The International Centers and the culture of hospitality

Cultivating encounter and dialogue in diversity. This is what has been happening for 40 years in the International Centers of the Scalabrinian Secular Missionaries, real laboratories of relationships, where young people of different languages, cultures, and backgrounds learn to look at others with new eyes.
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The International Centers were founded in Stuttgart in 1982 and today are present in Solothurn, Milan, São Paulo, and Mexico City. They are inspired by the prophetic intuition of Blessed Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, who at the end of the 19th century provided spiritual and material assistance to Italian migrants in the United States and South America. Over 40 years, thousands of young people and refugees, locals and migrants, have passed through the International Centers: they have shared spaces, moments of leisure and reflection, creating relationships that last over time.

In August, at the International Center of Solothurn, the Internationales Bildungszentrum G. B. Scalabrini in Switzerland, the Scalabrinian Secular Missionaries organized a celebration, the SOMMERFEST, to bring together some of the people who, during the year, have brought this space to life through their presence. Refugees and volunteers who spend the afternoon with them every week playing, chatting, or having grammar lessons took part.

Among the refugees is Jamen, a Kurd from Syria: he arrived here three years ago, was alone and did not know the language. At the Center, he found a “compass,” a place where he finally felt at home. Chiara, 20 years old, did her internship here after graduating from high school. Her grandparents emigrated from Italy in the 1970s, and for her, born and raised in Switzerland, these meetings became an opportunity to rediscover a bit of her roots in the people she met.

A weaving of faces and stories, who in the International Centers have discovered the revolutionary and still very relevant message of Giovanni Battista Scalabrini: we all belong to a single family, that of humanity. As Veronica testifies, who fled Nicaragua with her husband and two daughters: “Being foreigners strips us bare and makes us feel strongly the need for a family, for brotherhood, for a community; here I found all three of these things. Now I can say that in the midst of so much suffering and difficulty I have become a better person.”

Even today, the Missionaries, the Missionary Sisters, the Secular Missionaries and the Scalabrinian volunteers live out the mission of carrying forward in history God's dream of communion, becoming “migrants with the migrants.”