A new world
There was something new; I didn’t expect it. I study and translate the Old Testament, but I had never heard that way of talking about the divine in the human before. I was amazed, and I began thinking that my daughter, who I raised by myself because my husband died in Vienna in a car accident, is in good hands. She is discovering a new world, as I am. My daughter is an atheist, but she comes home from school and feels challenged by your professor. She has set herself to studying in order to battle him. So I became curious, and came to see. My daughter says that after this encounter, she wants to study psychiatry, because she has come to want to understand man more. But coming to the meeting with Fr. Carrón, I understood that this is the road for me and my daughter to understand man, to understand who we are.
Elena, Professor of Byzantine Philology, invited to the meeting by her daughter’s teacher
Restoring hope
At the beginning, I found it hard to follow the direction of the talk. Then, strangely, my whole life came to my mind–like the microphone, it often hasn’t worked well (I had cancer). I love the kids at school, but it seems that we’re not giving them anything. How I wish they could encounter such a beauty! Maybe it was difficult, but this meeting has restored my hope at a difficult moment in my life. I spent five years studying in America. I was the student of a poetess who loved Eliot. The other evening, this poet and the beauty of poetry returned to my mind. This is how one can begin again.
A teacher invited by a friend of the community

Following our children
We were moved. I didn’t want my children to spend time with you, because your meetings are in the Sanità Quarter and we’re afraid something might happen to them. One of them had his cell phone stolen just in front of your center. Since they were interested in your religious and somewhat strange discourses, two months ago we proposed that they spend time at a parish in Vomero. They were decidedly opposed. So then we accepted your invitation to the meeting with this Spanish priest. It was powerful. A surprise. I’ve been a catechist for years, but this is another world. Thank you. We won’t be suspicious of you anymore. The only thing we would like to ask you is, when they come to your meetings, could you accompany them to the metro stop? (We’re afraid anyway.) Thank you.
Two parents from the Vomero
neighborhood in Naples

A hope for Naples
After the meeting with Fr. Carrón, I left for Tunisia for work, together with twelve other Italian friends. We had dinner with the Italian ambassador, he too from Naples, and the discussion quickly centered on events in Naples. As usual, the observations were all negative. At a certain point, I said that the previous evening I had seen something different; in fact, I had understood the motive for the presence of the Company of Works and that this must be made known to as many people as possible, because it brings a true hope for those who work and live in Naples. All this aroused curiosity and prompted a lot of questions from those at the table, and we agreed to meet as soon as we return to Italy to pursue this. Thank you.
Alessandra, a young entrepreneur
from Naples, invited by the friends
of the Company of Works
In the confessional
Dearest Fr. Julián: I am a Jesuit priest, and every Wednesday I hear many confessions of CL youth. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for having stopped to greet me in my confessional, in the Church of Gesù Nuovo, the morning of October 28th, the day after the meeting at the Mostra d’Oltremare. I have a strong, penetrating memory of your talk to the CL crowd in the auditorium, jam-packed together, listening with great attention. Thank you for the spiritual experience your words provoked in me; it was a splendid, extraordinary meditation on Jesus Christ, salvation and hope of man, of every man willing to encounter Him. May the Lord Jesus sustain you and give you the strength and light of the Holy Spirit, to be able to help so many young people pursue the unforgettable mission of Fr. Giussani.
Fr. Francesco

Friuli Venezia Giulia

Eating together
Since the end of last year, a student of mine has been coming to GS. Before the meeting, we eat together, then the kids play a while, then we have School of Community and, afterwards, those who so desire study together. Well, speaking at one of these meetings, this student told us how it was beautiful for her to be with us, eating together, joking, having fun, speaking, and comparing her life with the experiences of adults, because these things helped her see the positive in life and not, like her, always the negative. She added that for her, the word “eating” was not something taken for granted, because for the past two years she had never had a regular meal; her parents didn’t know what to do, because it seemed that her eating disturbances would never stop. But here, for her, who refused food, it was natural to gobble down her meal like everyone else. So, unexpectedly, she began eating normally again. What has healed her can’t just be a company of friends, no matter how nice–there aren’t many of us, and we have a long way to go in the Christian walk. It can’t be the goodness of the food, even though we try to do our best, nor the games the kids play together. Only God can be so merciful and great as to use such a fragile instrument as us, to work His miracles.
Anna

