The founder of the international lay movement of the Sant’Egidio Community explains how his group has been able to build peace, one conflict at a time.

When Andrea Riccardi and his high school friends began to help Rome’s poorest 42 years ago, they did not intend to work beyond the city. But the movement they launched now has about 50,000 members in more than 70 countries.

Along the way Riccardi realized that to help the poor it was necessary to promote peace, as his Sant’Egidio Community has done effectively in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Balkans. “Promoting peace and helping the poor are related aspects of trying to respond to today’s needs by drawing inspiration from the gospel,” he explains.

Riccardi has a quiet, friendly manner, open and ready to laugh, but when he talks about his community, the passion comes through. The student unrest of 1968 convinced him that humankind had to make a fresh start, but, unlike many of his peers, he saw that something more than politics was needed.

He still sees religious renewal as the answer: “Our churches have to become warmly human, they have to be real communities, not closed in on themselves. Churchgoers need to be involved in social issues to help society be an expression of solidarity because globalization makes it urgent for us to find ways to live amicably despite our differences.”

When people come to the Sant’Egidio Community to find out what it’s all about, Riccardi says, “My answer is, ‘Come and pray with us.’ It’s reading the Word of God each day and meditating on it, which clarifies the meaning of our work.” 

In elections earlier this year Italy’s center-left Democratic Party wanted you to run for governor of the region of Rome. Why weren’t you interested?

I’m convinced that I have to work in society and in the church, which is a broader field than engaging directly in politics and being involved with a party. I don’t disdain politics, but at the same time I don’t think it’s the be-all and end-all.

I didn’t even think so in 1968, when I was a student seeking what to do. Many of my companions chose political activity as the way to set the world right.

That was the year of student revolts in many countries, when young people demanded power to build a better world. Did you share this ambition?

We tended to be bold and confident at that time, whereas today many young people are uncertain because they are worried about the future.

After high school I felt the unrest and excitement because change was in the air. Like others at my school in central Rome, I wanted to change society. But the talk at that time, influenced by Marxism, was rather theoretical. I decided it was useless to change social structures without changing people, and dangerous to do so by using violence—in this I was influenced by reading the gospel.

Was this because of your Catholic family background?

I have a relative, a Benedictine monk, who was beatified in 1954, but my parents were not particularly Catholic. My father was a banker who joined the antifascist resistance movement during the Second World War. After the war he was opposed to the Christian Democratic Party because of the pressure in favor of the party exerted by some priests.

As a student I had doubts about religion. I didn’t much like my parish nor Catholic Action, which had become a breeding ground for Catholic politicians.

But I met a worker-priest who took me to the slums on Rome’s outskirts. The people living there were mostly migrants from southern Italy, laborers without steady jobs, women who served as maids in our homes. To me it was a shocking discovery: the Third World at our doorstep.

My group of school friends called it the New Frontier. I explored it on my Vespa motor scooter. We were seeking a way to live the gospel, and eventually we set up an after-school program to help dropouts return to regular schools.

That experience sparked discussions that persuaded me that I needed to know some theology as well as the gospels. I bought and read books by people such as French theologians Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, and Marie-Dominique Chenu, and the German theologian Karl Rahner.

These discoveries—both of the marginalized people and of the theologians—were perhaps my most formative.

How much were you influenced by the Second Vatican Council, which had just concluded?

It was in the air, but the church seemed far away. However, two outstanding priests helped us in our work. Carlo Maria Martini, who at that time was not yet a cardinal but rector of the Gregorian University, worked with us in his spare time in the 1970s, while Vincenzo Paglia, now bishop of Terni, was the first priest to work with us in a stable fashion.

Then in 1974 Cardinal Ugo Poletti, the vicar for Rome, convoked a diocesan conference on the social problems in the city. It was a people’s assembly: All were entitled to speak, and we did so. Until then we had called ourselves simply “the community,” but, as we had to give ourselves a name to address the conference, we chose “the Community of Sant’Egidio.”

Here’s the reason: We had worked from places on the outskirts or places we rented in central Rome, but they were too expensive. When we heard that Carmelite nuns had abandoned a damp convent at the Sant’Egidio Church in the Trastevere district, we squatted there. Eventually, seeing the work we did, the owners—the state—allowed us to use it for a peppercorn rent. So we became the Sant’Egidio Community. [Sant’Egidio—or St. Giles—was a miracle-working hermit in seventh-century France.] 

With the Rome diocesan conference the Second Vatican Council caught up with us. Although Pope Paul VI never visited us, Poletti did and he became interested in us.