Week of prayer for Christian unity, a special opportunity to go out into the streets of Rome and invite passersby to enter a church and pray for this intention. Last Saturday, January 21, a group of parents and brothers from the Legionaries of Christ did just that: they headed to the Church of the rectory of Santa Barbara dei Librari, a small church near Campo dei Fiori, and there, as on other occasions when they organized this activity called StreetFaith, they began to invite people to pray for this intention inside the Church.
Alfonso León Sánchez, LC, Colombian and philosophy student, tells us that at one point a group of people approached them. “They were Orthodox Christians who had come to Rome on a pilgrimage. Immediately, the dialogue flowed. They were there – he explains – because it was the week of prayer for Christian unity. They came from Syria and Iraq.” Catholics and Orthodox sharing faith experiences, of which Brother Alfonso especially remembers the following: “One of the women told us that her brother had just been ordained a priest in Iraq in a church that had just been bombed…”.
The brothers, for their part, explained to them what their activity of inviting people to pray for Christian unity consisted of, “and in that big cross, where people write their intention on a post-it, they wrote theirs in Arabic: for the unity of Christians, for peace in their countries, and for persecuted Christians because of their faith.”
The encounter concluded with everyone praying the Our Father, each in their own language. Brother Alfonso explains to us that it was an experience that moved him: “You are not alone on this path, and although I am Colombian and in Rome, I am united to the suffering of all of them. As the Pope has explained in recent days: if one suffers, we all suffer. And if one rejoices, we all rejoice.”
