page one

The Wellsprings of Gratuitousness
Notes from Fr. Julián Carrón’s talk at the General Assembly of the Company of Works in Milan, November 18, 2007

Thank you for your invitation to participate in your annual assembly. I’m happy to be with you because a Christian like me can’t help but look fondly on your efforts. In the historical context of our times, you haven’t spared yourselves the risk of freedom in order to try to create a companionship among those who want to contribute to the generation of wealth and work, and to respond to needs through charitable and cultural works.

1. Historical context
The social panorama of our times appears increasingly grey and brings to mind the “great homogenization” prophesied by Pasolini. Young people are the worst hit, the emblem of the difficulties we’re experiencing and the most evident challenge put to our responsibility as adults.
“In 1968, youth incarnated hope, the future, liberation, and utopia. So often today, young people seem to me like the vanguard of fear and anguish in the face of the future,” wrote the French philosopher Luc Ferry. “They’re victims, I believe, of a kind of ‘Peter Pan syndrome.’ They’re children, adolescents who refuse to grow up…. The fear and anguish are tied to a kind of irresponsibility and ‘victimism’…. They expect everything from the State and politics…. They’re all afraid of living without the crutch of the State, in order to enter into adult life.”1
Ferry’s thoughts were recently echoed in a book by Umberto Galimberti, who wrote, “Young people, even if they don’t always realize it, are suffering, not because of the usual existential crises that break out during our youth, but because a disquieting guest, nihilism, is circling among them, penetrating their feelings, confusing their thoughts, erasing prospects and horizons, dispiriting their souls, saddening their passions, making them bloodless.”2
As the writer Pietro Citati said a few years ago, young people “prefer to remain passive…; they live wrapped up in a mysterious torpor.”3
An example is worth a thousand words: Someone told me that during a family lunch they were talking about the situation of the labor market and the difficulty many have in finding jobs. When the father commented on how ugly and humiliating it is for an adult to depend on unemployment benefits, the son, a college freshman, said from his place sprawled on the couch, “I’d gladly take the unemployment benefits.”

2. The Company of Works:
a fact that imposes itself
When we look at the Company of Works in this anthropological and cultural context in which we see man’s proper protagonism lacking, the first thing that amazes us is precisely the fact that such a reality exists: these are people not overcome by this mysterious torpor, who find the energy and courage to get together to support each other, who actually attempt economic and social initiatives to respond to their own needs and those of the people with whom they live.
Two characteristics marking the Company of Works phenomenon are highlighted in an important slogan of your history: striving for the ideal and an operative friendship. In this, you were pioneers: over twenty years ago you interpreted a need that now everyone recognizes as necessary for social renewal.
“Forcefully emerging in Europe as well as in the United States,” Aldo Schiavone recently wrote, “is a new and unexpected desire for social bonds, the need for a human universe, if I can so express it, with closer knit and interlocked meshes…. A search… for a new social sustainability for the growth of each individuality… [in which] technology manages to enter into relationship with life … directly producing freedom… without passing through the market, and, at the same time, avoiding weakening it too much either. …The Church has grasped this well and quickly, and is readily positioning herself on this horizon, which is not new to her.”4
The existence of the Company of Works documents that we aren’t condemned to watch impotently as everything–desires, hopes, attempts to make and to build–falls apart in our hands. It shows that there is a real possibility for starting again, even in the situation of the destruction of the human in which we find ourselves. There is something that resists decay and endures even in the most unfavorable conditions.
In order to thoroughly understand the meaning of our efforts, we have to look at their origins.

