Chiara Lubich- The Founder of Run for Unity the Focolare Movement

Chiara Lubich was born as Silvia Lubich in Trento. Her father lost his job because of the socialistic ideas that he held during Italy's period of Fascism.[citation needed] Consequently, the Lubichs lived for years in extreme poverty. To pay for her university studies in philosophy, Lubich tutored other students in Venice and during the 1940s began teaching at an elementary school in Trento.
Her discovery of "God is


Love" (cf. 1 John 4:16), led her, on December 7, 1943, alone in a small chapel, to promise herself to God forever and to change her name to Chiara, in honour of the Saint from Assisi. This date is considered the beginning of the Focolare movement.
These Focolare (small communities of lay volunteers) seek to contribute to peace and to achieve the evangelical unity of all people in every social environment. The goal became a world living in unity, and its spirituality has helped dismantle centuries-old prejudices. Today its members and adherents are Catholic, Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Bahá'í, as well as thousands of people who profess no particular religion.

In her life the day of May 13, 1944 remains the night of one of the most violent bombings of Trento. Lubich's house was among the many buildings destroyed. She decided to stay in Trento to help the new lives being born. She encountered a woman who had lost her senses through the suffering caused by the death of her four children.[citation needed] It was among the poor of Trento that that which Lubich often calls the "divine adventure" began.

In the 1960s young people started protesting in large numbers throughout much of the world. From 1966 Lubich proposed to the youth to live according to the radical message of the Gospel as an answer to the profound desire for change claimed by young people everywhere. The Gen Movement was thus born (New Generation) which animates the wider "Young People for a United World".

In the year 1966 Chiara Lubich co-founded the school Our Lady, Seat of Wisdom College, Fontem in Cameroon with the assistance of the contemporaneous native chief of Fontem, Fon Fontem Defang. She visited the school in May of 2000. From the very beginning there had been younger teenagers and children who made the spirituality of unity their own. The third generation of the Movement, those who animate the vaster "Youth for Unity" movement, was born in 1970.


Christian, the first lay person, and the first woman to be invited to communicate her spiritual experience to a group of 800 Buddhist monks and nuns in Thailand (January 1997), to 3,000 Black Muslims in the Mosque of Harlem in New York City (May 1997), and to the Jewish community in Buenos Aires (April 1998).




Death

She died in Rocca di Papa in her native Italy, aged 88, on March 14, 2008.

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