The ‘St. Anne’ Parish Camillian Mission – Lucca ‘the joy of taking care of people’

    At Lucca, during the fourth week of Lent (11-18 March 2018), in the Parish of St. Anne, in synergy with the Camillians and the Daughters of St. Camillus, a parish Camillian mission was organised on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the Blessed Maria Domenica Brun Barbantini, the founder of the women Ministers of the Sick of St. Camillus.

Journeying towards a community that looks around it…mission accomplished!

     We continuously hear it said that these are difficult times for the Church: Christians are decreasing in number, a religious sense increasingly gives way to worldliness, faith seems to be something for the chosen few or for those especially involved through their work, a sort of dehumanisation is at work, relationships fade, as does mutual welcome, and individualism rules. Yet with all of this, in the local area of Lucca various realities still exist, such as the small towns and villages of the Garfagnana or the countryside, where various ways of coming together still exist, where people still know each other and greet each other, and where the identity of being a town or a village still exists. The city milieu is very different. Lucca is a small city and the greatest density of inhabitants is to be found in the outskirts. The neighbourhood of St. Anne is the largest in the outskirts and has about 11,000 inhabitants in what is a very varied local area from the residential blocks to the liberty streets and from the council houses to the courts typical of past centuries. Differently from small inhabited centres, in the neighbourhood of St. Anne a social collage does not exist and there is a great tendency to the anonymous and individualism, to diffidence; the terrain for evangelisation is drier and stonier.

With these premisses, rather than closing ourselves up in our parish organisations we accepted the invitation of Sister Assunta Di Salvo of the women Ministers of the Sick to celebrate the Camillian Parish Mission from Sunday 11 March to Sunday 18 March on the occasion of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the death of the Blessed Maria Domenica Brun Barbantini, of our city, who founded the Congregation of the Women Ministers of the Sick of St. Camillus. This mission was directed above all to people who suffer in body and spirit, to elderly people who are often on their own. In recent mornings, some Camillian religious, accompanied by women Ministers of the Sick, by extraordinary ministers of the communion, and by various lay people, visited more than a hundred elderly people or sick people who are unable to move around.

In the afternoons, on the other hand, Holy Masses were celebrated in people’s homes. These were occasions of grace when the community learnt to be near to these people. From Monday to Friday in various homes about twenty afternoon celebrations took place. Young people were involved in animation with guitars, singing and readings and helped our elderly people to pray. This was truly a unique experience. It was not only this: it also brought freshness, smiles and hope, with the elderly people themselves being the beneficiaries. All of this is an excellent exercise for faith to become charity. For that matter, Father Rosario Messina who was present in a very active way, and in 1976 began the practice of Camillian missions, reminded us on a number of occasions that the real result that should spring from a life illumined by prayer and the word of God and nourished by the sacraments is charity: the charity of great actions but also small ones.

As is typical during days of mission, last week in church there was an increase in moments of prayer: morning lauds after the Mass of 8.30 with the showing of the Most Holy Sacrament, the Holy Rosary in the evening before the Mass at 18.30, and lastly, also from 13.00 to 13.20, a brief moment of spiritual nourishment. We can say that in our parish of St. Anne there really arrived a breeze of new air which enthused many of us about the beauty of giving of ourselves for others, bringing comfort to those who suffer, and giving hope, the same beauty that we are called to live through the gospel, in the footsteps of the Lord. In addition to meetings with betrothed people and young couples, with the young people of the catechism and their parents, the Via Crucis with children in the streets of the neighbourhood with Father Alfredo Tortorella, the Holy Mass with the communal moment of the Anointing of the Sick, what was especially touching was the vigil with young people in which about a hundred post-confirmation boys and girls took part. This fine evening moment was led by Father Marco Boriani, by Barbantini Sisters, by two Daughters of St. Camillus and by the Camillian religious Brother Carlo Mangione. Prayer in front of the Eucharist Jesus, various activities, and the testimony of Sister Caterina Belluomini made everything very touching.  The evening then ended with the blessing of the new little chapel of the oratory in the presence of all the young people. The Most Holy Sacrament was placed in this little chapel for the first time.

    Another very fine initiative was the visit of the Camillian religious and sisters to the council houses of the area of the parish where one can encounter various difficult situations of every kind. These were brief but very intense moments that reminded us that mission forms a part of the very identity of the Church. A Christian community that is satisfied with showing that it is such only within the walls of a parish church or an oratory ends up by becoming sectarian and does not achieve its baptismal vocation.

The mission ended with the Holy Mass of 12.00 on Sunday 18 March. Various lay people took part in the visits and various young people and others who made themselves available received at the end of the celebration the mandate to begin to dedicate a little of their time to bringing comfort in all the situations described above. The purpose of the mission was to sensitise the community itself to the problem of its sick people, with the invitation of Jesus “I was sick and you visited me”, and to constitute a group that would take care of our sick, elderly, alone…brothers and sisters of the community in order to alleviate their condition, conferring upon them the Ministry of Comfort of  pastoral agents of the mission. We hope that this will benefit the whole of the community and will bear a great deal of fruit for those who give and those who receive, and that the Lord will make us his unworthy instruments so that his face, through us, may encounter the gaze of every man who is thirsty and thirsty for Love. We thank those who work in our parish and in particular Sister Assunta who attended to the organisation of the whole mission with great dedication and care.