"Here the encounter with the other, the openness to the different, does not represent a choice but a fact, our daily life".
With a full and round voice, an Apulian cadence that more than forty years lived in the Middle East cannot hide; Father Quirico Calella, a Franciscan of the Holy Land, has been in Tripoli for eight years, a port city in northern Lebanon, the second largest city in the country after the capital Beirut.
Where does your vocation come from? What prompted you to leave your country and reach Lebanon?
Vocation is not something that is discovered in an instant; It is a journey that takes a long time. I remember when as a child I met two Franciscan Friars of the Custody of the Holy Land; that encounter that marked me to the point of deciding to go to Rome to attend the Minor Seminary. From here began a journey that led me, as soon as I came of age, to leave for the Holy Land: I still remember my father's tears at the airport, it was a shock that forced me to search even more for the reasons for my choice.
After ordination in Rome in 1975 I was sent to Nazareth where I remained for eighteen years and then transferred to Acre where for twenty-one years I was parish priest and rector of the Catholic School. In 2016 I had already started several projects, but my Superior asked me to abandon everything to move to Tripoli in Lebanon, a country I did not know in any way. I left out of obedience and, once I arrived, I worked hard to fit into my new home; However, I found a certain closure on the part of the people I met, it seemed that no one wanted to allow me to access this world.
So, a whole new shock...
Yes, a new trial that I found myself facing in my vocational journey. What allowed me to go forward was, on the one hand, the trust I had in my superiors who had thought of me for this task, and on the other, my desire to discover God's plans in this place. So I started working and organizing events to promote and make our Mission known; a method that continues today and that has allowed not only Christians but also many Muslims to be informed about the many projects we are working on.
For example?
In recent years we have built a sports center where we host a summer camp for children and where there is also a judo gym where they hold competitions at national level; a paediatric clinic was then opened that we called Francis and the Sultan – a name that implies our intention to create a place of dialogue and support for anyone in need, to which this year we have also associated gynecology. In addition, we distribute food and drug packages and help families pay school fees in a society that in recent years has seen an exponential growth in the number of poor people, even among Christians.
What does it mean to promote dialogue in Lebanon?
For more than 800 years, the Custody of the Holy Land has been working every day to promote encounter with others; After all this time, one would expect a greater result than the current one, but this is not the point. Instead, it is necessary to continue to work and leave the task of pulling the strings to God.
In 2021 I dedicated, together with some friends, to writing the musical opera "Francis and the Sultan": the result was a show that we staged four times, twice in Tripoli and twice in our capital. In particular, on March 25, 2022, the exhibition took place at the UNESCO headquarters in Beirut; On that occasion, a large part of the national government, which had not met for some time, met to attend the event.
Usually, when a crisis breaks out, areas such as music are the last to be revived; we, on the other hand, wanted them to be the first: these, in fact, are the essential tools to start again and to allow our mission to become, with the help of St. Francis, a real center of dialogue and encounter.
Article by Alberto Perrucchini
Photographs (the first, the second and the one in evidence) by Giovanni Dinatolo
