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How We Become Christian
Notes from a talk by Luigi Giussani in the Basilica of St. Anthony, Padua, Italy, February 11,
1994

I thank the community of the friars very much for this invitation to come here and immerse ourselves in that wave of grace that flowed from the words of St. Anthony, as a specialist in the study of the Saint’s life said to me just now. This brought to my mind a phrase from the early Christian writings, a phrase well known to us: “Seek every day the faces of the saints so that you find rest in their words.”1 So I pray St. Anthony to lighten up our faces, making them childlike, simple, poor in spirit, as the holy Gospel says–as he has lit up the faces of millions of people who came to this house of his–and that our hearts, that is, our faith, may find rest in the words we shall say, so that we not waste time and because in these sad times, when everything tends to be confused and everything seems to be fading, becoming vague, and there seem to be no more certainties, what we need above all is comfort, in its true sense, that is, strength that comes from hearts that are united (“con-forto” –strength that comes from united hearts).
As my classmate in the seminary, I had someone who was to become a great bishop, Enrico Manfredini (for less than a year Archbishop of Bologna, where he went after being Bishop of Piacenza). I remember vividly, as I have told my friends so often, what happened one evening as we were going to the chapel. The bell had rung and we were all running down the stairs near the chapel of the theologians of the huge seminary of Venegono; we were the last two and so were rushing to catch up with the others. All at once, Manfredini took me by the arm and stopped me; I don’t know how, but I looked him in the face and he said these exact words to me, which made me shudder: “To think that God became man is something out of this world!” Then I walked on and he went ahead of me. The heart of that classmate of mine was full of emotion at the greatest announcement that ever rang out in this world.
Now, by means of attentive ears and inattentive ears, receptive hearts and irritated, contrary hearts, down through centuries of history, this message is, objectively, in itself, if we repeat it and look at it, the best, most human message, most filled with promise and hope, that man can hear. Can we imagine another phrase that expresses a message better than this, more full of hope than this? No! Manfredini, my classmate, felt this in his heart; I felt it in the hand that grabbed my arm, like this, suddenly, on the staircase. “To think that God became man is something out of this world!” And while he went down the stairs faster than before, ahead of me, I shouted to him (“shouted” as loud as I dared in that period of silence), “It is something out of this world, in this world!” The theme this evening reminds me so readily of these things, because it asks, “How do we become Christians?” That is, how does a movement of faith come to birth in our hearts? How can a movement of faith be reborn in our hearts?
The word “heart” is, in fact, the first word we have to look at, because it brings that faith back to its origin, in that mysterious instant, in that mysterious place in that mysterious point in which a man says, “Lord, I believe,” and the Lord says, “Man, I love you.” The heart is the place of the great needs: the need for truth, the need for justice, the need for love, the need–and this summarizes everything–the need for happiness. The heart, for the Bible, is this place of the great needs, which distills in the end into that shorter, more important word of all those we can say, which is the word “I.” “What use is it if you get everything you want, if you manage to have everything that comes into your head, everything, and then you lose your ‘I,’ your own self?”2 asks Jesus in the Gospel.
I remember another fact from when I was in the seminary. I was reading a book by Fr. Gemelli, entitled, Franciscanism. Every chapter began with a rubric (the chapter began with a large illuminated letter, called a “rubric”). This particular chapter began with the letter Q and the Q was all illuminated. Inside the oval of the Q was the silhouette of St. Francis of Assisi, with his arms open wide and his head back, and before him the faraway outline of a mountain, behind which the sun was rising, and the tail of the Q was a little bird. The first “Q” of the chapter (it began with the word “Quando”) began another phrase that was written small at the feet of St. Francis. This phrase made a lasting impression on me: Quid animo satis?3 What can be enough to satisfy man’s heart? The symbol was clear; the most distinguished man, the man who best exemplifies the sensitivity of our race, before the finest panorama of nature and the rising sun, felt his heart wide open, and his arms were spread wide to imitate the feeling of his heart. In that moment, nothing seemed to be lacking, but actually everything was still lacking. “What can be enough to satisfy man’s heart?”–for man’s heart is that place in our personal existence in which we grasp that we are that level of nature in which nature becomes need for relationship with the Infinite, need for relationship with God. Before this, everything collapses; before this eternal and infinite shore, everything collapses, even the face of the person you love most is ruined, even the things you possess most escape from your hands and “more what I liked most,” said a poet friend of Giosuè Carducci, “And more what I liked most.”4
Perhaps the link will not seem immediately logical, but on one of the first days I was in my office on via Statuto, which Monsignor Pignedoli had given me at the beginning of the life of my youth movement, my student movement, there appeared the father of a girl I already knew, who was attending a teachers college in Milan. He was a very distinguished gentleman. He stopped at the door, embarrassed, then broke into tears and told me, “Father, please excuse me, but when my daughter takes my hand (she was irreversibly ill with cancer,) she squeezes it and says, ‘Dad, why don’t you make me get well?’ It is unbearable for me.” I’m sure it was! But that girl and her father were not the victims of injustice. God came and died on the cross, after all! The mother who had given birth to that man and the mother who had given birth to that girl had not done so in vain, because they are, or were, people destined for infinity, for eternity, God’s eternity, for the infinite relationship with God, and now they are certainly there, here, wherever, waiting for me, and they see us. This is the idea that came to me many years ago, while I was at the funeral of my father, whom I was very attached to. I had already begun to make some friends, so there were a hundred or so youngsters who had come from Milan with me. The idea that struck me most, as I walked in procession, was this: “Now you see me, you see me in my thoughts, in my soul.”