3.  Looking at the origins
How was your entrepreneurial and associative initiative born? Fr. Giussani clearly identified the origin in his talk at the Company of Works national assembly in 1989: “The Company of Works … was not born of a social project or a blueprint for its construction, but as the miracle of a change–a change at which we, ourselves, as spectators, are the first to be amazed.”5
In fact, for many of you, certainly for those who brought it to life, enterprise and association (Company of Works) were the fruit of the change wrought in you by the Christian event. Christianity lived as an experience showed its generative power in you, re-awakening your “I.” The human attractiveness it held for you was so strong that it moved your persons to a creativity and richness of initiatives that constitute a witness to Christ and to the historical value of the Church, as Fr. Giussani acknowledged on another occasion like this one.6 In other words, the Christian encounter re-awakens in us the religious sense, that is, the bundle of exigencies of truth, beauty, justice, goodness, and happiness that constitute the original structure of every human person and that lies at the origin of your efforts.
Through this rebirth of yours and your efforts to respond to the needs and urges of life, you got together with many others, even non-Christians who nonetheless felt the same urge: encountering you, they felt that your attempts were consonant with theirs. “The religious sense as a point of departure can’t help but motivate people to gather together”7 because this existential urge is what “guides the personal and social expression of man.”8
Looking at this origin is fundamental because without consciousness of it one remains like a child. This origin “cries out” that none of us makes himself, that each of us needs to be continually generated in order to be able to say “I,” in order to have the courage to initiate a work or continue it, overcoming all the obstacles along the road. Just as we don’t give ourselves our biological life, so neither do we give ourselves that life from which spring the capacity, the energy, and the desire to build. Just look around you; you see how many people are worn out and abandon any efforts in the face of the current situation, how many never experience the gusto of initiating something.
This is why looking at the beginning is decisive, because the origin, together with the fact that constitutes it, communicates to us the method for continuing without becoming exhausted.

4. The method: faithfulness to the origin
The greatest danger for those committed to a work is changing the method, breaking off from the origin. In order to avoid this, we have to be truly aware of our original dependence; otherwise, we end up taking it for granted. It’s not that we deny it, but it simply remains there like a background, taken for granted, and sooner or later we think we’re the sole fashioners of our good luck.
Thus, we succumb to the same illusion of the Enlightenment, which, reducing Christianity to a system of ethics, expected to obtain the same fruit that Christianity had produced, generating subjects and works without Christ, who constituted their true source. This has devastating consequences for both the subject and for Christianity. For the subject, we see the devastation in the total disinterest that leads to that torpor from which nothing can arise, for lack of a place where the rebirth of the “I” can happen. The same illusion devastates Christianity by removing the authentic nature of a historic event, capable of kindling the “I,” reducing the faith to an ethical premise or an abstract cultural discourse that has nothing to do with the interests of life.
This holds for us as well, and we see it in what Fr. Giussani said exactly thirty years ago to a group of teachers, words with the same pertinence now, as then: “For many of us, the announcement that salvation is Jesus Christ and that the liberation of life and the human person, here and in the other world, are continually bound to the encounter with Him, has become a merely ‘spiritual’ call. Many of us think of concrete things as something different.  …[O]rganization, work groups, or meetings aren’t seen as expressions of a need of life, but as a mortification of life, a burden, dues to pay for a belonging that inexplicably finds us still in the ranks.”9