The beauty of Christianity
On August 29, 1990, my wife and our two children and I arrived in Trieste, leaving behind us our homeland, Albania, which had caused us so much suffering and difficulty. We left our loved ones and our memories of a life with great pain but, at the same time, we also left the persecutors who in forty-five years had destroyed the tradition that had been formed, and through a terrible dictatorship had subjected the best part of the people to suffering unto death. This system led the country to decline in material terms and caused the intellectual and spiritual impoverishment of the people, culminating in the closure of places of worship and imprisonment and murder of religious. They attempted to remove God from the minds and hearts of our people, but they failed. In these circumstances, it was fundamental to bring our children to a free world. Notwithstanding all the difficulties, my thought always pressed me to believe that the devastating power of the regime was something miserable and small in the face of the beauty of Christianity, which led me to a conception of things in which the presence of God was always tangible–a God who manifested Himself in every positive thing that has been offered me, in a context in which every possibility was denied me. When we left the place that sought to eliminate this presence, it manifested itself with the fortuitous encounter with Fr. Beniamino, who welcomed us and did everything possible to help us integrate into our new context, thus concretizing all our hopes to encounter a Christian presence that was no longer lived as a clandestine experience, but as an experience shared with a group of people. Along the journey we’ve made over the past fifteen years, we can say that that presence has never failed, granting us a certainty about the years to come.
Zef and Josephine

Vienna

Discovering her own good
Three years ago, our fourth child, Eduard, was born prematurely, at five and a half months, and because of this, was blind and mentally retarded. We went through this experience with great pain, but also with great faith. I can say that since he was born, we have been much more united as a family and we pray much more. But the biggest, most radical change for me is the different relationship with Christ. Let me explain. When Eduard was in the hospital and had to undergo a series of operations, I was convinced that sooner or later a miracle would happen and Eduard would be healed. I asked a good thing of God, who can do everything, and who loves me. But even if all this is true, the miracle didn’t happen. It remains true that He loves me and desires my good. Therefore, it is reasonable for me to think that the fact that Eduard has not been healed is for my good. And now, after three years, I am experiencing this fact. In feeling so incapable and inadequate to manage the situation, I began praying, “Okay, if You want it this way, I accept that Eduard stays ill, but by myself, I can’t handle it. You, Christ, have to stay alongside me; You have to be particularly present in our family.” After the 2005 Exercises, I began asking for His person instead of asking for favors or “things,” even good ones. Thanks to the friends of the Movement, I have understood that, in our pain, Christ seizes us, and calls us to Himself. Christ calls us back in all circumstances, but for me, so distracted and taken up by the things to do, a big shock was necessary, a wound that remains open, to tell me that the purpose of life is to love Christ, that vocation is a “yes” that you say every day, not just on your wedding day. For this reason, I can say that Eduard is a gift, in the sense of a good and not a “rip-off” for us. I am beginning to intuit what I thought only the saints could say, that my good, that which makes my life beautiful and useful, is loving Christ.
Maru

Padova

The factor that counts
I remember a dialogue with Giussani at a summer council in the 1980s in Colfosco, when, all of a sudden, he asked, “What was Leopardi missing?” Without hesitating, we answered, “God.” He said sharply, “No, the problem is not God; it’s Christ.” And I connect this with what Carrón tells us: “I’m interested in the heart because I am interested in Christ.” If I look at my experience and that of my friends, it isn’t that we don’t affirm Christ, but is as if Christ were one of many factors of experience–He’s there, but so is the disappointment of that friend, the difficulty of that situation, the pain of that fact, and the complaint about that other one. Christ, if reduced to one of many factors, can no longer be welcomed, understood, lived for what He is, that is, the reality of the Risen One, true reality, and thus the unifying factor of the real.
Mario