The word heart indicates the essence of the personality, the nature of man, the essence of the human “I,” which is a phenomenon, an event–in the nature and the history of the world–of relationship with God, with the Infinite, “made for the Infinite.” Why do I remember these things? Because the heart is awareness of a reality that it needs in order to be itself; the heart is awareness of a reality–God–whom it needs in order to be itself. That father, in order to be himself, even though he wasn’t thinking of it at that moment, needed an Other, precisely Him whom he had perhaps been tempted to curse because of his poor daughter. The heart is awareness of a reality that man’s soul, the human person, in order to be itself, has to recognize, has to realize, to operate; that relationship with the Infinite that our heart longs for, that the essence of our being longs for, has to be made. This is the religiosity that we have to live in order to understand Christ. In order to understand Christ, this religiosity–that original, natural condition in which God created us, through our mother–must subsist in us, live in us. Without this religiosity, one cannot even understand Christ; it becomes too difficult to acknowledge Christ.
In Redemptor Hominis, the Pope said that man is a being incomprehensible to himself.5 Without admitting, acknowledging, trying to live and adore the great presence of the mystery of God, man is a being incomprehensible to himself. The Pope was echoing a phrase from the philosopher Pascal, when he said that man infinitely surpasses man6: he is relationship with the Infinite (the Pope and my mother when she was cleaning the house, a king and a housewife, a child making his first confession, and I, an old man, in the same way).
St. Paul once went to speak in the place in Athens where all the great philosophers and all the great politicians of the time met. In his speech on human religiosity, he said that man is in search of the meaning of his life, that is, of God, of the Other without whom he cannot understand himself; he is searching, “groping” for God,7 in the night, in the darkness. Imagine we were born in the dark, never having seen the light, and knew things only by groping around–how different reality would seem from what it actually is; we would be deprived of all possible realism. How many dreams and nightmares could we build up on that fruitless, incomplete groping!
So let’s imagine mankind… I was thinking of this when I saw exponents of three hundred religions called to Milan by the Cardinal to affirm the value of unity amongst men and of peace in the world8–three hundred, so many heads, so many opinions, so many ways of thinking of this mystery from which everything is evidently born, because we ourselves have done nothing, we have not even made ourselves, and we are not making ourselves even now. In this tangle of efforts to imagine the origin and meaning of one’s life, in this huge confusion, we have to say it–I often tell the youngsters that the human world is like a big building site where everyone is bent on trying to build all kinds of ladders to go up to see what is there at the bottom of things or at the origin of things. Let’s imagine that, all of a sudden, something extraordinary happens, what my friend Manfredini said to me: a man, a man who had been small, who had played as a child, who had sucked milk from his mother’s breast, who had companions, who now and again came out with something so exceptionally intelligent that it left even adults astonished, like the doctors of the law in the Temple; then, when he had grown up, dared to say before everyone, “I am the way, the truth and the life.”9 It was an event that was therefore absolutely unforeseeable, unthinkable, not deducible from previous factors, because his father and mother were two human beings, like the others. And it is the only case, unique in history, because the prophets or religious geniuses, since they had a strong sense of the difference between man and God, had a deep perception of their limitation, of their unworthiness. At most, when they are truly great geniuses, in particular prophets sent by God into the world, they say, “This is the way to the truth.” No one ever dreamed of saying, “I am the way, the truth and the life.”
