Fifty years have passed since two Claretian missionaries, Roberto Rocchi and Angelo Cupini, moved from the Claretian seminary in Lierna to Malgrate, in the province of Lecco, in October, to live in an apartment building in via Gaggio 52 to accompany and share the lives of young vulnerable people.

Our choice, approved by the religious superiors, has been transformed over time: from attention to drug addicts, to immigrants, to dialogue between civil and religious experiences.

After fifty years, we ask ourselves how has it been possible to live such a long time?

God has accompanied us in the trust that our religious superiors have had; there have been ‘normal’ families who have welcomed us and opened their homes to hospitality; the adhesion of lay people, women and men, to this life project. People have enveloped us with their goodness and made us do things we would never have imagined.

We seem to be rereading some pages from the early days of the church.

The name we chose as indicative was that of a postal address reference, but in the ancient Longobard language gaggio meant the common forest where people used to go to get wood for the life of the house. It is a name that has served us well. 

This is how we tried to make our life: welcoming, economically sustained by the professional work we did, attentive to the transformations of the area. We walked a lot, moving with every signal that came our way. We listened to what people pointed out to us, we bet together on the lives to be resurrected; we trusted the Word.

The tiny Claretian presence walked by supporting everyone’s life (that is, we made it possible for everyone to realise their own life project). The association ‘Community of Via Gaggio’ has fostered the realisation of work activities, but we have not become masters of them. 

We thus experienced the development of a charism at the service of a territory.

In harvesting these fifty years we have no purchased property, we think we have diluted the seed of the charism, of a model of life that is that of caring for others, of listening to the Word, of loving Justice, as we wrote on the wall of the house a few years ago, of a normal sharing between lay and religious.

To be at the service of life in all things and not to use oneself to expand one’s own area of influence, even religious.

For the past three years, the presidency and board of directors of the association has been in the hands of lay people, faithful to their choice of life.

We did not want to add the adjective Claretian to their choice of life so that their lay roots would be declared.

In continuing (or bidding farewell to) this experience, Roberto and I think we have remained faithful to mercy; we think we have put words, gestures and paths of peace into circulation.

What has the Institute gained from our presence?

We have certainly not been enriched with material goods; we have dedicated our lives to being useful; we have dialogued with the churches and with humanity, always starting from the most marginal point.

We have lived like everyone else, working and collaborating. We have reduced the violence of people on people. We have accompanied lives destined for ruin and nonsense. We keep the names, and we have written them on the Wall of Memory at the House on the Well, of a hundred or so people who have lived this experience and who have crossed the river.

We have always walked on the edge with the will to remain there so that the steps were possible for everyone.

Angelo Cupini