Germany

A Community of
Living Stones
There were 4 of them in 1979, and this year, at the Opening Day with Fr. Carrón in Munich, there were 500. This thirty-year journey gone ahead  through many small gestures, including the polyphonic choir, Spuren (Traces), and short vacations

by Christoph Scholz

There could not have been a better place than the church built over the tomb of Blessed Rupert Mayer in Munich for the Communion and Liberation Movement’s “Opening Day” of the year. This tireless missionary championed the cause of freedom and faith lived in public life during the Kulturkampf [“culture struggle” against the Catholic Church, begun in 1871], and was a leader of the Catholic resistance at the time of Nazism.
So he is an exceptional witness of “The Adventure of Freedom” the theme of the CL Opening Day in Munich. In recent years, many Germans have joined in this “adventure” of Fr. Giussani’s charism. This year, the guarantee of this charism, Fr. Julián Carrón, paid a visit to the Bavarian capital.

Where it all began
When Fr. Giussani visited our small community for the first time, in 1987, the meeting was held at Altötting, Germany’s most famous Marian shrine. Since then, the Movement has grown a great deal, and is present even in what was formerly East Germany. For the Opening Day this year, people from all over the country came to fill the Bürgersaalkirche, a church in the heart of Munich, from Bremen, Berlin, Cologne, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Heidelberg, Freiburg, Dresden, Leipzig, Würzburg and Eichstätt. There was even a group of 30 students from Vienna, as well as a larger group from German-speaking Switzerland.
Amongst the many young people present were a number of children of the “first generation” of German adherents. Fr José “Pepe” Claveria, responsible for the Movement in Austria, recalled the beginnings of Communion and Liberation in Germany, telling of that “community of living stones” in Freiburg, where it all began. It was all thanks to the scholarships that the late archbishop, Oskar Saier, granted to four students from Milan in 1979, in order to bring the experience of CL to his diocese. This year, the participants numbered about 500, of all ages.
“What struck me most during these days was to see this people on their journey,” Claveria said, giving his impressions on the day. So  we have to ask ourselves, “How is it possible for this to happen in a Europe in which the spiritual desert is  still advancing?” “Not thanks to plans or activities, nor thanks to organization, so dear to Germans,” he said, with a wink. No. It’s possible only thanks to the work of an Other; and the clearest sign of this is the very fact of these two days we spent together, the experiences and the friendship we shared. The indisputable sign of the work of this Other are the children and the youngsters, who reflect the authenticity of this experience.
Just a few examples: This year, about 80 children came for the summer vacation on the lake at Achensee and to the ski holiday at Lenzerheide, in Switzerland. “On these occasions, many bring along their friends,” explains Sabina, who teaches mathematics in a high school in Eichstätt. “We teachers invite our students, too, and word goes around the school that the ski holiday can be more than mere amusement.” Some of the older kids help out as assistants at the “youth camps” organized every spring. She adds, “The children are glad to have older friends, and the youngsters learn to take responsibility; they begin to understand better what is important in their GS experience. For me, how wonderful the vacations are is a miracle that repeats itself every time. I organize everything, but this beauty does not come from me.” Then she explains that while preparing these vacations, she and her friends in the Memores Domini house always make a novena to Our Lady. “Those few days give rise to a unity that is not based on common interests or similarities in character, and this for me is a sign of Christ acting among us.” The friendship among the kids is kept alive even when they are far apart, from Lake Constance to northern Germany. They get in touch every day, by means of Chat sites or Skype, and visit each other whenever they can. “Munich? We go to watch Bayern playing against Inter, in the new Allianz Arena,” jokes Stefano Montanari, who leads GS meetings along with Ute Schretzmeier. He was born in Romagna, in Italy, and is now Bavarian by adoption, but when it comes to soccer, his heart still beats for Italy, “and for the youngsters to whom I want to transmit what I have been given.”