What if a man like this should come? He has come; a man of this kind did come, an unforeseen, unforeseeable event, not a consequence of what came before him. And for those who met him, what a wonder, what astonishment, how struck they were! They were struck by an unlimited exceptionality. It is exactly what happened to those who saw him in the first moment in which he decided to make himself known.
It is told in a passage of the Gospel that I read almost every day, the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel.10 It describes the scene of St. John the Baptist, who had foreseen the coming of the Messiah and was traveling around the desert near Jerusalem, preaching about the great event that God was about to bring about. The people were all going to listen to him, even the scribes and the Pharisees, and the heads of the people, too. Let’s imagine, among all those people who were there that morning, two who were from far away, from a far-off village. They were two simple men, who made their living fishing. They were there open-mouthed, listening to John the Baptist. At a certain point, one who was in the group left and went off along the path beside the river Jordan. All of a sudden, John interrupted what he was saying and, pointing to that man who was walking away, cried out, “That is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world; He is the salvation of the world.” They were all used to hearing the prophet explode, now and again, in phrases they didn’t understand, mysterious phrases; so they weren’t surprised much at this. But those two, simple men, who were all intent on listening to John the Baptist, noticed this signal, and went off to follow that young man who was going away. They followed him. They followed him for a while and didn’t dare… they didn’t know what to do, until he, that man, turned around and said, “What are you looking for?” “Master, where do you live?” “Come and see.” They went with him and stayed with him the whole day. It was about the tenth hour. The Gospel notes the moment he appeared, the moment they saw him and went after him, the moment they came away: “It was the tenth hour.” It is a note written by one of those two, John, the young man; the other, Andrew, was already married. Let’s imagine those two, those two men, who spent hours there listening to that man, watching that man speaking. I don’t know how much they understood of what he said, but they saw him speaking in a way that transformed them. It was something never seen, never heard, that sound of his voice, and what that voice was saying, even though they didn’t really understand it, and reported some fragment of something they already knew, had already heard, like, for example, “I am the Messiah,” as he said. They felt themselves above all transformed by him. Imagine how they went away that evening, how they went home. It’s easy to imagine they walked home in silence. Then, when he entered his house, Andrew had such a different look on his face that his wife asked him, “What’s up with you this evening?” And Andrew, without answering her, took her in his arms and embraced her in a way that almost frightened her, because he had never embraced her in such a tender, true way before. The relationship with that man had this effect, a transformation. A man was no longer the same as before; he could still go wrong like before, more than before, but he was changed.
He was walking through the countryside with his first friends; the path was narrow and from the other direction the funeral procession of a young man, the son of a widow, was coming; behind, the mother was crying loudly, screaming. And Christ, that man, took a step towards her and said, “Woman, don’t weep.” It seems a joke to say, “Woman, don’t weep,” to a mother who is following the bier of her only son.11 But it was not a joke. Who knows what that man would do, who knows how he did it! Who knows how? He was exceptional! Notice that our heart, which is made for the Infinite, needs first of all what is exceptional; in order to breathe, in order to face up to things, in order to resist, in order to live truly, it needs what is exceptional. The exceptional should be every day. The exceptional, that is to say, what corresponds to yourself, corresponds truly to your heart (you don’t know how, but it corresponds truly to your heart); what corresponds truly to your heart never happens–it is something “extra exceptional.” With that man it happened like this: the way he spoke, the way he looked, corresponded deeply to your heart; he was exceptional–“Woman, don’t weep.”
Or, who knows when that woman passed along the road, that sidewalk, one of the most infamous sinners in town–just one look, and a few days later that woman was at his feet, washing them with her tears.12 But the Gospel does not tell us words; we have to identify ourselves with that situation. It truly happed, the event happened: an exceptional man, irreducible to any scheme of ours, who transformed people.
Another time, there was a town’s mafia boss; it was a big town, even today we still hear of it–Jericho. He was the mafia boss there, head of the tax collectors, his soul sold to the Romans. He heard that Jesus was in town, because everyone was talking of it in that area. He went ahead of the crowd and climbed a sycamore tree–not a very tall tree–to be able to see Him because he was too short. The crowd came nearer, and Jesus was talking. He is passing and stops in front of him: “Zacchaeus, I respect you, I am coming to your house. Go home because I am coming to see you.” I don’t know what Zacchaeus did later in life, maybe worse things than before, but in his life what was fixed in his soul, around which his heart revolved, in hope and in sorrow, in repentance and in expiation, was the memory of that instant, the instant in which that man looked at him and said, “Zacchaeus.”13 Have we tried to think that the same thing happens to us and we are so distracted that we don’t realize it?
