Scalabrini Fest 2023: A certain hope - for you, for me, for everyone

This was the theme of the Scalabrini Fest 2023, organized by the Secular Scalabrinian Missionaries and held in Solothurn, Switzerland, at the Scalabrini International Center, on Saturday, April 29 and Sunday, April 30. About 270 participants from 38 different countries of origin, with various life situations and stories behind them, met and shared moments of reflection, exchange, and celebration guided by the theme of hope. The Scalabrini Fest has been proposed as a training meeting since 1995, but this year’s was the first after the canonization of Giovanni Battista Scalabrini, which took place last October 9, 2022, in Rome.

Locals, migrants who have been in Switzerland for some time, refugees, international students, young families, children, boys and girls came together to share experiences of life and faith, culminating in the Eucharistic celebration presided over by Father Valerio Farronato, Scalabrinian missionary, on his fiftieth anniversary of priesthood. The celebration continued with specialties and music from different countries, to rejoice together in the simple fact of being together, just like brothers and sisters of a single family. The expenses of the meeting were covered in the spirit of sharing goods: there was no fixed participation fee, but everyone was able to give their own free and responsible contribution. 

“Let us expand our hearts more than ever, let us hope; but let our hope be calm, patient; let us hope, but without tiring. […] If God, in his adorable designs, delays in answering us, we double our trust, opposing […] to the unbelief of the world an unlimited confidence” This is what Saint Scalabrini communicated to his Diocese during Lent of 1877, and these words have never sounded more relevant.

Guided by the reflection of Anna Fumagalli, secular Scalabrinian missionary and biblical scholar, participants were able to deepen how Christian hope, a hope founded in God, is truly a hope for all, capable even of overcoming death, a hope that does not cover up or set aside the negative but rather values it, showing, as happened in the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ, that where everything seems to end, something new is actually beginning. For this reason, Christian hope is a call to responsibility: to train ourselves to see and love every sign of new life already present in the world.

In this time when winds of war blow strongly throughout the world, where extremisms and nationalisms seem to be spreading in society, every opportunity for meeting, exchange, and dialogue among people of different origins and social conditions is and becomes a sign of hope and shows that coexistence and peace are possible and start from the small, involving everyone, no one excluded.

 

Giulia Civitelli

Secular Scalabrinian Missionaries