So what should be a continual encounter with Him, because of our need to be continually generated, becomes a spiritual call. But an abstract spiritual call can’t awaken the subject. Rather, since there’s the spiritual premise, this can lead more easily to the misunderstanding that belief in this premise, together with the good intentions to act in a certain way, can be substitutes for Christianity as a lived experience. But a good theory about love, together with good intentions to fall in love, has never led anyone to fall head over heels in love. The difference is seen in action, the way a man moves when he has fallen in love. If you want to know what kind of experience you have, look at how you move in reality; observe yourselves in action. All our good will won’t free us from succumbing, on so many occasions, to the common mentality in the way we really move, judging and operating like everyone else according to our own calculations, seeking our own personal advantage.
“An evident exigency of the proposal of faith,” Cardinal Ruini said, “…is to show how faith itself is neither a simple, and ultimately illusory, desire of the human soul, nor a merely interior experience, but instead, in each of its essential nuclei, has a precise and very solid relationship with reality.”10 We all can see the consequences of changing the method or taking it for granted: there’s no longer any meaningful impact on the “I.” The fact that everyone recognizes the emergency in education is nothing other than a manifest sign of the historical defeat of the Enlightenment’s boast of producing the fruit of Christianity without Christ.
What can help us not to change the method? In this as well, the Church demonstrates her realism by helping us become conscious of all the factors involved:
1) First of all, the acknowledgment that man is always needy, because his openness and his original impetus falter. The awareness of our need spurs us to seek the origin without which we cannot stand. For this reason, in reminding us that we’re sinners, that is, needy, the Church offers us a contribution that’s more decisive than we think. That her most significant gesture, the Mass, begins with acknowledgment that we’re sinners isn’t just a “pious” opening. It’s the most realistic help, because in doing so, it puts us in the appropriate attitude for beginning anything.
2) In the second place, the nature of Christianity as Event of the wonder aroused by Christ’s beauty. This beauty makes us cling to Him, facilitating our attachment and thus blocking the failure of the “I” that no success could spare us, precisely because no success can satisfy our “I”’s need for totality. We can only hope for something if we’re continually solicited by the attraction of the Truth.
In fact, a companionship like yours deals daily with power and money. Is it realistic to think that someone can deal with them without ending up enmeshed in their use in a way that builds neither himself nor others? In other words, is it possible to have a new, different association of businesses and works? According to me, yes, but on one condition. I wasn’t sure whether it was suitable to say it in a gathering like this, with people from all different trajectories, but I was reassured when one of you told me that the Corporation of House Painters –people like you, up to their elbows in real life, with the same need for success–put up a sign in the Piacenza cathedral saying, “If we want to give new meaning to reality, if we want a new life, we have to return to virginity.” Fr. Giussani wrote, “Virginity is the search for destiny in everything you do, so that every circumstance is shaped in its meaning, thus realized in the truest, most loyal, most useful way. And so human life becomes truer, more loyal, and more useful. It becomes better. Human life brought forth as passion for Christ… concretizes itself in the passionate will that the life of man be truer, more loyal, more useful.”11
Only this passion for Christ, this “direct gaze at Something greater”12 makes virginity possible, puts us in the right attitude for dealing with power and money without being dominated by them; only this enables a new use of things, their true possession. This is not the fruit of an ethical effort, but rather, of giving in to the fascination of the beauty spoken of by Jacopone da Todi: “Christ in His beauty draws me to Him!”13
He is the One who makes possible the gratuitousness that you’ve put in the title of your meeting. “If God… hadn’t become man,” Fr. Giussani reminded us, “nobody would’ve been able to formulate his own life according to this gratuitousness.”14

