Christian group sees salvation in the foreigner

When Ibrahim Rugova was released from house arrest in Belgrade during the Kosovo war there was particular joy and relief among the members of the Sant'Egidio Community. NATO halted air strikes to allow the pacifist Kosovo leader to fly into Rome, where Sant'Egidio is based. One of the first to talk with Rugova was the Italian priest, Father Vincenzo of Sant'Egidio, who had helped secure his release. He and Rugova had worked together only last year on an agreement with Milosevic which allowed Albanian students attend schools in Kosovo for the first time in years.

Those days of dialogue soon gave way to the suffering we witnessed earlier in the year. The terrible logic of ethnic cleansing seems the logic of our century. The lesson would appear to be that it is impossible for different peoples to co-exist. To be different can get you killed.

As Christians trying to change the world, the Community of Sant'Egidio currently numbers some 15,000 members. It has given rise to similar communities in Italy and 23 other countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe (including Dublin).

Sant'Egidio is based among the poor and underprivileged. Volunteers run soup kitchens and shelters for the homeless and the many immigrants, they visit the elderly and build real and lasting friendships with them, they help people suffering from AIDS and help the handicapped. They also struggle against racism and anti-Semitism.

Members strongly oppose capital punishment and all forms of violence, legal and illegal. Recently they have funded from their own pockets the continued operation of a hospital in the tiny African country of Guinea-Bissau which has been devastated by war.

Some of the community, who are qualified doctors and medical staff, have gone out there to help train the locals. Their motto is non soltanto io, "not just me", and this is truly reflected in their service to the poor.

The community sees the victims of war and conflict as the poor and have been active as peacemakers. Every year since 1986 the community has organised an inter-religious prayer-for-peace conference to promote understanding among world religions and a common desire to be peacemakers.

In October of 1992 Sant'Egidio staked its claim as a true peacemaker by bringing about an accord between Mozambique's Frelimo (government) and Renamo (guerrilla movement) factions, after a 16-year civil war. That accord is still intact and world diplomacy now refers to the Mozambique process as the "Rome formula", a term coined by the previous UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

The community is also involved in difficult peace negotiations in other parts of the world, such as Guatemala, Sudan, Angola and even, indirectly, in Northern Ireland. It was most notably involved in attempting to broker dialogue in Algeria when it managed to bring all the parties except the government to Rome for talks. As a result, Andrea Riccardi (the founder) has had his life threatened and is supplied with a bodyguard by the Italian government.

FOR its tireless and discreet efforts towards peace, the community was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. Supporters of the nomination were the Archbishop of Algiers, Cardinal LeonEtienne Duval, the Islamic University of Rabat and Bartolomeos I, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. Even politicians such as Mikhail Gorbachev and President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe have endorsed the candidacy of the Sant'Egidio community.

However, the primary function of Sant'Egidio is spreading the good news of the Gospel. Since the beginning it has met for prayer in the little church of St Egidio (from which it takes its name). Time for prayer is an important source of strength and solidarity for the entire community.

The life of this community is a life according to the Gospels lived in a complex society. This is a difficult equilibrium, but so far the Community of Sant'Egidio has managed to maintain it. The 30 years of its existence and what it has achieved in that time are proof that a radical Christianity is relevant to today's world and that lay communities, in the spirit of the early Christians, will be part of the future for a modern church.

As Christians we are an Easter people not belonging to a tribe or a particular nation, but to a world made up of different peoples co-existing in the spirit of Pentecost.

It is this spirit which drives the men and women of the community working in the Kukes refugee camp on the Macedonian border as volunteers, doctors, teachers, helpers, caring for some of the most unfortunate people in our world at this time.

It is a world polluted by tribalism, and yet tribalism seems an easy disguise for more sinister elements, such as the arms trade and the economic stranglehold placed on indebted Third World countries.

Billions of dollars are spent on making war while entire countries remain in dire poverty and misery. Every day 40,000 children die in the world from hunger or related causes, the equivalent of a small town disappearing.

Can it really be true that, two thousand years after Christ the pacifist shared the loaves and fishes with the crowds, we are entering a third millennium with the shame that human beings are still dying from hunger and war?

Contrary to the illogic of ethnic cleansing, Christianity teaches that the stranger, the foreigner, is a blessing. Jesus was himself a foreigner in Jerusalem as the Dubliner is in Belfast. Salvation comes from the foreigner.

As Christians we have hope. In Indonesia the corruption of the government caused a economic crisis, as a result of which the tiny Christian minority are persecuted and killed because they are different.

Even there, among such unprovoked hatred, a Christian community of mainly Indonesians tries to promote peace and reach out to the oppressed Chinese minority.

And in Rwanda a small community of Hutu and Tutsi Christians prays together and administers to the poor, witnesses that peoples can live in peace even after the greatest of evils.

Garry O'Sullivan is a member of the Sant'Egidio Community in Dublin