A Monday night prayer meeting at St. Columbkille Church, Brighton. At far right is BC graduate student Sarah Moses; on her lap is Isabel, daughter of Kerri Marmol ’01. Photograph: Gary Wayne Gilbert

October 4 was the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, perfect timing for a visit to Chestnut Hill by Marco Impagliazzo, president of the 40-year-old Community of Sant’Egidio, an international movement of Catholic lay people dedicated to prayer and friendship with the poor. In the early 1990s, the community, based in Rome, was doing charitable work in Mozambique when its volunteers began shuttling between rebels and the governing regime, long mired in a vicious civil war. Sixteen years of strife had taken the lives of an estimated one million people, and experts in international conflict resolution say hundreds of thousands more would have perished, if not for the peace treaty mediated over two years by Sant’Egidio (with help from the Italian government) and signed in Rome on October 4, 1992, Feast of St. Francis of Assisi.

Fifteen years later, to the day, Impagli­azzo was greeted at Boston College by an overflowing, multigenerational crowd in Gasson 100, where he delivered a lecture titled, “A Church of All Especially a Church of the Poor,” echoing a radio message by Pope John XXIII in 1962. The Sant’Egidio leader spoke often of St. Francis, bowing, as he did, in the direction of the front row to his left, where there sat a bearded man wearing a red cap and a brown Franciscan robe. That was Cardinal Sean O’Malley, OFM Cap, of Boston, who gave what was billed as a “response” to the lecture by Impagliazzo but was more like a homiletic reflection on the least of these.

The whole scene, including the scores of young men and women who turned out that night, was suggestive of how well the Catholic Church has been propagating its message about the poor ever since the time of “The Good Pope” John. Some say Catholic leaders have done a better job of this than perhaps they themselves intended. If we are to believe the sociologists and their opinion surveys, young adult Catholics tend to say that serving the poor is more important than any other aspect of their faith, including Mass attendance and certainly including the Church’s teachings regarding sexual ethics. During a brownies-and-coffee reception following the lecture, Dana Clasby ’06 echoed her Catholic cohorts. “To me, service to the poor is what makes the Church alive. It makes it a living faith, instead of just words and doctrines,” said Clasby, now a graduate student in the Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry, which cosponsored the lecture with the Church in the 21st Century Center.

Clasby is not a member of Sant’Egidio, though a pivotal crew of BC graduates are; five of them started praying together as students on the Heights in 1998, before launching Sant’Egidio of Boston, which now has 50 members and reaches out to the poor and elderly in nursing homes and housing projects. Like the other 50,000 members whom Sant’Egidio counts in 70 countries, the Boston members are a community but not a live-in community. They keep their day jobs and reside in their own homes, coming together three nights a week for sung prayer and Gospel readings, apart from their hours spent each week visiting with the poor. They emphatically do not see themselves as conducting a service program. It’s not volunteering, says Kerri Marmol ’01, one of the original BC five and the mother of two small children, who finds time to accompany elderly people on doctor’s appointments—“it’s really friendship.” Marmol is typical of Sant’Egidio members in the United States—urban and educated, clustering around chapters in New York City, Berkeley, Washington, D.C., Minneapo­lis–St. Paul, and South Bend, Indiana, in addition to Boston.

Impagliazzo seemed to be speaking for Marmol when he declared during his lecture, “The poor are stealing the heart of the Church today. The poor are not customers of the Church. They are part of its mystery.” Being close to them, he professed, is “an unfailing guarantee of salvation.” Impagliazzo, who was 15 years old when he joined Sant’Egidio in Rome in 1977, wasted little time getting to the Parable of the Last Judgment, in which Jesus tells his followers that what they do for the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the ill, the stranger, and the imprisoned, they do for him. “These are the roots of my speech here tonight in these prestigious surroundings at Boston College,” he said. Now a professor of modern history at the University of Perugia in central Italy, Impagliazzo spent much of his hour-long lecture providing what he described as “a few historical notes” about charity. He began with the early Christians who shared all, before he sailed through the Middle Ages, lifting up St. Francis as “the most eloquent expression” of both charity and its more illustrious relative, voluntary poverty. Then he spoke of how poverty “lost its sacred character” in the early modern era, as civil authorities began figuring out ways of separating the poor from others, through such inventions as public hospitals and laws that limited public begging.

“Charity entered the 20th century with dynamism and energy,” said the history professor, pointing to movements of solidarity with oppressed workers, but the charitable impulse, which is love, was smothered as Christians bayoneted each other on battlefields and as Jews were gassed in concentration camps.

Reading closely from a text in his halting English, Impagliazzo called his audience’s attention to a “globalization of charity” under way today, a movement of conscience around issues like hunger and the death penalty (which Sant’Egidio is campaigning against, alongside other organizations such as Amnesty Inter­national). But he’s not nearly as optimistic as those words would suggest. Speaking of injustice and disrespect for human life and dignity abroad in the world today, he said, “The general situation is disturbing”— although he was more upbeat about Christians, who are “experts in solidarity,” as he styled it, and are called to “keep the world from being arrogant in its happiness.” Cardinal O’Malley struck similar countercultural notes, intoning against a world that is “ever-more individualistic, addicted to entertainment, [and] materialistic.”

Questions from the audience indicated that at least some Catholics and their institutions could use a refresher course in solidarity. And Impagliazzo, now speaking in Italian through a translator, gave answers that seemed cast less from his somewhat abstract talk and more from his distinct commitments as a Sant’Egidio leader. (The cardinal had slipped out before the Q&A.)

When one man said that Catholic parochial schools were becoming havens for the well-to-do, that this was a “scandal,” and that the Church should sell off the schools, Impagliazzo gave a few sympathetic nods. He said Sant’Egidio has tried for years to get Catholic schools in Italy to reach out to gypsy children, but he doesn’t think the answer is to sell off everything. “It’s a long process,” he said, adding that the real answer is to continue trying to open the doors for the outcasts.

When a younger man asked what he, a busy, affluent American with responsibilities toward his own children, could do to “break down the structures” that marginalize the poor, Impagliazzo gave another understanding nod. He said the man should not apologize for tending to his own family’s needs above all, but he could also befriend just one poor person. “If you want ten [poor friends], that’s good. Twenty? That’s even better,” Impagliazzo said in Italian. “But the important thing is for the poor to be part of your life.”

Fifteen years ago, being friends with the poor of Mozambique meant helping to end a murderous conflict. More recently, the Sant’Egidio community has been drawn into another war, against the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa. Pushing governments to do more, the community acts on its own as well, bringing antiretroviral drugs and other lifesaving supplies to 30,000 of its friends across the continent.

William Bole is a writer based in Massachusetts.

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