And he had a “strange” power over things. Nature obeyed him as if he were its master. That night, they had gone fishing, and he was so tired he was asleep in the stern. A strong wind came and the boat was on the point of going down; so, uncertain, they decided to go and wake him and said, “Master, save us, we are going down.” And he got up, called to the wind and the sea, and suddenly there was a great calm. Then his friends, those who knew where he was from, knew his mother, would go with him almost every day (by this time, they would go along with him almost every day), were often at home with him, terrified, were asking each other, “Who is this man?”14 What did they mean, who is he? You know his father, you know his mother, you visit him at home, you know very well who he is! But he was so extraordinarily exceptional, that all they knew of him faded away; it didn’t answer. He was truly mysterious, he was a mystery.
But it’s not just the miracles that the Gospels are full of; there was another miracle that he carried, that he had brought to Zacchaeus, that he brought to the sinful woman: forgiveness–because man is incapable of forgiveness; there is no mother or father who is able to forgive. For us to forgive is to forget, for us to forgive is to cover up, for us to forgive is to let things go, for us forgiveness is trying to forget. Here, forgiveness was bringing to rebirth–transformation, as I said before.
Why am I saying all this? Think of the Last Supper, his final, long discourse, all in silence, fine sections, bad sections, terrors, hopes, thoughts that were aroused in their souls… At a certain point, that man who was there with them dared to say, “Without me you can do nothing.”15 This is God! Yes, this is God, He is saying it to me, brother and sister. St. Anthony felt it more than you and me; let’s pray to St. Anthony above all for this to make us understand: “Without me you can do nothing.” An event, a man, who called himself God: “I am the way, the truth and the life.”16 I am God, I am the Mystery who makes all things; I am the principle and the aim of everything; I am the meaning of the aspiration to happiness, to truth, to justice, and to love that constitute the nucleus of your “I,” the nature of your “I,” your heart. Our natural religiosity comes across an event of history in which a man, born in the womb of a young girl of fourteen or sixteen, once grown up, says, “I am God.”
In one of his novels, someone who did not believe, or believed he did not believe, called Franz Kafka, says, “He whom we have never seen, but whom we wait for with true longing, whom reasonably has been considered unreachable [from the point of view of reason he was considered unreachable, forever unreachable for man] here he is seated.”17 Was it not like this at the well with the Samaritan woman? Was it not like this when he was eating with the others? “Here he is seated.”
After the encounter with this man, with this Jesus of Nazareth, man’s life becomes a journey. For Andrew and John, after they had seen him, life was a journey with him, for him, toward what he was saying. Life was a journey. Life as a journey: or you can speak of life as morality: a tending toward perfection, fulfillment of self, already in the present, toward goodness, truth, justice, delicacy, exactness and faithfulness that is like the echo of eternity. Life becomes a journey, which springs not from our instinctive will and energy, thanks to a will of dignity, magnanimity, as the ancient philosophers said; it is a journey that is born from love for Christ, for love of this man. Life is born as a journey, as morality, as ascesis, as tending to the good, not by willpower, based on the power of our will, or our instinct for magnanimity… no! It is born from love for Christ. So it is a journey that goes along with sin, too.
Psalm 129 (De Profundis) says, “If you, O Lord, should mark our guilt, who would survive?” Or, as a hymn from the first week of the Psalter in the breviary says, “Without you, we are dragged down by a deep vortex of sins and darkness,”18 ignorance and wickedness so small that I cannot be seen, or so great that it frightens us; so sharp that it cuts us without our noticing the blood we are losing, or so grave like a wound that spurts blood; fatal. Whether venial or mortal, without You, we are dragged down by a deep vortex of sins and darkness; without You we cannot wholly understand the origin of nothingness, the meaning of nothingness, but with Him we walk within the way of virtue, the way of knowledge. This is why St. Paul said, “I judge no one.” No one can judge a brother, no one. “I don’t even judge myself.”19 God is the judge.
