The Provincial Superior, Sr Mary S. describes the solidarity of the India Group as follows: on the one hand there is the support work, on the other the material work, on the ground, “It is like breathing with two lungs”. Sister Mary uses this powerful appeal, lungs, to describe the support, especially financial, that has been coming to her congregation from the India Group for years. For religious sisters working in many difficult places, such as Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, the Group’s help proves to be fundamental in supporting children who live in the middle of the street, those who are disabled, those who have no access to food. “The poor teach us,” explains Sister Mary, “that, as St Vincent de Paul says, they are our masters and we are at their service,” which is what happens thanks to the common journey of the religious sisters and the India Group and its small gestures to “make love for the last ones concrete”.
Let’s know the India Group, for whom every stranger is a brother
Francesca Sabatinelli and Federico Piana – VaticanNews, 21 December 2023
The charitable organisation, founded by Jesuit Father Mario Pesce, has continued since 1980 to support the actions of various religious institutions in the poorest areas of the world. President Marco Petrini: opening our hearts to those who remain unknown but are our brothers.
Father Pesce’s project
The Group has been carrying out this mission since 1980, when, close to Christmas, Jesuit Father Mario Pesce decided to involve some of his students from the Massimo Institute – the Jesuit school in Rome – in a trip to India. It is from there that the Group that continues Father Pesce’s commitment took shape: that of Christian solidarity through the help of individuals and families, and that today, from the fifty or so children he helped at the beginning, has come to support thousands and thousands all over the world. Recounting the birth of Gruppo India is a pupil of Father Pesce, who is now its president, Marco Petrini. His memory goes back to that 1980, when as a student he followed his teacher to go and dig a well “in a new mission of the Canossian Sisters, in a village on the border between the Indian states of Maharashtra and Gujarat”. It was an adventure for Petrini and the other 14 classmates who left with him to join the Jesuit, “who had already taught us the true meaning of charity, of brotherly love”.
A network of generosity
This is where the ‘adoption scholarship’ initiative destined for India and many other countries around the world, 30 countries in all, gets underway. With 16 euros a month, one can give, explains Petrini, “the possibility to a group of children, to attend school up to high school and thus have the possibility of a better future, to have a job, to have many new prospects in life that were unimaginable at the beginning”. At the same time, it is an initiative “of true Christian solidarity” that asks, the president adds, “to open one’s heart to a child, to a group of distant children who do not know each other, who will remain unknown, but who are our brothers”. An invitation to conversion taken up by many, and not only in Rome, many ‘drops that every month make a sea of solidarity’. The India Group, Petrini goes on to explain, is an intermediary between the ‘generosity of people and those on the other side who carry out these initiatives’, because it takes care of collecting and sending the sums to the Group’s partner religious institutions, such as the Jesuits, the Sisters of Charity of Saint Jeanne Antida of Sister Mary, the Canossian Sisters and the Maestre Pie Venerini Sisters, all realities through which works ranging from education to health, from self-development initiatives to the supply of water and electricity are carried out.
The tireless commitment of the Sisters
An eyewitness to the activities of the India Group is Luisa Marolla, a retired paediatrician, a regular donor for 40 years who, on her return from a trip to Andra Pradesh, where the Canossian Sisters operate, decided to recount in a letter her amazement at the activities carried out by the nuns alongside lonely women, children, the elderly, AIDS patients and even untouchables, and at the joyful welcome she received on her arrival, not only from the Canossian Sisters, but from all the people she met. “Marolla writes, ‘What is being told does not give the slightest idea of the commitment of the sisters, of the hardships they face, travelling kilometres and kilometres on foot, or at most by scooter’. The nuns “work without ever stopping, they go around the villages, house to house, sometimes even with a ‘mobile clinic’, to provide immediate medical support, regardless of whether they are Christians, Hindus or Muslims; they uncover hidden realities such as sick children locked up at home waiting to die, because their parents do not want or cannot take them to hospital, or undernourished, sick elderly people abandoned by their children”.
Christmas is charity towards one’s brother
A bursary can give the right to education to a child living in a developing country, helping them to escape exploitation and receive a substantial and dignified meal. A donation can support, in India for example, children suffering from blindness, preventing them from experiencing neglect and marginalisation. A donation can also bring a smile back through micro-credit, which enables groups of women to undertake production activities, or through the construction of wells, cisterns and brick-built cottages with concrete floors and toilets, which are essential for providing a roof and fighting disease. Sixteen euros a month to change the life of a child, but also of an entire village. ‘It is nice,’ Petrini concludes, ‘to see some realities that after a few years no longer need us because they stand on their own two feet, thanks to the contribution we have made. We are not an emergency organisation, but we try to be attentive to our nearest or farthest neighbour, this is the sense of spirituality that is charity for us. Christmas is really about caring for our brother, charity in the full sense of the word’.
