On a typical Tuesday morning, Pietro Bartoli (C’17) is up with the sun, wrapping up logistics from the day before and marshaling a team of volunteers to serve more than 500 hot meals and distribute hygiene products and clothes to those in need.
It’s not all too different from his Fridays as an undergraduate at Georgetown, when he would hand out bagged lunches in Dupont Circle with the Community of Sant’Egidio, a lay Catholic organization that has helped form Bartoli’s spiritual journey and vocational life.
Today, Bartoli heads a homeless outreach program in New York City called “The Solidarity Project.” The program, a collaboration between the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Community of Sant’Egidio, aims to complement existing state and nonprofit systems in the city through “personal bonds that overcome the anonymity of bureaucracy,” according to Bartoli.
“We want to encourage and enable all people of goodwill to serve others they would not otherwise engage with on a daily basis,” said Bartoli. “We want to build relationships that go beyond the usual expectations of our society and, in so doing, build a better world, little by little.”
Pietro Bartoli (C’17) and Richard, a community member, conversing at a weekly event.
The Community of Sant’Egidio began in 1968, when high schooler Andrea Riccardi recognized the material and spiritual needs of the underserved neighborhoods on the periphery of native Rome. With a small group of friends, Riccardi began organizing acts of charity, from free classes for underserved schoolchildren to answering material needs for food and clothing. These like-minded friends were trying to live up to the gospel message by living it out every day.
More than half a century later, that community has grown into a global community with a presence in more than 70 countries. The community centers its actions around a spiritual life rooted in fraternal bonds and service to others.
“Our theory of change at Sant’Egidio, if you can call it that, is that personal relationships are the foundation of any sort of society,” said Bartoli. If we want to change the world then we start with ourselves and the people we meet on any given day.”
The community encourages members to maintain what they call an “ear for suffering,” which consists of listening and engaging with people who have often been pushed to the peripheries of society.
“All of the services that we do, whether it’s free meals on the streets or visiting the elderly in nursing homes, are conceived of in response to the communities in which we live,” said Bartoli. “Sant’Egidio is present all over the world and, depending on the context in which a local community finds itself, the individuals who make up that community try to respond to needs as a brother or a sister would.”
For members of the community, maintaining an ear for suffering entails more than just listening, it requires action.
“We try our very best to make our lives available to the people we meet, to listen to what it is they ask us to do for them and to respond seriously to the invitations that they make on our lives,” said Bartoli.
“Many of the people walking down the street in New York are crying out for help. In all major cities, many people are in need of an invitation to lead a full and good life, a life that they were meant to live, a life that they were built for, a life that brings them into contact with other people, that isn’t just centered around themselves.”
Through the building of substantive relationships with one another, the Community creates systems of spiritual and material support. Just during the preparation of this story, Richard, a friend and member of the Community, entered permanent housing for the first time in over a decade of friendship.
Bartoli and Richard with Sant’Egidio members Katherine Soba and Susan Cangiano at Richard’s new apartment.
Before his work with the Community of Sant’Egidio became a full-time job, Bartoli had spent years growing, professionally and spiritually, with the community. During his time on the Hilltop, Bartoli volunteered weekly with the Washington, DC chapter of the community, serving the unhoused and those in need.
“The community revolves around the idea that every person of faith has a call and an invitation to serve the poor freely,” said Bartoli. “I have found that this not only speaks to the heart of the gospel message but is a solid foundation for a Christian life that is worth living.”
As an undergraduate at Georgetown, Bartoli not only had an impact on the city through the Community of Sant’Egidio, but on the Hilltop through his academic pursuits and lived faith, which those close to him witnessed. Eric Wu (SFS’17) remembers meeting Bartoli as first-year roommates in Darnall Hall.
“I wasn’t close friends with very many religious people growing up and, of the religious people that I did know, I basically never spoke with them seriously about religion,” said Wu. “Regrettably, I didn’t exhibit much curiosity about their faith traditions or how they lived out their faith day to day.”
“Then, I became freshman year roommates with Pietro and he practiced his faith in a way that was so human and so in touch with the realities of his day-to-day life, his friendships, his family and his work — for me that completely flipped on its head the concept of religion and what it meant to be religious.”
A theology major and history and Jewish civilization minor, Bartoli completed a senior honors thesis that examined the contemporary relationship between Jewish and Catholic theologies. His thesis started with Nostra aetate, an official declaration from the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican that focuses on how Catholics should engage with, and live alongside, people of other faith traditions.
“My senior thesis studied the Catholic Church’s actions beginning with and since Nostra aetate in light of the Orthodox Jewish document, “To Do the Will of Our Father in Heaven,” said Bartoli. “I argued that an intentional line of thinking could be found in those 50 years that demonstrated a willingness to engage in the other’s terms, signaling hope for a better future.”
After graduating in 2017, Bartoli earned his M.A. from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. His thesis, titled “Interpreting Faith and Religion: Lessons from Social Justice Catholics,” explored the lives of Catholics in the Bay Area who chose to live out their faith as a profession.
“My interest is on the role of faith in an increasingly secularized world, particularly regarding how faith motivates people to contribute to the common good,” said Bartoli. “All throughout graduate school, it was very clear to me that Christianity and the life of a Christian disciple is a life of service to the poor. We are called to abide by a love for those on the peripheries of the society as if they are our brothers and sisters.”
Before undertaking full-time work on behalf of the Community of Sant’Egidio in 2021, Bartoli actively served with the group in various capacities for more than a decade. Whether as a mentor in the School of Peace in the Bronx or as a volunteer handing out food on the street, service has remained a constant in Bartoli’s life.
“In a world that atomizes each person and drives us further apart, we have the option and responsibility to choose dialogue, friendship, and peace,” said Bartoli. “The world needs a revolution of tenderness, as Pope Francis likes to say, and we can only achieve this through a spiritual revolution that opens us to loving in ways we never thought possible before.”
Photography by Todd France.
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