Thousands of volunteers
Several thousand Italian CL members run the festival on a voluntary basis, many traveling long distances and paying their own way. I attended this year’s event as a speaker, on the invitation of the editor of the CL magazine, Traces. Speakers are not paid, but travel and accommodation expenses are met by the organizers. The theme of this year’s Meeting was intriguing, if long-winded: “Reason is the need for the infinite and culminates in the longing and the presentiment that this infinite be manifested.”
Flagship exhibitions on the Milky Way, the Benedictines, and the poet Dante were intertwined with debates about everything from Creationism and Darwinism to dieting–some 200 events over seven days. For someone raised in a version of Catholicism which looks askance at much of reality–especially modern reality–it is at first quite shocking to encounter the incongruous juxtaposition of faith and marketplace. The meeting, however, is strongly rooted in the ideas of Fr Giussani, who had among his admirers both the current pope and his predecessor (Giussani died early last year). Through Giussani’s many books and teachings is a call for the integration of faith with reality and reason.

Faith exalts rationality
“Separating heaven from earth,” he wrote in The Risk of Education, “is a crime.” Christianity, he insists, is “God on earth,” an event in history rather than an idea. Jesus exists not as story or metaphor but in the realm of fact. Giussani challenges the assumption that faith and reason follow parallel lines, insisting they are one and the same. Faith exalts rationality because it answers the cry of the human heart for truth, beauty, justice, and love. Faith and reason are one because the human longing for perfection has but one answer: God–our identity and our destiny. There are no questions, says Giussani, without answers. Faith is the highest form of rationality because happiness is synonymous with eternity. To speak of God is the most rational thing in the world.
Giussani’s exhilarating vision centers on the valorization of personal experience, on the veneration of tradition combined with a wariness toward traditionalism, and on an elevated sense of what freedom means. In his words, there is a challenge to both traditional piety and modern secularism. Unless God is relevant to my life and my experience, he tells me, He has no meaning. But without Him, there is no meaning at all. Religion, says Giussani, is not about morals, but about the fact that God is what defines humanity.

We have departed from reason
Moralism, he states starkly, is idolatry. We require a new approach, combining an awareness of absolute truth with openness toward the shifting nuance of this truth in a changing world. What is the meaning of this? Has there been a mix-up in the subediting department or has Waters gone mad with piety in his middle years? How long before the authorities step in? It is a measure of how far we have departed from reason that these thoughts do not seem to fit here, on this page, which is, after all, reserved for rational discussion about reality, apart from the weekly “Rite and Reason” slot, which is acceptable by virtue of its strong borders. In its organization and thought processes, our world increasingly resembles a newspaper: each thing in its own box.

Fr. Giussani offers a way back
We often think of the decline of faith as resulting from the hubris arising from increasing knowledge, but this is just half the story. Faith has been isolated from life by both our growing cleverness and a tendency toward oversimplification which insults the burgeoning intelligence of the young. Fr. Giussani offers a way back.
Citing Dante, Kafka, Mozart, and Leopardi, he suggests an alternative to the arid conflict between tradition and modernity, a new way of seeing the moment-to-moment integration of abiding truth with the imperative of the new. If Christianity has a future, this is it.

© The Irish Times