c. 1997 Religion News Service

ROCCA DI PAPA, Italy _ Popes may come and go but Chiara Lubich endures.

At age 77, the president and founder of the Focolare (Hearth) Movement, one of the largest lay groups in the Roman Catholic Church, is busy sowing seeds for the future.

In January she became the first Christian woman to address Buddhist monks at a monastery in Thailand. In February, she announced plans to open a school in the Philippines for the study of her movement’s theology.

And, in another groundbreaking event, on May 18 Lubich will become the first white woman _ Christian or otherwise _ to address Muslims at the Malcolm Shabazz Mosque in Harlem. She was invited by Imam W. Deen Mohammed, spiritual leader of the nation’s largest African-American Muslim group.

During her upcoming trip to the United States, Lubich will also receive an honorary degree at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn., and urge countries at a U.N. meeting to focus on what unites rather than divides them.

Lubich’s simple message _ that on some level all people can find common ground, a sense of belonging, and love for one another _ has made her a non-threatening Catholic ambassador of goodwill.

But she doesn’t receive her marching orders from Rome. Such a relationship might inhibit her mission of breaking down barriers among Christians and, in the larger interreligious movement, building bridges with Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and others.

But her ability to cross rivers of discord and move easily among all religious people has made Lubich one of the most important women in the Roman Catholic Church, despite the fact she holds no official Vatican title.

She has, however, known every pope since Pius XII, and was regularly invited into the salons of John XXIII and Paul VI during work on the Second Vatican Council. John Paul II, who invites her occasionally for private Mass at his Vatican, talks to her regularly.”I think she’s about as Catholic as you can get but she’s not encumbered by all the dogma a bishop or pope has to worry about,”said Rabbi Jack Bemporad, who heads the Center for Christian-Jewish Understanding at Sacred Heart University.

Bemporad said he recommended Lubich for the honorary degree at Sacred Heart without ever having met her because she is supremely effective at spreading her message of love and charity at a time when so many young people are searching for meaning in life.”I see the influence she’s had on so many people who have gained a great deal of inspiration and hope from her and whose lives have changed,”he said.

Asked about her appeal, the single woman with radiant white hair and a polite grin, eschews any personal responsibility but cites the success of her movement’s interreligious outreach.”We feel very united with other Christians and that spirituality links us together,”Lubich said from the movement’s center near the papal summer residence, 45 minutes southeast of Rome.”The movement is like a yeast in the ecumenical sphere. When I was in Thailand speaking to Buddhists, it was very informal. I had no intention of evangelization. They wanted me to speak of my life, what I did, where I went to church. And they wanted to become part of this movement.” Lubich said she has seen first hand the great chasm existing in the interfaith world, not to mention within Christianity.”There are differences, big differences,”she said,”and it’s a big commitment to come on board.” Although she speaks often of hope, as she did last weekend to a group of young people from 90 countries meeting near Rome, it was despair, not promise, that led to the movement’s creation in 1943.

Lubich, who was born and reared in the northern Italian city of Trent, said the war years short-circuited the plans of many young Europeans like herself, often making them feel without purpose amid pain and misery.”At a certain point, because of the bombardment, we saw little by little that our ideals were being eliminated,”she said.”I was meant to go to the university in Venice but because of the war I wasn’t able to go.”So we asked ourselves, is there possibly an ideal for which it’s worth to spend your whole life. And the answer came within us. This ideal was God.” Charity was the logical service for the group of youths, mostly women, who helped shelter, feed and clothe the homeless and set up an informal network with churches to exchange goods.

It was from this exchange the earliest seeds of ecumenism were planted,”20 years before Vatican Two,”Lubich said proudly of the church council that committed Roman Catholicism to the cause of promoting Christian unity.

The movement, which received official Vatican approval in 1964, counts more than 2 million members and adherents, and is active in more than 180 countries. The majority are Christian but thousands are Muslim, Buddhist and Jewish. It offers course work on spirituality, theology and ecumenism around the world and publishes about 300 books a year. Its monthly New City magazine has 38 editions in 23 languages.

Lubich has been widely recognized for her work, having received the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1977 and the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education last year.

Although little known in the United States, the Foclarini, as they call themselves, serve an active role in religious studies and interreligious dialogue.

Lubich, who does not speak English, has visited the United States several times. The capstone of her upcoming trip will be the speech to the Muslim community.

Mohammed, who visited Lubich’s center several years ago and was impressed by its work, will also make an address on interreligious dialogue.

In the United States, Lubich said,”people have to begin to live in a more spiritual way. Things will change if they put this into practice. America is a rich country. But look at the poor. You have to make the rich want to give their money away to help the poor.” Such recommendations may sound like boilerplate solutions in a country with problems as diverse and complex as its myriad racial and ethnic composition.

But Lubich holds that in most cases where conflicts are not resolved, people are looking at what divides them instead of what unites them.”We may not agree on everything. But surely there are humanitarian things we can share,”she said.”That is what we must look to.” MJP END HEILBRONNER