Pesaro

Stubborn reality
I’m a clerk in a glass factory, where I’m responsible for a variety of things, including customer care for the delivery of ordered materials. Often it’s necessary to work overtime to complete the work but, except for the usual miniscule minority, all the workers refuse to work more. One afternoon, a job was a bit behind and overtime was necessary. The factory director told me that he had a previous engagement, and that none of the workers was willing to stay on, except one person. The owner himself, informed of this fact, told us to send what was possible. So, at that point, I had met my responsibility as much as was expected. But even though I’d done my job, and nobody could complain, seeing that general attitude of resignation and closure in the face of the circumstances provoked me and wouldn’t let me feel entirely peaceful. So I went to the fellow who had said he could stay, and told him that I myself would help him. This episode struck me because I, too, am like all the rest of the workers, and I always use my own measure, above all at work. However, the work of School of Community and the relationship with the friends of the Fraternity are educating me and this makes me more attentive and open before reality, and capable of things that only five minutes before I wouldn’t ever have imagined. Also, it helped me understand Carrón more clearly when he says that reality is stubborn: I had always interpreted it thinking that reality is stubborn because every now and then it charges in again with strong reminders or through certain circumstances. Instead, reality, or rather, He of whom reality is made, always calls you to Himself, in any circumstance, even maybe the one you have been experiencing daily for years, and that by now you take for granted, in the worst sense, without hope.
Stefano

Lisbon

A question of judgment
During a lesson on narrative in films, I said that narrative is a way of representing a human experience. It has nothing (at all) to do with abstraction; rather, it is the representation of the real, of man’s experience. So I asked them, “For you, what is experience?” They began talking about what makes an impression on them, what they feel, emotions, the shock provoked by a movie, etc. I said, “Yes, all these are all true things, but something’s missing. What’s missing?” At a certain point, one fellow raised his hand and said, “Judgment is missing!” I just about fell off my chair! I said, “José, I don’t know whether you realize the value of what you’ve just said.” He replied, “If I said it, I consider it important!” So I threw out a provocation: “There has to be a judgment on what we feel in order for the thing to become experience, for it to become human.” Then I read them a sentence of Paul Ricoeur’s that said exactly this, that time is human to the degree to which it is revealed to the experience of man as clear, that is, when it has a judgment. A discussion ensued, with many saying, “Experience is only what I feel now, at this moment, because tomorrow what I think will no longer be experience, because it is already over.” I was thinking that this is the problem of our age: on the one hand, the incapacity to judge–to make ours what we live–and on the other hand, an ideological tendency that becomes dominant–thinking that this judgment we have given, and that has become ours, is not important, because it is no longer the truth of the thing; it is a disfigurement. And I said to them, “Well then, isn’t this because this thing has become yours?” Some said “yes.” The fact that this thing has become yours is the reason you know who you are. It was an incredible lesson. When break time came, the students left and I could hear them continuing their discussion in the hall!
Rosarinho

Indianapolis

Victory in the heart of America
The Beginning Day in Indianapolis for Chicago, Evansville, Dayton, Toledo, Cincinnati, Lexington, Milwaukee, and of course Indianapolis took place at Marian College.
Among the more than 65 attendees was Erica, who just graduated from the Evansville CLU and is now a teacher in a Catholic school in Indianapolis. She gave a testimony about how she needs to have a reason and a meaning for everything that she does in her classroom. She had proposed the Angelus as a prayer before lunch and her kids asked her, “Why?” She had to answer that question first for herself but also as an opportunity to guide these kids who are starting to say “we” with unity. Two other CLU kids from Evansville made a movie this summer about Cain and Abel. Erica showed that movie in class and her students were screaming for justice. From the realization of that need for justice, she began to work on elementary experience and “the heart” with her kids.
We also had Terese Black, who gave a beautiful testimony on her experience as a mother to her own children. She has been really struck by the other women of the Movement who truly educate their children and their children’s hearts. Terese noted that she was fascinated by these mothers and wanted to imitate them, but that that was never enough. And so she lived with them and attached herself to them. This was more than an imitation, it was also the beginning of a new way to look at and educate her own children. It was also the way that Terese was able to really follow and become a mother to the GS kids in Chicago. From what I saw and heard, the Movement exists and is a victory in the heart of the heart of America.
Mike

