The communion of goods (spiritual and material) and the economy that follows from it, is the first aspect of our life and is linked to the first point of our spirituality: God is love.

To live the communion of goods means to discover the love of God that invests our whole life.

We respond to God’s love by making it concrete in the love of our neighbour, which then becomes reciprocal. It is an experience that we have together.

From a letter of Chiara to her first companions and to the first communities: “Love one another as you love yourself. Is anyone without a job? We are all without work and everyone is looking for it.

Do with your communities what was said of the first Christians: there were no poor, because they put everything in common.”

Reciprocal love gave rise to the communion of goods.

A new mentality was born with the radicalness of the Gospel.

The “culture of giving” was being born and then multiplied in many social initiatives around the world, like the one you have been carrying out for years in Haiti.

Chiara’s inspiration was a seed and today there is a tree. A tree with many branches and other branches are being born today. For example, the Economy of Communion (EoC), born in Brazil when

Chiara was there in 1991, has given birth in more than thirty years to other realities as has happened recently with the Economy of Francis, in which the EoC has placed itself at the service of the

Church and the Pope.

As a charism, we function well when we put ourselves at the service of others. It’s good that we get together with each other, but then what do we do for others?

It’s like taking care of yourself in the morning but then you have to leave the house.

The charism of unity (that is, the gift that God has given us through Chiara) only works in this way. It works if you use it for others. If it is not used for others, it dies out. It’s like yeast that doesn’t

rise, like salt that has no taste.

If the yeast and salt work, with the flour (that is, with everyone else) they make excellent bread that everyone eats.

Our charism is specifically to help create unity with everyone.

But you have to be careful! It is not that others have nothing (they are the flour). Others have other charisms. We must know how to collaborate with other charisms. Collaboration highlights

reciprocity. We must not want to become masters of what we do for others.

In 1992, Chiara spoke of the typical evangelization of the movement:

“Increase the culture of giving. Giving to those who do not have, knowing that this way of using our goods has an enormous interest, because our giving opens the hands of God and he, in his

Providence, fills us up so that we can give even more and thus be able to meet the enormous needs of many people.”

In this regard, we advise you to read the new document recently published by the Center of the Movement, the “Communion Report”, which, as Margaret Karram (current president of the Focolare

Movement) says, “wants to be a first step towards a wide sharing of our economy (that is, our communion) in the Focolare Movement... the beginning of an ever greater sharing to be credible seeds

of hope that will contribute to renew the whole world.”

This report will soon be published in different languages and will be published annually.

To produce this first report, a lot of data and information was collected. To make it even better in the years to come, we are in the process of organizing ourselves here in North America.

As you may know, we started a project a few years ago to be able to account for and report on our entire life of communion. We began with an initial survey of the various members of the

Movement in Canada and the United States.

From this survey it became clear that there was a need for greater transparency in our reporting (i.e., how the funds that are the fruit of our communion are used) and also a modernization in how

everyone can participate in this communion to support all the different initiatives of the Movement.

A second requirement was the need for ongoing and updated formation in communion to keep this aspect of our charism alive.

Two working groups were created:

One on formation to this aspect which developed a beautiful formation program with the contribution of 25 groups of members of the movement throughout the zone. This program is already

available on a website. We hope that this training material can be used in groups and improved with everyone’s input as it becomes available in different languages.

A second group worked on modernization and the relationship of communion. Thus, a new digital platform (Kindful) was born which is linked to the Movement’s website in North America.  Through

the page “Donate” you can support all the initiatives of the Movement in North America. This site is open to members but also to all those who want to know more.

The new platform, in this first phase of testing, for the moment has only been made available in the United States and we would now like to extend it to Canada.

That is what we would like to talk about this afternoon.

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