by Maurizio Crippa

“No, no debate!” The famous line with which Nanni Moretti dismissed decades of left-wing “political culture,” made up of ideological categories and with the single aim of “transmitting contents” above (and into) people’s heads, is a perfect starting point–a negative one, obviously–for relating what the St. Charles Cultural Center, today the Milan Cultural Center, has been since it started. “When we began in 1981, we were still in the years of ideology; Milan was still embittered with hate, and people were almost afraid to go out,” Onorato Grassi remembers. He was the first director of the Cultural Center. “But we, a group of people who had recently left university, wanted to communicate an experience we had met, and which now made us responsible for telling everyone, publicly, the judgment that arose from the Christian experience we were living.” This was the intuition of what it means to do cultural work, because culture is the expression of an experience, not debates to drop onto people’s heads. So today, Camillo Fornasieri, the director since 1988, adds, “The Milan Cultural Center is a place where everyone can meet passion for the truth and for beauty. I always have in mind that Gospel phrase: ‘Not by bread alone.’ It means that faith is also an immediate comparison with everything, the search for the truth in everything. In this sense, culture is also a form of charity, because it is a profound meeting with the other.”

No specialties
So it was that in 1981 this desire met up with a willing response from the Servites of Mary, who were in charge of St. Charles Church in Corso Vittorio Emanuele, in central Milan, and who had set up their own cultural center. Grassi recalls, “There was a tiny office, a telephone and a small auditorium.” But from that telephone calls were made all over the world, wherever there was the hint of a topic, or of a person with whom it was worth measuring up. There were no specialties; rather, it was a place you could just go to, not only to follow conferences.” It was communicating Christianity as the meaning of everything, so much so that the early initiatives included a course of catechesis for adults, held by Monsignor (now Cardinal) Giacomo Biffi, Monsignor Enrico Galbiati (the scripture scholar), and Fr. Giussani. From the start, though, alongside the meetings on culture and theology, began the “Science Mondays” and the “Economics Wednesdays,” which had quite an effect because it was the first time that Christians got together to talk seriously about economics, the market and enterprise. It was looking at everything, learning from whomever had something to communicate. Many people still recall the meetings with personalities like Hans Urs von Balthasar, and scientists like John Eccles and Carlo Rubbia.

An all-round vision
“Culture today is often the ‘stalling place,’ as I call it, a presumably neutral place in which arguments count, but not communication of something important,” Fornasieri comments. “What moves us is an interest to relate to the truth. This is the difference.” He quotes Romano Guardini: “He said that one of the greatest dogmas of the twentieth century was that one could say anything about poets–about their style or aesthetic value… but one could never say whether or not what they were saying was true. In this way, Guardini added, one was ‘wronging not only the poet’ but wronging oneself, too.” This dogma was brought down by the thousand people who blocked via Larga in Milan, one evening in 1987, because there was no more room in the theater there to hear the great poet Ceslaw Milosz. The Nobel Prizewinner said later that it was “one of three finest things in my life,” astounded at how many people wanted to meet him and to understand what he had to say. Robert Calasso, the proprietor of the publishers Adelphi, was astounded, too, though he was a very good editor for Milosz.
Over the years, publishers of many writers and poets “met” by the public at the Center, from David Grossman to Les Murray, were astounded in the same way. Thus, through that living experience, the dialogue with the city and its culture grew, as it had at the start, when the St. Charles Center first opened its doors to a Milan still drenched with ideology and it was also a sign for everyone–so much so as to make Milan rediscover the faith in its soul, and the city of St. Charles rediscover its vocation to charity. Guided by the intuition of Giovanni Testori, one of the encounters that left the clearest mark on the road in those early years, St. Charles’ Memorial to the Milanese was republished and presented at the Piccolo Teatro in 1984, the saint’s centenary year. There was an all-round interest that “obviously grew with highs and lows,” Grassi says, “but around a living center, because the Cultural Center is alive only if there is a living, unitary experience that generates it.” There were two decisive events, Grassi recalls: “The first was John Paul II’s great address to UNESCO in 1980, in which he said that man lives thanks to culture.” The other was an intuition of Fr. Giussani, who came to the Center to speak to us of his conception of modern culture in relationship with Christianity. It was to be the nucleus of his book, Modern Man’s Religious Awareness.

Opening up once
more to the city
By chance or Providence, the moment, in 1991, when the Cultural Center moved from its home at St. Charles Church coincided with a dramatic moment for the city of Milan. A new name had to be found, since that of the St. Charles Cultural Center was still linked with the activities of the Servite Fathers, the legal owners. “‘Milan Cultural Center’ was an intuition and a challenge,” Fornasieri, the new director, tells us. “It meant opening once more to the city, proposing a judgment that was born of a presence, but in a secular, free style.” Thus, in the activities of the MCC, the theme of the city, attention for the people who live there and for what interests them has grown, leading to the huge photographic exhibition dedicated to Milan at the beginning of this autumn.
The history goes on, marked these days by formal, often crucial encounters–for example, with the great writer Chaim Potok, “one of the many encounters that, over the years, have helped us to relate with Judaism,” or with the Israeli writer David Grossman. “We had read a fine article by him on the Pope’s visit to Israel, in which he said that the Pope had, as it were, made those Israelis ‘who feel they are seated in an armchair’ get to their feet.” Then there are relationships that grow little by little until they form a network, or like lighthouses that mark out a course, from the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut to the Milanese economist Giulio Sapelli. The organizers have tried to keep their eyes always fixed “on the truth, with an ear for beauty,” on the great questions of the men of our time and on the faith, like when Anthony Burgess came to speak about the evil of the world, or Fr. Ignace de La Potterie about gnosticism. They were unforgettable evenings, often impressed on the memory of the city, too, like when Margherita Guarducci and Federico Zeri spoke about St. Peter’s tomb, or when Alberto Moravia discussed Manzoni’s The Betrothed, speaking of God and of the world’s evil, and the audience stretched right out into the road.