The announcement was given on social media and it is a small earthquake for the Church. "Dear ones, I wish to share with all of you a painful decision resulting from a long discernment but which the worsening and multiplication of increasingly alarming symptoms led me to take in these days: on February 11th, the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, I officially handed in to Pope Francis my resignation as President of New Horizons". Chiara Amirante, founder of New Horizons, a work that has 231 reception centers, 6 Citadels, 1,020 “service teams” and as many as six million friends and supporters leaves the command of a small empire. Her physical conditions no longer allow her to carry on with the commitments and the mission started, when she was little more than a girl, in 1991 at Termini station collecting vagrants and drug addicts, helping them to find a “new horizon”.
In the post Amirante explains that she had to “take note of her situation” which she generically defines as “non-health”. Adding that she will continue to be there “for all of you in this our great family, but in a different way. I count on your prayers”
Last January 6th she had been re-elected to the presidency and until that moment she did not think about a worsening. “After accepting this appointment, however, I had a further collapse of health and a worsening of numerous alarming symptoms. I then had to, reluctantly, reopen the discernment on the compatibility of my “non-health” with the many commitments connected to the role of president. Despite the great precariousness of my health – explains the founder – I had to continue to keep impossible rhythms. All this has obviously contributed further to wear out my body beyond any possibility".
Pope Francis, Bocelli and Monsignor Fisichella at the community of Chiara Amirante
The doctors this time have imposed a stop. For now the leadership of New Horizons remains entrusted to the presidency elected last January 6th, waiting for a final word from the Vatican Dicastery. “On the other hand, we must not worry about anything, because this Work is of God and He will continue to guide it in the stormy waters of this time. I count on your prayers in this moment particularly difficult for me, you count on mine".
Chiara Amirante: how to overcome the death that lives in the heart
Amirante over the decades has made important friendships, one of all that of Ennio Doris, among the silent benefactors of New Horizons but above all Chiara has created a network of “saved” boys. In the books she wrote she summarized the questions she always asked young people when they asked her for help. Do you really feel happy? Do you feel free? When did you really feel happy? Rather essential questions that however have the power, she said, to unmask every falsehood and never leave indifferent.
“In my mission experience in the poorest countries – she still told in her books - I have often felt, especially in front of the suffering of children abandoned in the mud streets of the favelas, a sense of impotence. I have often had the feeling of a sharp blade that pierces the heart. The same feeling I felt when, more than thirty years ago I started going out at night in the "hot zones", in the deserts, of our metropolises. How many splendid young people, thirsty for love, reduced, by the seductions of the world and the terrible lashes of life, to creatures with an icy gaze and a heart of stone. How many boys in the prime of their youth gripped by a subtle nausea, by a terrible existential void, by a deadly anguish!"
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