Jesus, that man, says, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.”20 O, God, perfect as the Father, be perfect as the Father, the infinite mystery, absolute perfection! But a passage from another Gospel clarifies the term “perfect”: “Be merciful, as your Father is merciful.”21 There is no difference. If perfection is mercy, we are incapable of perfection and we are incapable of mercy, but we are walking with Him, like a child that looks at his father and holds on to his hand, and with his father can go into the darkness of the woods and overcome all the difficulties of the road. It is a journey in which sin is there, too. But measurement is abolished as a factor of judgment of the time that passes for man. Every measure is abolished. Instead of measurement (“we are able/ we are unable, we are good/ we aren’t good”), gratuitousness. The heart is transformed into desire for gratuitousness, the great imitation of mercy, the great beginning, the beginning, just the first hint, of perfection, gratuitousness–gratuitousness!
Let’s take a final look at the Gospel. The Apostles are returning together with their boat empty; they haven’t caught a single fish the whole night. On the shore, still a long way off, they see a shape and say, “It’s a ghost.” John, instead, squinting his eyes, says, “It’s the Master.” At this, St. Peter immediately answers by throwing himself into the sea and in a few strokes reaches the shore. It truly was the Master, who had prepared broiled fish for them. Meanwhile, the others arrive with the boat full of fish, because they had followed His directions: “Let down the nets on the other side”–another miracle. There they were around that man, and no one dared to speak, because it was clear that it was the Master. He says, “Let’s eat!” So, lying down on the ground, they ate. Jesus turned and near Him was Simon, son of John. He didn’t ask him, “Simon, will you betray me again,” or, “Simon, will you tempt me again like when I said, ‘Get away from me, Satan’?” or, “Simon, will you be ashamed of me again like before that servant of Pilate’s?” “Simon, will you commit all the sins you have committed again, all the disasters you’ve caused?” Nothing of all this; he looked at him and said, “Simon, do you love me?” “Lord, you know,” Simon said for the third time, “You know that I love you.” This answer indicates that he acknowledges that he belongs: “Lord, I belong to you.” “Yes, Lord, I belong to you, I am yours, I am yours; I, a sinner, I can say, I am yours, and I am a sinner, there is no sin that can prevent it. I am yours.”22 This is the key to a deep transformation, which on a faithful journey becomes what God wants. And it cannot be measured; it’s no use wasting time trying to measure. This, then, is the miracle: not that man manages to correspond to his ideals, but that he recognize and love a historical man, in whom lies the correspondence with the divine, identity with the divine–this is the miracle of the world, that a man love Christ.
In an interview, Mother Teresa of Calcutta said, “I remember collecting a man from the street and bringing him to our house. What did that man say? He didn’t complain, he didn’t blaspheme, he just said, ‘I lived on the road like an animal and I am going to die like an angel, loved and cared for.’ It took us three hours to clean him. Then he looked at the sisters and said, ‘Sister, I am about to go to God’s house.’ And we have never seen such a smile as on the face of that man.” Christianity has made this possible; His presence makes this possible. Then the journalist asked her, “Why do you make such great sacrifices as if without effort?” And Mother Teresa replied, “It is Jesus to whom we do everything; we love Jesus.”23 Cardinal Hamer rightly writes, “In this way, a Fact that happened two thousand years ago becomes–what a paradox–the most clamorous and interesting novelty in the life today of so many young people”24–in the life today of so many young people, of Mother Teresa, or our life, our time, our age. Mother Teresa was not a youngster, but she was certainly young at heart.
“Man’s life consists in the affection that mainly sustains him, and in which he finds his greatest satisfaction”25 (this is a phrase of St. Thomas Aquinas). Before your woman whom you love and to whom you have kept faithful, you can say, “Yes, Lord, I love you,” like Simon Peter. It is not a contradiction, nor a mere comparison; it is what lies at the root of the other person, which sustains, and which has sustained the other. And if you have not been faithful and find things hard with your wife, you can say, “Lord, you know I love you,” and yet go wrong. “In the experience of a great love,” Guardini says, “everything that happens [all that happens: a child that is born, your wife, a stomach ache, recovering, the sun, the rain–everything that happens] becomes an event in its ambit.”26 Everything is faced with love for Christ, with that love for Christ that subtends your attitude toward everything. So, the method for being Christian, for becoming Christian, for becoming Christian again, is simple. The method has its origin in faith; faith is the acknowledgment of an exceptional, inexplicable presence, which concerns our destiny; we feel that it concerns our destiny. The method for becoming Christian again has its origin in faith, which is the acknowledgment, in your own life, of an exceptional presence that concerns your destiny. Someone who sees Mother Teresa of Calcutta sees this exceptional presence in Mother Teresa of Calcutta, but it is not she, you understand that it is not she. But it is what we are all called to do, all of us, so that others when they see us understand that, whether we are sinners or not, there is something exceptional in us, which comes to us from an exceptional origin: “I love you, Christ.” I, too, more a sinner than everyone else, can say, “I love you, Christ.”
