Here and Now

The Opera Santa Teresa is a work in progress. There have been ups and downs in its history, there have been worries and uncertainties. Yet one thing has never been lacking: the eagerness to continue to fly and keep up the ideal that Don Angelo Lolli nurtured all his life, its evangelical spirit remaining intact.
With the passing of the years, the emergencies of poverty and of social and economic distress have greatly changed, and continue to be modified. But while times change, the poor, loneliness and needs remain. Indeed, they are increasingly marked. Faced with this situation, the Opera Santa Teresa has never ceased to make its services available to the “last”, and day by day its members experience the moving faithfulness of God who supports them with his Providence: benefactors, friends, supporters, men and women of hope through whom God forcefully invites the Opera to remain faithful to the charism from which it was born.

“The spirit of the Samaritan whom Jesus points to as the concrete example of someone who knows how to be a ‘neighbour’ to any wounded, wretched person lying half dead at the side of the road – this was what led Don Angelo Lolli to found the Opera, and today it must guide us too, in renewing it and keeping it faithful to the work of re-evangelisation in our Romagna territory. Joined not only physically to our Metropolitan Cathedral, it is the third table, after the tables of the Word and of the Eucharistic bread, which we so desperately need in order to present to our fellow-citizens a Gospel that not only illuminates, but ministers to the evils of our time, driving us to love and come to the aid of the most wretched, those most wounded in body and spirit.”
Monsignor Lorenzo Ghizzoni, Archbishop of Ravenna-Cervia
(from the introduction to the book Una Casa rifugio per gli abbandonati)

The Opera Santa Teresa is a shrine of love in action. In the Opera Santa Teresa, Romagna has recognised the authenticity of the Christian message. It has been adopted as the best, the very heart of Romagna. And this is true even of those who have never set foot in the Church.
Cardinal Ersilio Tonini

“Providence goes to meet the burden of unhappiness and poverty of the guests of our Hospice, encouraging its servants who bear it on their shoulders – servants who are as great as they are humble and hidden; and that burden, rather than falling, rises, made light as a wing, because the passion for Christian charitas breathes within it.”
Don Angelo Lolli