SANT’EGIDIO
Sant’Egidio is a Christian community founded in 1968, just after the Second Vatican Council, on the initiative of Andrea Riccardi in a high school in the centre of Rome. Over the years it has grown into a network of communities in more than 70 countries, with a special focus on the peripheries and those who are part of them. It is made up of men and women of different ages and backgrounds who are united by a bond of fraternity based on listening to the Gospel and on voluntary and unpaid work for the poor and for peace.
In this sense, its fundamental concerns are prayer, the poor and peace.
- Prayer: it is their first work, a prayer based on listening to the Word of God which accompanies and guides his life. In Rome and throughout the world, the prayer of the Community is also a place of encounter and welcome for those who wish to listen to the Word of God and invoke the Lord.
- The poor: they are brothers and friends of the Community. Friendship with the needy –the elderly, the homeless, migrants, the disabled, prisoners, street and peripheral children– is one of the defining features of the lives of Sant’Egidio’s participants around the world.
- Peace: they believe that war is the mother of all poverty, and so they work to protect peace in those places where it is most threatened and to help rebuild it by facilitating dialogue where it has been lost. For Sant’Egidio, this work is a Christian responsibility; it is part of a wider service in favour of reconciliation and fraternity that takes the form of (among others) ecumenical work and inter-religious dialogue in the ‘spirit of Assisi’.
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