The Cenacolo Community, Florida (United States)

From the Holy Spirit’s intuition, through a consecrated woman, Sr. Elvira Petrozzi, The Cenacolo Community was born in 1983. It was an answer from the tenderness of God the Father to the desperate shout of many youngsters, tired, unhappy, addicted to drugs, and for people in general, who were looking for happiness and the true meaning of life.
Many people collaborate with the Community: volunteers, consecrated and families, all helping freely in this work.
The Community’s "Mother House" is located upon Saluzzo´s hill, a city in Cúneo province (Piemonte), in the northwest of Italy. Since its foundation, many new Fraternities of the Cenacolo have been born. There are actually 51 all over Italy and other parts of the world.

How long have you been in the Community?
I’ve been a member of the Community for five years, and helped the organization full time in the States for over eight years.

What was your life like before meeting the Community?
I come from a good family, who tried to teach me good and pure values. During my adolescence I used to frequent the parish, like so many other youngsters of my time. When I was around 17, I started rebelling against society and family. I started to go with a different group of people, very unpollitically correct and rebelious. All that took me little by little begenning with light drugs. In my time, it was the begining of drugs, especially in the villages. We were few and thought that with drugs we would be able to change the world. But it was a great lie, instead of changing the world, we changed ourselves, becoming little by little a slave to drugs.

Why did you start with drugs?
I started on them thinking myself superior to the rest of the world; also as a means of hiding the fears and defetcs that I had as a young person. Drugs were a substance that filled all the empty holes .

Why did you go to the Community?
Through the cross my drug addiction supposed. As I’ve already said, at first there is an ideal, but it turns into slavery. In my long period of addiction, I went down many times, but in some way or another, with my familiy’s help, I seemed to get better, untill my idealistic world broke down. I was always convincd that I’d be able to pull thrugh on my own, and looked for many excuses inside me, but I got to a point were the earth just seemed to open before my feet. I lost everything, I had no life, I was in darkness. And I asked for help.

How did you get to know about it and what was you first encounter with Sr. Elvira like?
I had heard about the Cenacolo because the mother house was near the village I come from and two of my friends had entered there in its beginnings. My first encounter with Sr. Elvira was accidental. I had gone to the Community to visit a cousin ( he’s now a priest of the Community of the Cenacolo),who was doing social services. After a short visit around the house with my cousin, we bumped into Sr. Elvira coming out of the chapel. Without even asking my name she started shouting at me and saying all kinds of things with a great force. I don’t remembr very well all the details and I wouldn’t like to repeat them, but you can imagine. It wasn’t a pacific conversation, and what called my attention was the strength of her voice and that everything she said was true. I would certainly have walked away any other time, leaving her shouting to thin air, but I stayed till the end. But I wasn’t prepared yet to take the step, I still had a trip to India, but Sr. Elvira’s words stayed inside me, and it was only a year later, more desperate than ever, that I went into the Community.

What is the Community’s charisma, it’s mission?
The community’s charisma is to believe strongly that through faith and God´s word we can change our life. That´s how we are able to believe in the young people, those who once lost, desperate, destroyed, and marginalised from society, can turn back to life and believe again in themselves, because the Community believes in them.

How was it born?
It came from a small religious named Sor Elvira, who in a given moment of her consecrated life, had that desire to help young people. In those days, twenty years ago, ther were very few institutions who looked after drug-addicts. She felt that need, and had to wait for permission from her superiors to start anything. Saluzzi´s town council had this great villa. It was very old and worn down, and no one had lived in it for years. With the help of a sister and a lay person from the Community, the Cennacolo was born in the summer of 1983, on the feast day of our Lady of Mt. Carmel. What it had to be like, not even Sr. Elvira knew, but there was a new hope and a total trust in Providence.

What is asked of a boy with drug problems who wants to become part of the Community?
To be allowed in you must have some interviews, and then some days of trial in the various houses of the Community. The interviews are made by the same young people who were once drug-addicts and are now living in the Community, as they were just like that same young man who is before them asking for help. This creates a different relationship, and who is able to know better the drug addicts than those who were once drugaddicts themselves? It can be a very long process, but it really depends on the young person’s will to change his life, and whether or not he has reached the bottom.

On what does the Community base itself, so as to help a young person leave drugs?
There are no special therapies, long courses, paid specialist... The base is the "Christ- therapy", that is, to start a new way of faith. It´s not easy at the beginning, as most of the young people have lost everything they had, includding faith in themselves. The way is accompanied by work, especially manual work, discipline, perseverance, sacrifice, truth, humility... in one word, christian values. That is why our Community is called a "school of life".

What is the minnimum staying time required?
The minimum time is three years, but we understand that each person is different, and must give them sufficient time to get over it. We have no hurry in turning the boys back to the street.