5. The challenge of a companionship like this
Without a doubt, accepting to put into action an effort like yours has its risks. All the newness that Christ is able to generate is entrusted to your freedom and responsibility. Part and parcel of the event that generated you is the capacity He gave you to take risks, entering into reality with this ideal (I also run risks in the work of the Movement). We know well that this ideal will never be completely fulfilled in history, but this fact doesn’t obviate our striving toward it.
This tension is very well described by Eliot, whose words sound so consonant to us: “Bestial as always before, carnal, self-seeking as always before, selfish and purblind as ever before/ Yet always struggling, always reaffirming, always resuming their march on the way that was lit by the light;/
Often halting, loitering, straying, delaying, returning, yet following no other way.”15
Bestial as always before, but always struggling and never abandoning the road.
Therefore, don’t be aghast at the errors you may commit, which are inevitable in any human work–but don’t justify them either. We can recognize them, because we’re not defined by them. Otherwise, like everyone else, in order to affirm ourselves we’re forced to deny them presumptuously. Within the experience we’ve encountered, we have the principle for correcting ourselves and always starting anew–always struggling, and the first struggle is within ourselves, to affirm a good that is greater than our measure and our projects.

6. Deep reasons for my fondness
I see your attempt as very consonant to my way of perceiving the Christian event, the new creature spoken of by Saint Paul, a new subject on the scene of the world, a new protagonist in society.
Becoming conscious of this is particularly urgent because only Christianity as event can respond to the current situation in which we see the subject failing and torpor growing. Without a subject able to say “I,” a country has no chance of newness and growth. Do you understand why we’ve been talking for years about an “education crisis ”?
This is why your efforts are also decisive for understanding the nature of Christianity. Who’s interested in a Christianity incapable of generating a subject who can enter into reality? It’d be a useless complication of existence, which already has so many problems! This is why the thing that will interest those who meet you, no matter what the occasion, is Christianity lived as a response to the problems of life, because this is the root and the method of your originality. This is how one can avoid the risk denounced by Cardinal Ruini: “It concerns a conception of our faith that tries to be ‘pure’ but can end up disincarnate because it fails to interest us or in any case doesn’t take upon itself the socio-cultural and institutional conditions required to maintain and re-launch both the popular rooting of the faith itself and its capacity to exercise a guiding role in history…. We have to overcome these forms of spiritualism that might hide a kind of alienation from ourselves. The socio-cultural factors certainly aren’t the decisive driving force of Christianity, which is collocated in the mystery of our relationship with the God who saves, but, even so, still represents an unavoidable element in the concrete weft and woof of history, as the vicissitudes of these two millennia have repeatedly demonstrated.”16
The works you’ve created are like an “ironic attempt”–to use Fr. Giussani’s words–to express the newness that entered into so many of you through Baptism: a new creature, a new way of saying “I”: this is anything but alienation from ourselves! A new subject able to risk–this is the fruit of a Christian education. You’ve got a lot of courage to take risks in these times! It’d be a lot easier not to care about yourselves or others, but instead, you take this risk. I’m grateful to you for this testimony, because the attempts of your creativity are a contribution to the good and the well being of society.
Being protagonists within social reality blocks the emptying of the “I” that happens when one expects everything from the State. In the face of this new protagonism, the State takes its rightful place and is able to carry out its fundamental role: to promote expressive and associative freedom, to protect the space in which man can journey along his path, facing problems and seeking answers that make each person’s life more human and dignified. In promoting or not promoting this initiative of individuals, each State decides how it wants its citizens to be: protagonists or subjects. In this sense, Benedicts XVI’s encyclical is a Magna Carta of a just relationship between society and State: “We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need.”17
This is in the best interests of the State and society. And this provides the reasons why it is in a person’s best interests–even a secular person–to participate in such a companionship.

Notes
1 L. Ferry, “Tenemos miedo de todo, del tabaco, del sexo, del alcohol, de la mundilización...” in ABC, April 1, 2006, p. 27.
2 U. Galimberti, “The generation of nothingness,” in la Repubblica, October 5, 2007, p. 47.
3 P. Citati, “Gli eterni adolescenti” [“The eternal adolescents”], in la Repubblica, August 2, 1999, p. 1.
4 A. Schiavone, “La destra non sa più spiegare il mondo” [“The right no longer knows how to explain the world”], in la Repubblica, October 16, 2007, p. 26.
5 L. Giussani, L’io, il potere, le opere [The “I”, Power, and Works], Marietti, Genova 2000, p. 159.
6 Cf., ibid, p. 99.
7 Ibid, p. 168.
8 Ibid, p. 165.
9 L. Giussani, “Viterbo 1977,” in Il rischio educativo  [The Risk of Education], Sei, Torino 1995, p. 61.
10 C. Ruini, Chiesa del nostro tempo III [The Church of Our Times III],Piemme, Casale Monferrato 2007, p. 135.
11 L. Giussani, “Presentazione” [“Presentation”], in E. Manfredini, La conoscenza  di Gesù [The Knowing Jesus], Marietti, Genova-Milano 2004, p. 24.
12 L. Giussani, Why the Church?, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal & Kingston 2001, p. 154.
13 Jacopone da Todi, The Lauds [S. and E. Hughes, trans], New York: Paulist Press, 1982, p. 260.
14 L. Giussani, L’io, il potere, le opere [The “I”, Power, and Works], op. cit., p. 132.
15 T. S. Eliot, Choruses from “The Rock, VII”, in T.S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980, p. 108.
16 C. Ruini, Chiesa del nostro tempo III [The Church of Our Times III], op. cit., pp. 56-57.
17 Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, II, 28.