By Michele Genisio – 16 July 2026
What does the “Pact of Unity”, made on 16th July 1949 in Tonadico, in the mountains of Trentino-Alto Adige, by the founder of the Focolare Movement and the parliamentarian Igino Giordani, still have to say to us today?
On 16th July 1949, Chiara Lubich, founder of the Focolare Movement, was sitting beside Igino Giordani, politician and journalist, on a red bench in Tonadico, in the province of Trento. He had just come out of a conference, while she had just left the little church.
They were facing a stream. It was summer, with beautiful mountains all around them. Chiara asked Giordani: “Do you know where we are?”
It was an almost embarrassing question. The wise politician and writer could have replied: well, obviously, we are in Tonadico, sitting on a red bench beside a stream on a summer’s day. But that was not what Chiara meant.
She wanted to open his eyes too to the extraordinary mystical experience she had just had in the little church—an experience later known as Paradise ’49, which would accompany her for some time.
It is striking that Lubich did not ask him: “Do you know what happened to me?” or “Do you know where I have been and what I have seen?” Instead, she asked: “Do you know where we are?”
She used the word we: the present tense, in the first person plural. What she had experienced, therefore, was not simply a beautiful personal experience, but a reality that had been imprinted upon her soul, like a mark made by fire. And it was not hers alone: she wanted it to be imprinted on Giordani’s soul too.
The question “Do you know where we are?” is so profound and so luminous that I believe we should ask it of ourselves many times throughout our lives: when we are in a hospital bed; when pain is intense and hurts everywhere; when we are alone in a care home; when life seems like a terrible solitary climb; when we find ourselves alone in a devastated marriage; in a desperate financial situation; when we have serious problems with our children; when we are alone and filled with resentment towards others and towards life; or when we are depressed and see everything painted in black, as Mick Jagger sang.
“Do you know where we are?”
In a hospital bed? Alone in my house? Yes, we could answer like that, just as one could have replied: we are in Tonadico, sitting on a red bench beside a stream on a summer’s day. But, obvious and objectively true as that answer may be, it is not the deepest truth.
There is another reality beyond the one we can touch—a more authentic reality, which Chiara Lubich called “the Uncreated”. It is there that we can turn our gaze; it is there that we can dwell. And from there we can see everything from a completely different perspective. There we find truth and the source of love.
We can then realise that this reality is stronger than the I—I suffer, I am alone, I am depressed—because it is rooted in the we: the invisible threads that bind us to one another.
And even if things do not change—if the hospital bed remains, or the marriage remains devastated, just as the red bench remained—everything changes. We see and live differently, in claritas, in the light.
It is a wonderful experience, yet one within everyone’s reach. All that is needed is the courage and the wisdom to ask ourselves the question that Chiara Lubich asked Igino Giordani:
“Do you know where we are?”