The deadly shooting of two employees of the Israeli Embassy at an event in Washington on May 21 cast a pall over the Sustainable Peace Networks Conference, then meeting nearby in Silver Springs, Md. The conference was sponsored by the Rome-based Focolare Movement.
Speaking to media over a Zoom webcast, Margaret Karram, president of Focolare, said the attack only demonstrated the urgency of efforts to bring people from diverse faith backgrounds together to work for peace. “That’s what we needed: to bring some hope to our minds, to our hearts and to the people who are working in these many organizations,” she said.
Echoing a phrase that Leo XIV has used several times during the first weeks of his papacy, Ms. Karram said that the world yearns for “a peace that is disarmed and disarming.” She said that the spirituality of Focolare, focused on unity and universal fraternity, offers a way to bring Pope Leo’s dream of peace to fruition.
Ms. Karram recently made her first official visit to the United States and spoke with journalists from various U.S. Catholic media outlets at a press conference on May 23.
Focolare, named after an Italian word describing a fireside or hearth in a family home, is an international peace movement founded in 1943 by the Italian author Chiara Lubich. Ms. Karram is Focolare’s third president, following Lubich, who died in 2008, and the Italian lawyer Maria Voce. (Focolare’s statutes stipulate that the president should be a woman and that she should be a consecrated member of the community with perpetual vows.)
The movement currently boasts over 140,000 members. In 1990, the Pontifical Council for the Laity recognized it among the International Association for the Faithful and bestowed upon it the official designation of Opus Mariae, or “Work of Mary.”
Ms. Karram’s own background makes her efforts as a peacemaker especially poignant as conflict rages on in the Holy Land. She was born in Haifa, Israel, to an Arab Catholic family. Her connection with the movement began at the age of 14, after she encountered Focolare when some of its young members visited her school in Haifa. She later took perpetual vows as a consecrated member of Focolare and oversaw its activities in Israel and Palestine during the 2000s.
In a statement following her election as international president in 2021, Ms. Karram said, “There is a cry from humanity that touches us in a particular way—it is the cry that rises wherever there is disunity. Disunity in families, disunity among Churches and among peoples. Disunity is often caused by conflicts and wars. Because this is the essence of our charism: to rebuild unity where it has been broken and to make this world more harmonious and at peace.”
Ms. Karram came to the United States to host the Sustainable Peace Networks Conference on May 21. The event convened Jewish, Christian and Muslim organizations dedicated to peace work.
Against the backdrop of a dramatic escalation in the war in Gaza, Ms. Karram deplored the brutality of the conflict and said that Focolare’s spirituality offered civilians on both sides of the divide a way out of a cycle of dehumanization. “My dream for Gaza and for Israelis is that they meet and learn about each other and see how many things they have in common,” she said.
Drawing on her background as an Arab Israeli Catholic as well as Focolare’s devotion to human unity, Ms. Karram highlighted the commonalities between people trapped on opposite sides of the conflict. Israelis and Palestinians, she said, “are two people with many things in common, even if they have different stories and different languages.”
“Both of them suffer. And I think the suffering that they both share can be the solution to the conflict. But they have to make the others’ suffering part of their story.”
For roughly 40 years, Focolare has been facilitating exchanges between young Israeli and Palestinian civilians and families in Jerusalem, including bringing Palestinian teenagers on beach excursions to Haifa. Ms. Karram said that these encounters have helped young people on each side see past dehumanizing stereotypes.
“People do not meet. They don’t know each other. The first time we put teenagers together, the Palestinians told us, ‘We thought the Jewish people were all in the [Israeli] army,’ and the Jewish teenagers told us, ‘We thought all Palestinians were terrorists.’” She said that while the movement has no high-profile political contacts in Israel or Palestine, she takes heart in the work it has done on a local level to promote contact between the region’s peoples.
Ms. Karram has briefly lived in the United States before. She earned a bachelor of arts in Jewish studies from American Jewish University in Los Angeles. Speaking about the increasingly perilous problem of polarization in the United States, Ms. Karram said that Focolare’s U.S. chapters have begun facilitating workshops with Braver Angels, a cross-partisan association dedicated to fostering conversations across the U.S. political divide.
“Because of this spirituality that we have, we have tools that can help to find ways to start communicating,” she said.
Asked how Catholics unfamiliar with Focolare’s spirituality could begin to integrate it into their daily lives, Ms. Karram said, “Love every person that passes through your life. Chiara Lubich said, ‘No one has to pass us in vain.’”
“Every person that passes by us is a gift from God,” she said. “Every encounter with another person has to change our lives somehow. We’re not living only for ourselves; if we don’t help others and change others’ lives, we have failed in our mission. Jesus wants us to be united—to be holy, but not to be holy alone.”
