Born eighty years ago, in the aftermath of the Second World War, from the intuition of Cardinal Domenico Tardini, later Secretary of State, as a laboratory of hope in what was at the time a newly urbanized area of Rome, but with the dome of St. Peter’s visible, Villa Nazareth carries forward a necessary dialogue between faith, culture and charity, especially in favor of the most disadvantaged young people. In changed times but in which the new generations always need relationships of brotherhood, the peculiar birthday was sealed by the meeting with Leo XIV in the Hall of Blessings of the Apostolic Palace. Trainers, students, associates, former students, friends and spiritual assistants met with the Bishop of Rome to be confirmed in a mission that has already accompanied more than 1300 students to graduation.
A vocation which, in his greeting address, was highlighted by Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, illustrating its inspiring values, those of the Social Doctrine of the Church, to which were later also added the calls for generosity and a sober lifestyle, as desired by Cardinal Achille Silvestrini, guide and teacher of Villa Nazareth in the transition to the new millennium, “thoughtful guardian and modern interpreter of the original charism”, in the words of the cardinal before the Successor of Peter. Parolin had previously focused on the “challenge” of communion, celebrating mass before the “great moment of communion” with the Pope: “The feast of the Holy Trinity, from which the Church and everything in the Church is born and nourished, makes us reflect on this new constitutive dimension”, in which everything happens in communion, “ever more true, ever more profound, ever more real between us”.
