In the summer of my first year of high school, a priest of the Fraternity of St. Charles invited me, along with five other Portuguese kids, to attend a summer vacation of Gioventù studentesca with the community of Brianza. The families of a couple of the participants welcomed us and hosted us in the days leading up to our departure. Without knowing us, they welcomed us into their homes like friends only because we belonged to the same history. During the vacation, then, I was able to see that, despite the geographic and cultural distance, which was not immense but was nevertheless palpable, those young people were having the same experience that I was living in Lisbon with my friends. Only that there were around 100 of us, while at that vacation, there were 400 of them all together.
That summer, I discovered that Communion and Liberation was the place for me. I was born and raised in a “CL family” and, in those days, I experienced the gift that my parents had given to me. I discovered that CL was my home but also that the Movement was spread throughout the world. A missionary impetus was born in me that, at that moment, did not so much consist of announcing Christ to the world as much as recognizing Him within the companionship that the Movement was offering me. That same summer, I returned to Italy with my family to the Meeting in Rimini. The next year, those friends from Brianza had to tolerate me at Christmas, Easter and two more times in the summer, first at the vacation, and then again at the Meeting.
This world that had opened up before my eyes during high school exploded in my college years. With students coming to Lisbon for Erasmus, I had the opportunity to reciprocate the welcome I had been given. Plus, the opportunity to visit them during the winter justified trips to Italy, France and Spain. Finally, it was also my turn to do Erasmus: Chile and Argentina were the new homes that I discovered. The CL community then asked me to continue traveling: they were looking for a volunteer to translate the spiritual exercises of the university students from Africa for the youth in Mozambique. So I had the opportunity to go twice to Uganda and once to Kenya.
Christ makes any place familiar only because He is present
In addition to these beautiful trips around the world, there was a very significant experience during my university years, namely charitable work with the Sisters of Mother Teresa of Calcutta: catechism and study help for boys in a poor neighborhood in Lisbon. Lisbon is a beautiful city, but this area is not among those marked in tourist guides. The buildings are ugly, and although there is no longer the violence and insecurity of times past, one still breathes tension and malaise.
The sisters, who are from all different countries around the world, live there nonetheless with a smile and with love for the people of that neighborhood which is truly shocking. They do not look at their watch to see how long before they can escape and go to the beach. They live there and there they remain, happy and peaceful despite the suffering and precariousness that surrounds them. With them, I began to understand that truly I was able to have a home anywhere, as long as the master was Christ, who makes any place familiar only because He is present.
Their way of being with people translated into my desire for a consecrated, priestly life, which I already knew was full of beauty mainly because of the almost daily companionship my family had with Father João Seabra, a diocesan priest from Lisbon who accompanied and guided the birth and development of CL in Portugal. Thus, having realized that CL was the right place for me, experiencing a strong desire for mission and feeling called to priestly life, I saw in St. Charles the place to which God was calling me. In 2017 I began the journey in the House of Formation with new but also old friends: out of all the people at that first GS summer vacation in Brianza, in fact, four of us found ourselves now in the same seminary.