La Thuile

The Mystery, Before Everything Else
Coverage on an encounter that brought together seven hundred people from seventy countries before “an Event that is happening now,” challenging the heart of each participant to recognize the gaze of Christ

by Luigi Amicone

When the CL responsibles from 72 countries gathered in La Thuile, Italy, for the annual summer assembly, for the first time, among the 700 guests at the Planibel Hotel, there were also friends from Indonesia, Singapore, and Jordan. Between the 8:30 am wake-up call and the 12:30 pm silence, the hours were marked by daily Eucharist, assemblies, moments of group work, witnesses from illustrious friends (with a particularly significant testimony by the Patriarch of Venice, Angelo Scola), and conversations at table and periods for conviviality enlivened by improvised choirs. It was interesting to mark, for example, during the hike in the mountains, the mingling of languages and cultures in conversations that sought to deepen the words we’d heard. What is the common denominator uniting a Canadian TV journalist who spoke of multiculturalism and cinematographic productions with a Berlin print journalist? What unites an Italian ex-Communist with a very young daughter of Chinese Communism, who want to understand the nexus between the religious sense and the Church?
Julián Carrón is convinced that nothing should be taken for granted in this companionship, notwithstanding all the possible recognition it has received from the Holy Mother Church, notwithstanding the over fifty years it has been journeying in the world. For what proposal? For what historical meaning? “It’s not obvious,” says Carrón. “We have to give precedence to the Mystery who is making us, to this ‘first,’” he said in the opening evening of the International Assembly. “It is an Event that is happening now,” he reiterated as he began his closing talk.

From every continent
The fragility and, at the same time, the power of the event that unites people from every continent–people who probably didn’t know each other before, and probably will never see each other again in this life–emerges from what is going on before our own eyes. It transpires in the good-hearted banter of Cardinal Simonis (who, now that the Pope has accepted his request to retire, will soon leave the Diocese of Utrecht): speaking with an Italian priest friend, he asked, “How long have we known each other, and how long have you been inviting me to this assembly of the CL responsibles? Eighteen years, right? Our friendship has truly been one of merriment and jokes.”
Fr. Carrón says, “We have had the grace of seeing before our own eyes what has happened.” We perceive the fulfillment of the Scripture–“I will take you from among the peoples, and I will make you a new people”–by simply riding the elevator with young Alex, an Asian-American student from Seattle, or meeting up with Said, a forty-something Egyptian from Alexandria, or seeing our good old friend John, the Australian famous for his t-shirt advertising Perth as the perfect city, where people go surfing before they go to work, eat dinner on the beach under the stars, and sigh, “What a drag, another day in paradise.”
The dominant note running through Carrón’s talks was that “precedence is given to the Mystery before every other thing. It’s not a sentiment: it’s a judgment, a gaze, recognition of He who is making us, now. This is a given, not a convention. We don’t have to come to an agreement; nobody can lengthen his life, not even by a minute.” During all the gatherings, the Movement’s guide constantly sought to refer us to a measure exceeding our own measures (even though they may be dogmatically correct), to a mature personalization. The community, the companionship, the Movement mustn’t substitute the protagonism of the person. In the consciousness of oneself before reality, or in the daily decisions we make in response to the promptings of life, it’s essential that the “I” be the point of departure for everything. He told Tommy, an Italian who has settled in the U.S. with his family and works in Boston, that he shouldn’t give in to the anxious blackmail of communitarianism: “Engage fully in your adventure for who you are.”

No “associationism”
Carrón’s words reverberated with irritation at an “associationistic” companionship, and with gusto for the freedom that responds personally to the call of the Mystery. We, too, personally, felt moments of rebellion when faced with this peremptory warning, as if we were before a kind of theoretical evidence; it may be a strange oxymoron, but perhaps it expresses the urgency of not feeling “comfortable” even with the way certain words ring with perfect correspondence to the intelligence. As a young New Yorker said during an assembly, we’re not free “from the images that have been smashed into our heads”–for example, the images of what the Movement should be. After all, we’ve been feeling like members of the vanguard for twenty years, and now someone’s inviting us to discover an Other who is making us. It’s almost as if we’d like to ask, “So, did Jesus Christ come to us just to bring us this ferocious battle for religiosity?” One seemed to understand, from the passion animating Carrón’s speech, that even though the Christian can’t seriously feel nostalgia for the innocence of cats and butterflies, consciousness of the human does not subsist merely in the fact of belonging to the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation.
“The person is defined by the direct relationship with the Mystery,” says Carrón. He repeated it with insistent variations on the theme all week long. Is this why Giorgio Vittadini testified that he’s stopped asking Carrón questions, and has begun asking to look where he is looking? Where is Carrón looking? “The person of Jesus is the method of the Mystery. A presence. A presence called Church. What is the function of the Church in history? It is the same function as Christ’s. The Church defends us from the isolation by which religiosity would otherwise be exploited. She urges us in the continuous recognition of the ‘first’ without which I continually slip into the anxiety of doing. This is why our problem is not running a people, but following the one who follows. Since the ‘I’ does not emerge from an owner’s manual, and those who spare you the Mystery are taking you for a ride, living religiosity is the only road that generates true friendship. Otherwise, you have only political relationships. Friendship is going together toward Destiny.”