Dublin

Life, a Journey toward Destiny
I was struck so many times while reading The Religious Sense. Never before have I had explained to me this “sense” and what we call religion, faith, and that these things are part of me; they are me; they are my most profound identity. The shocking thing is that I knew this all along and let it go for all kinds of reasons, maybe because the Catholicism I grew up with seemed simplistic or hypothetical or limited.
But to see the title of the Meeting [The Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples in Rimini, Italy, August 20-26, 2006, entitled, “Reason is the need for the Infinite and culminates in the sigh and the presentiment that this Infinite be manifested.”], to read Fr Giussani’s book, The Religious Sense, and then to hear within a day or two of finishing it the Pope speaking about this very same thing… And to find that this “idea” addresses for me precisely something in my life that I need to come to terms with now–which is that split, that split between heart and head, left and right. All around there is a denial, in which I participated for a long time, the denial of the religious option, as it were, as having any credibility, of having any meaning, of having any substance. I come upon these ideas now at a time when in my own life I am struggling to transcend the limits of my own skepticism. I have exhausted my own skepticism, I have exhausted my cleverness, I have exhausted my sense of omnipotence. For many years in my life, from my teenage years on, I had this idea that religion and faith were marks of fear, of superstition, and of inadequacy, and that this was a bad thing. The idea that I come across in Fr. Giussani’s book is that there is a way of talking about these things which is so much cleverer, so much more real. Clever is not the right word. He has discussed these things somehow smarter than anybody who has decried and denied them, or dismissed them.
I think that now there is something happening in the world, in the Western world which is beginning to understand this idea that reason and faith are one. There is no collision, no conflict, and the sense of my identity, my ultimate identity, my connection with the Infinite, my deep knowledge of the Mystery is combined with my humanity in which these things are not uppermost. On a day-to-day basis, I am marooned, I can be cut off from my proper place. I find in myself these conditions, what I thought were my flaws. Maybe they are, maybe that’s the way to put it, but they are symptoms of this sense within me. On any given day, I may be unable to be here now, in the present, in reality. The best I can do, perhaps on some days, is to do the things that I have to do, and I find myself almost flying off, wishing myself away, wishing myself forward to some vague future point, to some place where… what? A place where perhaps my sense of perfection will be realized, will become manifest. These are the forces within me that have driven me forward all my life. I had seen them as defects, as limitations of myself. But now I recognize them, from Fr. Giussani’s words, as symptoms of my place in Infinity, of my place in the perfect reality. And that changes my whole attitude to life. It is beginning to change my whole attitude to life, I should say. It is not making me more pious or holy but making me–how shall I say?–take more notice of reality. What is reality saying to me? Is my life, really, as I used to think, a series of random events, or is my life something else? Is my life a journey to my own destiny? And so I am taking notice of reality and being exhilarated by it, and no longer falling back into explaining the way I feel as either an expression of some inadequacy in myself, as some defect or some lack in my life, but as an opportunity to be, to be whole, to be more myself than I am now.
John Waters, columnist for The Irish Times

Forlì

Builders of beauty
A month after my father’s death, in September 2005, I went with a group of friends to Fr. Giussani’s tomb and said to him, “Here I am, now I am available. Tell me where you want me. Talk with my father, and then let me know.” Shortly thereafter, I was asked to go to Nigeria. Saying an immediate “yes” was normal, that is, within a good design that over time had become familiar and a friend to me. It is a design that began when I entered the Memores Domini two years after meeting the Movement, almost at a run, because of the great desire for happiness that I had, and that nothing until then had satisfied. But the impetus for adhering and the will to embrace the world were immediately arrested by the death of my mother, and the evident need to take care of my father. It turned all my expectations upside down, and I continued to tell Fr. Giussani I was available for any place in the world that asked for us, until he said, “Stop fighting your situation; accept it!” I learned to accept it, and I lived it for thirty years. Last year, the night of June 29th, I arrived in Lagos, Nigeria, an enormous city, an infernal chaos. When we reached the Memores home, the gates opened to the full order of an other-worldly silence. The next morning, under a torrential downpour, I finally managed to get to the school where the gates opened to the same order, animated by the choir of voices of the children singing or reading aloud in their classrooms. “Here we are,” I thought, “builders of order and beauty in the midst of chaos; that is, builders of the Kingdom of God.” I am certain that the order I saw is the same that God, through Fr. Giussani, has built in my life. For this reason, everything in Nigeria, even in the following days, seemed familiar to me; nothing seemed extraneous to me. I’ve been in Lagos for over a month. Now they ask me, “Are you going? Are you heading off again?” I have been asked to remain available for another departure, and I am. If the Mystery wants me to stay here, I’ll stay, and if He wants me elsewhere, I’ll go; after all, for me, it just means changing rooms in the one home where everything is useful. Whatever He asks, what is important is always being with Him.
Emanuela