The two Roses in Munich
If you attend university in the Bavarian city, you can meet the CL students every day at the Ludwigskirche (the Church of St. Louis), for the recital of the Angelus or for evening Mass. Not only does the building house one of the largest frescoes in the apse, second only to that of the Sistine Chapel, but it was where Romano Guardini preached when he was chaplain; today his body rests in a side chapel. For Thomas, the friendship of the CLU students is “the concrete form in which to live my relationship with Christ on a day-to-day basis. Among the friends who meet regularly for School of Community, there are often Italians there on the Erasmus project, which sponsors students moving between various European universities for periods of study. Not surprisingly, Thomas, too, owes his encounter with the Movement to a scholarship bearing Guardini’s name. During a period of study in Ferrara, he met two students in the law faculty who invited him to School of Community.
The day-to-day university life alternates with “special” occasions. One of these, important for both students and the rest of the community in Munich, was the inauguration of the exhibition on the White Rose. It was right here, in the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität, that Hans and Sophie Scholl distributed their leaflets criticizing the Nazi regime, and the sister of Willi Graf, one of the organizers of the protest, took part in the presentation of the exhibition. And there are other cultural and missionary events–some quite small; others larger in scale–organized by the families and the young workers of the community. There was an evening dedicated to the Russian writer Vasily Grossman, a wine-tasting, then a choral concert in the streets of the city on behalf of “Support,” an association that supports Meeting Point, the center for AIDS patients in Uganda and long-range adoption of AIDS orphans, founded thanks to Maria Groos (head of AVSI in Germany) and others who wanted to share the experience of Rose and the Uganda community.

Hours of traveling
 Fr. Giussani said that song was born an instant before the Movement. The choir of the community is certainly one of the clearest examples of what the Movement is in Germany. People from all the communities take part in it, and they meet occasionally on the weekend for rehearsals. Many travel huge distances to be there. For Markus Lenz, the conductor, “this is not only the expression of a friendship, but also a way of being educated in the friendship, because nowhere else do I see so clearly that I am following a beauty that is given to me and in which I can participate.”
Further north, in Berlin, there has been for some years a smaller presence: a handful of people of all sorts, as diverse as the many districts of this global city. Among these are Basil, from Freiburg, Conchita from Mexico, Paolo and Laura from Italy, Cintia from Brazil… and Wolfgang, the only genuine Berliner. It is not by chance that this group, in a city of three and a half million, has chosen to visit lonely (and often sick) people, as a gesture of charity.
So, the German community is a very varied one, spread throughout the territory, above all in the south. Many of them are far from a community, and so Spuren (Traces) and the CL website are crucial for sharing the life of the Movement. Very important for the magazine is the work of the volunteers who, every month, in addition to their many job and family commitments, translate the most important texts from Italian into German. The fact that the magazine is published regularly is always a minor miracle for Chiara, who holds the crucial role as the “soul of the editorial staff” and the untiring coordinator.

The reawakening of the German soul
As in other countries, the process of de-Christianization is more and more evident. The former German Democratic Republic is the area in the world with the largest percentage of its inhabitants that declares not to belong to any religion. At the same time, there is a new interest in religion and in the faith, and not only in the mass media. Undeniably, the election of Benedict XVI contributed to this reawakening. Even the more powerful media, like Der Spiegel, admit that, despite the progress of modern science, the fundamental questions and human nostalgia remain unchanged today, just as two thousand years ago.
“The novelty of the Christian announcement does not consist in a thought, a feeling, or in presumption, but in participation in a present event,” Carrón said at the Opening Day in Munich. For Fr. Romano Christen, who was there at the beginning of the Movement as a student at Freiburg, and who is now the CL responsible for Germany, the journey that led from those four students to the reality of the Movement today is the most impressive sign of the work of an Other. “If I think of all the ups and downs, of the chances we had and of our limitations, I can only conclude that everything is a pure gift. It has not been due to our merits, but thanks to faithfulness to the Event that goes before us every day, and fills me continually with wonder.” Today, Fr. Romano is serving, along with two confreres of the Priestly Fraternity of the Missionaries of St. Charles Borromeo, in various parishes in Freiburg.
So, the striking example that Fr. Carrón used to explain the singularity of the personal encounter with Christ in the Church is valid even for Germany: “When you have tasted a spectacular wine, whatever wine they serve you the day after, you cannot forget the one you have tasted.” As a sign of thanks for his visit, Carrón was given a basket containing German  treats: beer, brezel, and sausages. “We don’t belong to a religion that forbids beer, but to one that produces it,” said Thomas, as he handed over the gift. But he warned, “Munich beer is so good that once you have tasted it, you have no taste for other beer.”