This moved a short time ago on the Catholic News Service:

Chiara Lubich, the 88-year-old founder and perpetually smiling symbol of the Focolare movement, died early March 14 in her room near the Focolare headquarters in Rocca di Papa, south of Rome.

Lubich had been extremely frail since November 2006 when she was treated at Rome’s Gemelli hospital for a lung infection. She was readmitted to the hospital in February after experiencing difficulty breathing, but decided to go home March 13 even though her condition had not improved.

Her physician, Dr. Salvatore Valente, head of pulmonary medicine at Gemelli, said at the time that she had shown no signs of responding to treatment, which included medication and use of a ventilator to help her breathe.

Lubich’s funeral was scheduled for March 18 at Rome’s Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls.

While still in the hospital, Pope Benedict XVI had sent her a personal letter, promising to remember her in his prayers and asking the Lord to grant her “physical relief, spiritual comfort” and to help her “experience the redeeming value of suffering lived in profound communion with him.”

In early March, Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople went to visit her in the hospital while he was in Rome to meet the pope and speak at the Pontifical Oriental Institute.

In a statement, the patriarch said, “with her life she has and continues to give much to the whole church.”

While the Focolare movement, formally known as the Work of Mary, began in the 1940s with Lubich and a small group of female friends, it opened an ecumenical chapter in 1961 and began forging ties with Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus and others in the 1970s.

The movement now counts more than 2 million adherents in 182 countries.

Lubich was born in Trent, Italy, Jan. 22, 1920, and was christened Silvia. Her admiration of St. Clare of Assisi led her to adopt the name Chiara, the Italian form of Clare.

She had said that her first awareness that God was calling her to something unusual came during a 1939 gathering of Catholic young people in Loreto, Italy, site of the house that a pious tradition holds is the house in which Jesus, Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth.

The Focolare biography of Lubich said, “While visiting the shrine, Chiara experienced an intuition of what her vocation would be: a reproduction of the family of Nazareth, a new vocation in the church, and she sensed that many others would follow her way.”

In 1943, after consulting a priest, she privately took vows consecrating herself to God and gradually began forming a circle of friends who read the Gospels together.

A year later, as World War II raged around them, they began asking themselves, “Is there an ideal that does not die, that no bomb can destroy, an ideal we can give our whole selves to? Yes, there is. It is God,” she wrote.

“We tried to put into practice the sentences of the Gospel, one at a time,” Lubich said.

Gradually, the women decided to form a community and share everything they had with each other and with the poor. They sought a sense of family gathered around a hearth — “focolare” in Italian.

Read on for more about her remarkable life. There’s also a comprehensive biography of her right here.

Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her.