Village of Love

It was planned as a place where men & women could come from all over the world to work and pray and search in each other's company for God. It was to be a place in which there would be no more Italians or Americans or Germans, Lutherans or Calvinists or Episcopalians--only Christians. It started in the head or the heart of a young Florentine, Tullio Vinay. He was an Italian Protestant, a Waldensian pastor.

Labor & Prayer. Vinay chose a site in the Piedmontese foothills, where his Waldensian ancestors had held out for centuries against papal persecutions.* There, in 1946, he and seven friends started to build a "community of love." They called it "Agape" (pronounced a-ga-pay)--the Greek word for brotherly love, which is translated in the English versions of the New Testament as "charity."

Tullio and his friends felled trees, cracked rocks and poured foundations. More & more people turned up to lend a hand. Some were prominent churchmen, like Dr. W. A. Visser 't Hooft, World Council of Churches secretary-general, who laid bricks, and Anglican Bishop Stephen Neill, who trundled wheelbarrows of stones. British judges, French attorneys, professional men from all over Europe worked side by side with 1,000-odd young men & women to build a village devoted to Christian labor and prayer.

Work v. Theology. The idea of labor as a form of prayer is central at Agape, as it is at the 13-year-old community at lona, off the Scottish coast (TIME, Feb. 3, 1947). This is the time in history, thinks Vinay, when cooperative manual work is the essential Christian activity, just as theology or faith was central in earlier centuries. Says Waldensian Carlo Lupo: "With all the respect we have for ecumenical councils and for doctors of theology, we must recognize that theological discussion belongs to a past state in church development. Today's religious revolution is a social transformation, not the social transformation of the Marxists, who continue to see work as a hated necessity, but a recognition that work is an act of love."

Last week some 2,000 Protestant Christians (and some lay Catholics) came to Agape by car, bus, train, motorcycle and foot to help dedicate its main building, a long rectangle of gray stone, light wood and glass, which for the present will be a combination refectory, meeting place and prayer hall.

Agape's veteran worker Gianni Cassetti handed the keys to the Rev. Robert Tobias, Kansas-born staff member of the World Council of Churches. Then a prayer was read (in six languages): "We this day do set apart this village to the service of God, in the fellowship of the Universal Church, to be a temple of that love which is revealed by the Cross of Christ, to be a meeting place for men to be reconciled . . ."

* The Waldenses, who like to think of themselves as the first Protestants, were followers of a French merchant named Peter Waldo. They publicly objected to papal pomp and corruption, and in the 13th Century were driven into the hills, where they managed to survive despite sporadic attempts to exterminate them. One massacre inspired Milton to write his famed sonnet:

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered Saints,

whose bones Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold . . .

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.