I end with a phrase from the novelist I quoted earlier, Kafka. But see why I quote him, for what reason: Kafka says, “Even if salvation [the meaning of life] does not come [he was an atheist], I want to be worthy of it in every moment.”27 What greatness, what magnanimity, what stoicity! It’s great; he said it in all seriousness. For him, it was so. “Even if salvation does not come, I want to be worthy of it in every moment”–for if someone does not try to be worthy of salvation in every instant, even if it does not come, then he is no longer a man. For man is a heart that desires and breathes, and is made for happiness, for truth, for justice and for love. So you try in every moment to be worthy of this aspiration, even if the answer does not come. But Kafka makes one mistake. If I were in a classroom I would ask, “Who can tell me where Kafka goes wrong?” In this: that he lives every moment in such a way as to be worthy of salvation, but he does not ask for salvation, he does not beg for it. This is the last word I leave to you: “begging.”
We are sinners as much as you like, but beggars. “Yes, Lord, I love you.” I live begging from You the capacity to make progress, to keep on, to be faithful, to go on, begging from you that capacity to love you. Nothing can come from us; everything comes from him, from this man who was born of Our Lady two thousand years ago and is present now. “I will be with you all days, till the end of the world”28–all days till the end of the world! And He is present and lets us get a glimpse of Him through the exceptionality that He operates in those who believe in Him. However little we are, if we believe in Him, if we say, “Yes Lord, I love You,” then something happens in us that makes another who sees us say, “How can you be like that? How on earth are you like that?” But the greatest transformation, the greatest exceptionality is the man who begs the Mystery to be able to know, love and serve Him–begs. It is prayer. Prayer is only begging, begging from God the capacity to be able to express once more Peter’s phrase: “Lord, you know I love you.” Any of us can repeat this, whatever happens, in whatever state of mind he be.

Notes:
1 Cf. Didaché, IV, 2.
2 Cf. Mk 8:36; Lk 9:25.
3 Cf. A. Gemelli, Il Francescanesimo, Edizioni O. R., Milano 1932, cap. XIII.
4 “E più quel che più mi piacque.” O. Mazzoni, Il bene perduto, in Noi peccatori: liriche, Zanichelli, Bologna 1930, p. 72.
5 John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis, II, 10.
6 “La dernière démarche de la raison, c’est de connaître qu’il y a une infinité de choses qui la surpassent.” B. Pascal, Pensées, no. 267.
7 Acts 17:27.
8 The reference is to a procession of ecumenical character that took place in Milan in September 1993; Cardinal Martini participated with about 300 religious leaders.
9 Jn 14:6.
10 Cf. Jn 1: 35-39.
11 Lk 7:11-17.
12 Lk 7,36-38.
13 Lk 19,1-10.
14 Mt 8:23-27; Mk 4:35-41; Lk 8:22-25.
15 Jn 15:5.
16 Jn 14:6.
17 Cf. F. Kafka, Das Schloß, Kurt Wolff Verlag, Munich 1926, Eng Trans The Castle, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1968.
18 Hymn for the Office of Readings, Mondays, in the Italian edition of the Liturgy of the Hours, Liturgia delle Ore secondo il rito romano, IV, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Roma 1989, p. 640.
19 Cf. 1Cor 4:3-5.
20 Cf. Mt 5: 48.
21 Lk 6:36.
22 Cf. Jn 21:1-17.
23 Cf. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, “A man came and told me, ‘My only child is dying’” in Il Sabato, n. 5, 1 February 1986, p. 8.
24 J.-J. Hamer, Introduction to L. Giussani, He is if He Changes, Supplement to 30 Days, February 1994, p. 5
25 St. Thomas Aquinas, Secunda secundae, in Summa Theologiae, q. 179, art. 1.
26 R. Guardini, L’essenza del cristianesimo, Morcelliana, Brescia 1980, p. 12.
27 Cf. F. Kafka, Diaries. I, 1910-1923.
28 Mt 28:20.