Story of a Friendship in God

Without a beginning there is no continuity ... The beginning of the Small Community of the Porziuncola  arises out of an encounter.

Silvana Boschieri and I met in our student days at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, back in 1976. One day I was studying in the library when a student approached me offering me tickets for a raffle. The goal: buy beds for the Larco Herrera mental asylum in Lima. I replied, You no longer need to sell those tickets, I have the beds. The night before, my father had offered me 200 beds from a hotel which a friend had closed down. It was a sufficient number. An explosive joy rose up in both of us as we felt we were sharing in something good.

That morning of the 24th of December 24, both of us faithful to our classes, we met again in the Letters patio, frustrated that our teachers had not come. A mutual friend offered to take us to our homes. Along the way we begin to share the deepest longings of our lives, attuned to the word "community." From there began this communion in sisterhood sealed by God.

We began meeting in Silvana's house to read and share what we were living according to the Gospel of the week. Five young students: Silvana, Liliam Manzanero, Lilian Cavani, my sister Liliana and me. Every so often a Spanish priest accompanied us, full of vitality and wisdom (years later, I would ask him, the future Monsignor José Ignacio Alemany, Bishop Emeritus, to be Director of Radio Maria Peru). These meetings full of simplicity filled us with joy. The Jesuit spiritual director I had at the time and who led a youth group in which I had participated since age 15, asked me to choose a group. After a Holy Week retreat, in a deep discernment, I decided to stay with Silvana.

Then came the years of Soledad Mariana in Peru. Puri Garrido, a lay missionary, works as an architect and accompanies people who want to do the exercises of Bernardo Olivera, a Trappist monk who cultivates the Marian and contemplative spirituality.

The simple community of Santa Maria forms slowly, with Puri and Silvana (who makes the Franciscan experience of leaving home), who live in poverty in the apartment provided by my parents. After a couple of years, Silvana renews the covenant with God in Mary, as a consecrated layperson, a Marian contemplative in the movement. After the two years, she decided not to renew the private vow and, providentially, the Italian school where she worked offered her a scholarship to study in Italy.

I suggested that she take the Corso Internazionale Maria Montessori Casa dei Bambini in Perugia, near Assisi, as I had done previously. Silvana had obtained a degree in Education with a specialization in Preschool and also in the Student Guidance, in the PUCP, where she taught Methodology of the Faith in Preschool, also directing interreligious and ecumenical dialogue; this was in 1983 and 84. She will later study Psychology at the Salesian Pontifical University in Rome, choosing to deepen the thesis on the influence of the seminal figures in shaping the image of God in children. At the same time, I graduated with a degree in International Relations, specializing in Latin America, at the George Washington University, in Wash., DC.

Silvana, living in Umbria, grew in love for the land of St. Francis, already on her mind from her university days in Peru. In Assisi she not only would study Religious Studies, thereafter teaching in a lycée in Perugia, but would also marry and give birth to four children in the hospital where the nature that surrounds San Damiano is contemplated.

During all this time in which we took different paths, we realized, through our correspondence, that the good God was moving us in similar ways, as if we were taking parallel paths in spirituality. Each one of our encounters became a visitation! It was an explosion of joy in sharing what God was doing in us.

In 1987 I went to Rome to study Social Communication at the Pontifical Gregorian University (PUG). Over the next three years we shared our lives.How many times I went to Perugia at the end of the afternoon; we talked all night and I would take the first bus in the next morning to be on time for my classes! Silvana would come to Rome to pursue specialized courses in psychotherapy. They were intense years. After several years working in the Catholic Communications Media in Latin America and the US, in 2004 I returned to Rome to take some courses at the Pontifical Gregorian University. I began to participate in the group Marian Solitude which Silvana had organized in Perugia, which for me were very significant encounters, since they helped me reconfirm my spiritual geography is Marian and contemplative. It is in this period that we have our first intense experience that would open up for us the Small Community of the Portiuncula.

The seed of the small community of the Portiuncula (pc Pz) was sowed on the eve of the death of Silvana's father. He was hospitalized and I had gone to visit Silvana for a week. That night, November 7, feast of Mary Mediatrix of all graces, we stayed up late talking. Silvi, always with her great generosity of a sister, helped me clarify my life project. We talked until 2 or 3am. That Monday November 8 at 6:30 am the hospital called to report that Mr. Boschieri had died. I answered the phone. Silvana rushed to the hospital with her mother and I stayed with the 4 boys, who did not go to school.

Silvana returned a few hours later and told me that we would go to St. Mary of the Angels to pray for her father, for the plenary indulgence ...

"I stayed with him a while, a couple of hours ... and then . . . flowed from my heart  these words of the Lord: " ... let the dead bury the dead, I am the God of the living ..." And I strongly felt the urge to go Portiuncula in Assisi, that I had to go to get the plenary indulgence for my father; I asked Piero if he could take charge ... and I went home to pick up Fiore to go to the Porziuncola.

When I got home and saw Fiore, I shared with her the word that was emerging from my heart ... ", it was the same Word that Fiore had asked for me while praying with the Gospel . . . she was surprised at the unity in the Spirit that we experienced in ourselves . . . "

In the Portiuncula, Silvi had some motions that can only be understood by faith. God's promise to  Francis to take souls to paradise, through Mother Mary, was becoming a reality in her father. At the end of this motion she had another: that in Mary she live her mission beside me.

All this we kept in our hearts.

In July 2005, I went to Assisi, after a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Merciful Love, founded by Blessed Mother Esperanza, in Todi. We stopped for a little less than an hour. In the Porziuncola, making the plenary indulgence for a great uncle who had just died, I felt strongly: that place was my land! I pilgrim, who felt ashamed for not having a fixed place, had finally found "my land". It was a fleeting intuition. I felt peace.

