Catholic movement in Italy dedicated to people ‘far from the Church’

Prayer house at San Simeone, Italy, September 2012. / Credit: Courtesy of Ricostruttori nella preghiera

Rome, Italy, Apr 28, 2024 / 06:00 am (CNA).

Across Italy there are houses of prayer run by the Ricostruttori (Reconstructors) community, a Catholic movement dedicated to people who are far from the Church but attracted to spirituality, particularly Eastern meditation and Buddhist practices. 

The Reconstructors was founded in 1978 by Jesuit Father Gian Vittorio Cappelletto.

“During the postconciliar period, the Church was faced with the need for new forms of evangelization and apostolate, to reach out to people who were drifting away,” Don Roberto Rondanina, priest and superior of the Ricostruttori, explained to CNA. “It was a time when Eastern meditation, Hinduism, Buddhism, the New Age … were beginning to spread in Europe.” 

“Father Cappelletto, who lived in Turin, sought to understand the meaning of this ‘flight to the East’ and felt the need to find new forms of spirituality that were more experiential, closer to mysticism, open to mystery, allowing to touch one’s own interiority,” Rondanina said. 

To achieve this, Cappelletto drew some inspiration from Indian masters, recovering from their teachings forms of profound prayer with a Christian matrix, such as the famous “Jesus prayer” (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”).

“His encounter with the East was an opportunity to rediscover this vein, which had previously been confined to monasticism, particularly in the Orthodox Church, but which was not widely practiced here at the time,” Rondanina said.

The East that leads to Christ

Cappelletto then designed a meditation course for the public with some characteristics similar to Eastern forms of meditation.

“It wasn’t a lectio divina type of meditation; there was posture, breathing, silence, and it had a big impact in the ’80s and ’90s because it was something new,” the superior said. 

According to Rondanina, who is the first successor to the founder, who died in 2009, Cappelletto’s “strong intuition” was to adopt technical disciplines from the East containing certain aspects of physical and psycho-physical attention and orient them “towards Christ and the Church.”

“Furthermore,” he told CNA, “Father Cappelletto has deepened an anthropological vision that is lacking in the East: the human person seen as a unique person who must be valued. Eastern schools tend to move towards an experience of the impersonal divine, where the divine in myself and in others is more essential than anything that defines the person. In the Western Christian matrix, on the other hand, each person makes his or her own choices, builds his or her own life and retains his or her uniqueness, expressed also in the dogma of the Resurrection.”

The Reconstructors today

The movement launched by Cappelletto spread by word of mouth throughout Italy, from Piedmont to Sicily. Today, it is recognized as a public association of the faithful, encompassing people from various backgrounds and vocations. 

The community is made up of about 30 priests, a few laymen, and about 40 laywomen. In all, there are just under 70 consecrated people. The priests are incardinated in their dioceses, while the laypeople work outside — as bank officials, doctors, religious teachers, or employees of charitable organizations.

More than 200 associates have also joined the movement. They are not consecrated but participate in the charism of the community in some way. “But it is much bigger than that,” Rondanina said. “Many people frequent our houses; it’s difficult to quantify.”

The landscape has changed a lot since the early days. 

“Before, there were hardly any non-baptized people. People knew the Church. Today, we find people who are far away but who haven’t moved away, simply because they’ve never been close.”

As in the past, the Reconstructors centers offer a methodical evangelization program, beginning with meditation, raising awareness of the sacred dimension, and then providing Catholic teaching.  

The reconstruction of man

The name of the community — “Ricostruttori” — has a few different meanings. 

“Our community is linked to the manual labor of reconstruction, as many of our out-of-town centers for retreats have been reconstructions,” Rondanina explained. “We began by restructuring an old building (cascinali) that had been used as housing for women working in the rice fields in the 1950s.”

This work of reconstruction also symbolizes the inner rebuilding of the person. For Rondanina, who teaches philosophy, personal reconstruction is an ongoing journey. Likewise, “to keep a youthful movement, and not close ourselves off in dogmatic forms, we must always be searching.”

Spiritual growth, the priest added, “happens when you move from the phase where you think you’ve found the magic wand to solve all your problems, the initial phase of youth where everything seems rosy, to a phase of crisis, where you take a step forward. The kingdom of God advances like this, with the ability to see our limits, to rebuild ourselves time after time, to understand where we went wrong, to remove the dross to get to the essential things.”