Italy: Phone Card Project Puts Church in Public Eye

The Seventh-day Adventist Church in Italy has a predominant display advertising Fondazione Adventum on more than 2 million phone cards that will circulate throughout the country until June 2004.

Fondazione Adventum (Adventist Foundation), a Rome-based nationally recognized organization that assists people with economic difficulties, recently released the project that is catching the attention of thousands, according to church leaders in Italy.

Phone cards, used by a majority of the Italian population, are a very popular method for making long distance telephone calls in Italy.

“We believe this is something really unique,” says Ignazio Barbuscia, president of Fondazione Adventum. “Telecom insiders told us that this card is very appreciated.” Fondazione Adventum says they have already received many calls from people who saw the organization advertised on the phone cards.

“Telecom Italia president Marco Tronchetti Provera printed our advertising on more than 2 million phone cards for free,” Barbuscia says.

The church’s membership in Italy is small, with more than 6,000 Adventists worshipping in 95 churches, compared to a population of some 58 million. Church leaders in the country say they hope the project will introduce more people to Fondazione Adventum and the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

When Fondazione Adventum first began, it received most of its funding from Italian tax refunds, an initiative that church leaders call “a small miracle.” The church in Italy was one of the organizations listed on tax returns. Called “otto per mille,” (eight for thousand), the option gave citizens a choice of assigning a small portion of their tax return to the Adventist Church, which used the funds received for social, humanitarian, charitable and cultural purposes in both Italy and other countries.

Fondazione Adventum, operated by the church’s Italian Union, has helped more than 1,000 families since it was organized in 1994.