I wrote earlier today about a loveless society. Here’s a countersign.

You might recall an interview I did with Giovanni Zennaro about the Cascina San Benedetto project. From that piece:

RD: The Benedict Option needs Christians to think creatively about ways we can construct communities and institutions within which we can live out the faith through hard times to come. Tell me how you and your friends are responding to this challenge?

GZ: Let me start by talking about my initial approach to the Benedict Option. I discovered your book in 2017, while I was completing my novitiate to become a Benedictine Oblate (lay member of the Order of St. Benedict). For me, it was a very happy discovery for two different reasons: not just because it offers useful insights to live the Christian faith in our post-Christian Western world, but also because it is inspired by St. Benedict and the Benedictine monks, the religious family I’m a member of.

At that time, my wife and I were starting to realize that our friendship with a couple of other families was taking a certain direction. During our usual Sunday meetings we were spontaneously adopting a kind of routine: the Holy Mass, the lunch together, a time dedicated to conversation, Vespers, the dinner. These very simple things turned into good regular practice. We felt the need to maintain and cultivate that practice.

Reading The Benedict Option was what made us wonder: why don’t we make this friendship stable? “Stable” stands for the Benedictine stabilitas loci. It means to choose a place and a community, considering them as the main tools for living a fully Christian life – not because a place or a community have value per se, but because being loyal to them helps one’s own Quaerere Deum(search for God).

We started talking about this with some wise friends, including some Benedictine monks from different Italian monasteries. Thanks to their guidance, we developed the idea of living together in the same place, as a group of families that share some material goods and a spiritual path, through a rule of prayer to be respected every day. That’s what you can read in the Acts of the Apostles about the first Christian community in Jerusalem (2:42-47), and that’s what the monks do in their monasteries.

We called our community life project “Cascina San Benedetto” (“St. Benedict House”; the word “Cascina” means a particular kind of country house, typical of northern Italy). A year ago we started spreading the first version of our manifesto, in order to ask friends and religious communities to pray for us. We recently published a new version of it, hoping that it will help us to collect the necessary funds to start. We need some money to buy and renovate the first apartments and some community spaces for prayer, school activity and meetings with other people interested in spending some of their time with us.

After publishing that interview, and an Italian website publishing an Italian translation of it, lots of people contacted Giovanni for more information about the Cascina project (read more about it in Italian, English, or German here, and find out how to reach Giovanni).

On Saturday, a big group (“40 people we don’t know,” said Giovanni, merrily) descended upon Giovanni and Alice’s apartment in the countryside northeast of Milan for a meeting to talk more seriously about establishing the community. Father Vincent Nagle, an American priest stationed in Milan, celebrated mass for them. I’m eager to hear more from Giovanni about how the discussions went, but I want to share the photo with you now, and to encourage all of you by the news from the Cascina. These are young Christian families who are taking the Benedict Option message seriously, and putting something together for themselves and their children.

Be of good cheer! The work is hard — I know exactly how hard, and for how long, Giovanni and his friends have been at this — but it’s starting to pay off.