01-05-2007 - Traces, n. 5 Mission Priestly Fraternity of the Missionaries of St. Charles Borromeo An Embrace beyond the Wall From the seminary in Rome to the whole world… In these pages, the Missionaries of the St. Charles Fraternity speak of their lives, their encounters and their difficulties. Tales of a friendship “on the frontiers of human experience” When I speak of the St. Charles Fraternity, the title of a famous book by Gilbert Cesbron on the worker priests comes to my mind: Saints Go to Hell–certainly not because the priests of the St. Charles Fraternity want to refer to that experience, but because we want to live on the frontiers of human experience. Everything that is human interests us and we feel we are sent to every man. This is what I saw in Fr. Giussani, what I learned from him, what he transmitted to me. For me, Fr. Giussani is a man who looked for himself in every man, curious about everyone’s humanity and, at the same time, a man who begged for Christ in everything. In this way, he became His witness. So, rather than describing a theory, I want to make known our Fraternity by means of a little-big event. A few days ago, I received a letter from Giampiero Caruso, one of our priests who lives in Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia. Amongst his other tasks, Giampiero regularly visits three different prisons, one of them sixty miles from the capital, in a small town called Tagucin. Here is what he wrote: “I enter the prison and walk a few yards in silence, accompanied by a policeman. I cross a long courtyard surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence. I meet some inmates walking around, others shoveling snow, and others playing football in a small field–things I have so far only seen in films. As we walk along, the policeman whispers in my ear that there are 2,200 people in that prison. I find 15 of them in a room, waiting for me. At first, I am afraid because I don’t know how the inmates will react to my presence, but then I remember I am not alone; I think of the priests of the St. Charles Fraternity who live with me; I think of Jesus’ phrase in the Gospel in which He says, “Go to the ends of the earth… I shall be with you.” I am no longer afraid. I begin to look at them, one by one. It is as if I were seeing my own humanity: wounded, needy, begging. Then I start asking some questions: “What are you names?” “How many years have you been here?” “How much longer have you got?” They tell me the sentences are very long because Tagucin is a maximum security prison. The first who answers is a man who finds it difficult to speak and can only just manage to keep his head up; of all of them he is the one who strikes me most because of the deep sadness in his blue eyes, and that head almost always bent down. I am probably in the presence of murderers, rapists, and thieves, but my eyes are intent on recognizing the origin of that sadness, that pain, that deep melancholy those faces display. Like me, these men want freedom and happiness; like me, they cannot give it to themselves. They are waiting. We spoke for three hours of freedom, of faith, of hope, of Christ… I felt naked before them–naked because I could not offer them mere phrases; I had to speak of myself, of my personal relationship with Christ as the source of the freedom I live, of the faith I live, of the hope I live. I told them that a man does not coincide with his own limitations, with his own sins; these are not the last words on our life. We are the objects of forgiveness and mercy. This is the origin of our freedom, of our hope. I realize I was able to stammer these words only because God humbled Himself, coming down to my level. I sense that if I don’t experience every day this personal and totally gratuitous love, then I remain blocked by my own limitations. The same man who found it hard to hold his head up gave a start when I said that faith is the summit of reason, and he began to get involved and ask questions, some of them argumentative, skeptical. The subject is interesting but the time is short, and soon it’s time for me to go. Before the policeman comes to collect me, I greet say goodbye to them, one by one. I go up to that man, and with a hand on his shoulder I gesture to him to lift up his head. He brightens up, and I offer him my hand and he pulls me to him and hugs me. Then he says, ‘Come back soon, I’ll be waiting for you.’” In these words, “Come back soon, I’ll be waiting for you,” lies the whole meaning of the St. Charles Fraternity.