Crypt of Mother Esperanza, Sanctuary of Divine Love, Collevalenza, Umbria

In 2009, on a visit I made to Silvana, she "informed" me that we would form the "Small Community of the Porziuncola" (pcPz). Who would be the members? Us two. I understood little ... But I gave my assent and we proceeded.

On September 18, 2011 we took a further step: after the 7:00 am Mass we renewed the third Covenant with God in Mary, in Marian Solitude, regarding the mission. We made explicit that we would live our contemplative Marian spirituality in the Small Community of the Porziuncola. We had some intuitions but nothing more, such as psycho-spirituality-House Peace, Porziuncola-forgiveness. Bernardo Olivera, Abbot General Emeritus of the Trappists, was in Assisi for a general chapter of this order. With great humility, respect and silence, he accompanied us as a witness, from the very last bench of the Porziuncola, together with the Trappist Abbess of the Abbey Mother of God in Michoacan, Mexico. Each of us then celebrated with a cappuccino and we split two croissants for the four of us. We shared crying  because we were laughing so much! A small feast.

Between 2012 and 2013 Silvana and I were "visited" by pain. Each one in her own way. Silvana already from 2011. And in this "via crucis" we began to understand more of what the Lord wanted to tell us for the pcPz.

In the midst of this Passover, the Good Lord gave us an original way to make our annual retreat of the pcPz: to meet in Rapallo, Liguria, to celebrate the anniversary of the apparition of the Virgin of Montallegro July 2, a day that for centuries the Church commemorated the Visitation. Just as an icon commemorating the Dormition of the Virgin is venerated in the sanctuary of the Porziuncola. The Celebration of the people maintain the tradition since 1557. And so, in our retreat, we began with Mass in the morning, we shared, we worked a topic, and went to the beach.

Sanctuary of the "Madonna di Montallegro" Rapallo

And during this retreat, we began writing what we intuited were the cardinal points of the Pz pc. It was to contemplateng the God's passing through our lives. We noticed that it gave us special grace to join us in our lives. Our solitude became solidarity. Pain was borne with good humor. Problems became more bearable sharing the consolations and illuminations of God. It was to "read" our life stories from God, in communion with the Church, feeling ourselves to be "daughters" of Bernardo.

From the beginning, Massimo, from Marian Solitude in Perugia, had wanted to participate in this new fellowship.

The day we made the third Covenant in Mary, in the Porziuncola, he too made it that same evening there (he usually went to Mass at St. Mary of the Angels).

A religion teacher like Silvana, in a lyceum, and Director of the Office of Catholic Religious Education for the Diocese, he is a consecrated person living a fine spirituality. His intuitions on the pcPz have been fundamental. His prayer accompanies and supports.

Our Covenants:

Small Community of the Porziuncola

Father God, I thank you for your action in my life and that of Silvana, creating, in your mystery, a small community, Porziuncola, lived in the Marian contemplative way of Marian Solitude. I pledge to contemplate this grace of Mary, to second it and to let you work in me, in communion, from this small community.

        Fiorella

Mary, the Father's favorite daughter, together with my children's prayer: "Jesus, Joseph and Mary, we are yours! Jesus, I trust in you," I tell you: I'm all Yours! with the intersession of John Paul II.

I am all Yours that God the Father's will be done in me, from this small community of the Porziuncola in the Marian and contemplative spirituality of Marian Solitude, so that we see with your eyes, love with your heart, embrace with your arms, in everyday life, from this small community, by the grace of the Porziuncola, of the plenary indulgence of Forgiveness, of St. Francis.

   Silvana

During the last European summer, Silvana felt called to write a daily email, which she called "The Little Porziuncola," where she shared parts of the liturgy of the hours, the gospel of the day and life in God with those of us who are part of this little community.

This correspondence was the basis for the "virtual community." And the virtual, join  the links of friendship, came with the mail IN MARIA. Silvana, since the end of last year, it had restarted faithfully pray the Liturgy of the Hours and Lectio Divina. On the eve of Pope Francis' entrusting the world to Our Lady of Fatima, on October 13, 2013, Silvana felt called to prepare this email, as prayerful communion.

Thank you for existing, for being my little joy Porciuncola where I rejoice and feel supported by you in my life way, sustained in this Joy of Grace, infinite love of the Father, in all of my human weakness in Mary, beholding Him who gives his life for us. ... I realize that these days that I am inspired in this small community of the Porziuncola, from her the soul's chords play, rise up to God ... and produce a melody for the soul: In Mary.

Thank you, Silvana

And now Silvi continues:

"Fiorella, on October 27 began your "Petrine" mission: to build the temple of living stones of friendship in God, to be found throughout the world. It is your visitation through the website."

On December 25, 2013 is born the "Little Community of the Porziuncola" on the web, with the name of "Porziuncola of the Heart". Just as on a distant Christmas we had shared our desires as young university students who were hearing the same tune with the word "community", beginning a fraternal communion sealed by God, we saw that the intuition that God had put in our hearts was coming true through this technological medium which we could not have imagined back then. Why on Christmas Day? We believe that the Small Community is like Baby Jesus, who was placed in our arms to take care of him with our humble prayers, so that he thus grow in our lives, and in this way we may become living stones in prayerful communion, where God is pleased and pours forth his mercy upon all.

It is a mystery woven throughout many years . . . Thanks to the accompaniment of Bernard, we have been able to put into words the graces received in the pcPz. We have understood that we have come to the Porziuncola of the Heart by the way of the cross, and there is no other way ...

Let us give thanks and glory to the Lord of Life!