What is the value of sacrifice in the Community?
The boys live in the Community. There are no commodities. The furniture is very simple, there’s no T.V., no radio, no magazines, no music, no girlfriend nor wife. You can’t do whatever you want, because we aren’t able to use the freedom we had before. Today’s young people have everything they want, and nobody asks anything of them. Many are unhappy, even though they might not fall into drugs. The world, and families are not exigent anymore, and sadly, many genarations of young people are being created who must be given everything. We ask them to give themselves totally because we believe in their worth and value.

Why do you ask this of the young people?
It’s part of community life, and it helps them as training for their future life, when they will have a family, kids to whom they will have to listen and for whom they will have to wake up in the middle of the night and help their wife. To build a house, learning how to do it by doing different jobs, listening to their brothers, sacrificing hours of sleep at night-time, sacrificing free time so as to be able to do the wash...

How does this help them in their situation?
It helps them to forget about themselves and their selfishness.

By what means does the community live?
It lives by providence. It keeps itself up by trusting in the knowledge that God won’t abandon us, but that doesn’t mean we just sit with our arms crossed. You work hard eight hours a day, we eat what we we have and learn to go without things if we don’t have them, without complainig about it. We don’t go to any supermarkets, all the food we have is brought by people, who many times we dont even know who they are. We work the land and learn to appreciate its friuts. As I’ve already told you, many of us were very spoiled.

What does it mean to "live off" providence?
It means to trust in God, who is there and will provide for us. And we see that every day in our 50 fraternities all over the world. We are in rich countries and poor countries. There are no barriers for God, and we have over 1500 people in the Community.

Why have you chosen to live by providence?
Sr. Elvira quickly chose that way of living because she didn’t want to accept the Government’s helps. We don’t want to have any supervision on our work.

Isn’t it a risk, you being such a numerous community?
There’s no risk about trusting in God, and if Sr. Elvira had to go back, she wouldn’t give it a second thought and she would do it the same way.

What place has God, the Eucharist and prayer in your Communities?
God is a living presence in all our chapels. Prayer is the centre of our community life, without it we would be a normal community like so many others. We start our day at six o’clock with prayer, praying the rosary on our knees, as a way of thanksgiving for the gift of life. We have Sunday mass, and weekly mass whenever a priest is around. There’s perpetual adoration in all our houses, and every moment of the day we know there is someone praying somewhere for us.

What is the Virgin’s role in your life?
I’m very devoted to Our Lady, because she guides and protects us, in the commmunity and outside it. I pray the Rosary every day, it’s a continual advocation to Mary our Mother.

Could you tell us what a day at the Community is like?
The day, as I said before, starts at six o’clock. We quickly go to the chapel to pray the Joyous mysteries of the rosary.Then we have some time in which we read the day’s reading and we share thoughts about it. We have breakfast at seven thirty, and at eight we start woking. We eat at twelve, and then have some free time until one thirty. We work until five thirty or six, and during that time we pray the Sorrowful mysteries. When we finish, we go to wash ourselves before going to the Chapel. There we pray the Glorious mysteries and read a passage from the Gospel.Then we share our day. Problems come out, and many discussions are started, which we analyze with total truth, without fear of offending anyone. All that is done in the Chapel, with a spirit of help.

What importance does work have?
Work is really important in the Community because it prepares the way for the future. Many of us were frequently changing work, we weren’t responsible and didn’t want to work. In the Community we learned to do all sorts of things, even those we didn’t like. We change jobs every certain time, and that way learn to do all kind of things while our perseverance and constananse grow stronger.

And friendship?
We learn true friendship, without any type of interests. We live in the same place with other boys twenty-four hours a day. And even if you don’t put up with some of them, you live with them and learn to be their friend. We tell each other the truth, and that creates a real friendship without any kind of compromise.

What are the reasons that push a young people to start drugs nowdays?
There is no complete answer to such a question, but I think that the problem might begin, even before kids get on drugs, in the problems which affect families, in the lack of dialogue, in faers, in the relations they have with girls. Drugs are a refuge and at the same time a kind of filler for all the emptiness that youngsters have nside them, producing the illusion that all is well.

Do you think there exists a "preventive mdicine" that might help young people not to fall into drugs?
It’s difficult to find one, because we don’t have a magic wand, but there are small changes we could do to prevent the problem.

Which ones?
I think we find the root in families. We should think over once more the concept of dialogue, of the meaning of sacrifice a family might ask from a son. Nowadays they are given everything. There is too much freedom: they have easy access to television, to computer, to music, where lots of wrong messages reside and confuse the kids. They become lost. A path of faith in the families surely helps dialogue with the children. Another problem is that many times families are broken up, and those who pay for the parents selfishness are the kids.

What would you say to a young person with drug or alcohol problems?
I tell him to go to the Community, because he won´t be able to get out of it on his own. Sometimes he can kind of cover it up, but the problem is really inside him, and he takes it wherever he goes.

©HM Magazine No.132 - September/October 2006