The face of the Church, with its light and shadows, ought to be in every Christian, in every group of Christians. This means that we must feel as our own not only the Church’s joys, her hopes, her constantly new forms of growth, her victories, but above all we must feel as our own all of her sorrows: the lack of full unity among the Churches, negative disputes, the threat of discarding age-old treasures, the anguish that many deny or refuse the message God speaks to the world for its salvation...
I was thinking that all true Christians should be stigmatics, not in an extraordinary, outward sense but spiritually.
I seemed to understand that the stigmata of today’s Christians are the mysterious but real sufferings of the contemporary Church.
If the charity of Christ is not wide enough in us to feel in ourselves the pain of these wounds, we are not how God wants us to be today.
Chiara Lubich
Essential Writings
New City, London, 2007, p 117