The Beginning of Comunità Cenacolo
It all began in the compassionate heart of
the Father, in the strong yet gentle way that God's love works. The Holy
Spirit breathed a radical desire into the heart of a young Italian nun
named Elvira. This dynamic, fiery, and faith-filled Sister became
consumed with the desire to answer the call she heard from God, the call
to reach into the desperate and shattered lives of drug addicts, young
men and women whose interior fragmentation makes them slaves to
self-destructive and chaotic impulses, leaving them filled with an even
more intense fear, despair, anger, and hatred.
After Years of Waiting
In 1983, after years of waiting and prayer, Sister
Elvira was given permission by her order to follow this call. The town
of Saluzzo gave her the use of a run down and abandoned villa, and with
two other women, she began taking addicts off the street to work and
pray with her in this first house of the Comunità Cenacolo. The
word began to spread, and addicts literally were knocking on the villa
doors, looking for a refuge, a resting place, and a place to be reborn.
With no money, but a lot of sacrifice and prayer, her only true security
came from knowing God's faithfulness. From the beginning, God's
providence manifested itself in tangible signs through concrete
donations by men and women who wanted to help in this new work of God.
The Community Today
Trusting unwaveringly in the direction of the Holy Spirit, Sister Elvira proclaims to all those who live in darkness that only Jesus Christ can heal and transform their shattered lives, changing despair into hope, sadness into joy, hatred into forgiveness, and death into life.
The need for healing and transformation has been so great that the Community now has almost 50 houses for men and for women in different parts of the world: Italy, Croatia, Austria, France, Poland, Russia, Bosnia. Several of these are mission houses for children, and one, the house of Pagno, is a house of formation for community priests and sisters.
The official websitesite of the Comunità Cenacolo in Saluzzo, Italy, is located at www.comunitacenacolo.it.