within the Movement of Communion and Liberation. I was born in Udine and I have five siblings. At our home, there were always many friends and classmates who shared life with us. In the years of high school, these friends and belonging to the Movement put down deep roots in me. When I was 19, I moved to Milan to study architecture. I felt like Violaine in The Tidings Brought to Mary: I knew whose daughter I was, what my house was, who I was going to marry and what work I was going to do. Everything was lining up for me. But these things were not able to exhaust the question that I had in my heart: “The Lord has given me everything; how can I respond to this love?”.
In my fourth year of college, I did a year abroad in Porto. I left alone and did not even know the language: this circumstance opened a new space for my relationship with Jesus. I searched for Him, and He responded, in prayer and in the faces of those I encountered. While I rejoiced for this experience of His closeness, at the university and at different gatherings, I met many people who did not have a sense of meaning in their lives. I realized that I had a precious treasure that they did not know. I needed to communicate this to everyone!
I realized that I had a precious treasure that they did not know. I needed to communicate this to everyone!
In December of that year, I went to the Exercises of the university students of CL in Portugal, led at the time by the priests of the Fraternity of St. Charles who were missionaries in Lisbon. I had known the Fraternity since my childhood and I had seen the friends of my parents leave as missionaries for Mexico, Taiwan and Germany, but that year, there was a new encounter: Fr. Paolo, who at the time was a seminarian, was the sign that it was possible to give one’s life to God and that life, with Christ, flourished. I did not stop seeking their friendship and, when I returned to Milan, I began to go to Mass every day: in this way, the Lord had begun to attract me to Himself. It was this intuition that led me to Anas to ask him to accompany me. Precisely in that period, a friend spoke to me of the existence of the Missionary Sisters of St. Charles: there was something that interested me there, but to go deeper into it would have been too risky, since I still had the idea that I would get married.
After I graduated, I began to work as an architect, doing luxury interior design. I would visit the construction sites in Iraq and stepping through the doors of the ultra wealthy, I would often think of the love of Christ for each of them. I was inserting myself into a history since it was in that very land that everything had begun with Abraham and where that same voice was saying to me, “Follow me, I send you.” For years, I kept hidden under my mattress a book of Fr. Massimo that I would bring out in the evenings in which I was thinking of the vocation. In the meanwhile, between a lot of life with friends and colleagues, I stalled for time, organizing a summer in Syria with the Franciscans, a trip to the Ivory Coast among the poorest and visits to the homeless. There was, however, a problem: I was not at peace.
That day in 2019, speaking with Anas, I understood that if I continued to follow my own projects, I would have lost the best part. The Lord was not calling me only to depart for a faraway land; He wanted me closer to Himself and He promised me happiness. It is for this reason that, on this coming March 25th, I will consecrate myself to God in the Missionary Sisters of St. Charles, the beautiful home that had always been prepared for me.
