new world

Not an Empty Word, but
a Real One
Hope is a popular theme today: the new President talks about it, the Pope has written about it, and pop culture is wrestling with it. From January 16th to 19th, the CL National Diaconia of North America took place in Jersey City, New Jersey. Over 430 people came together for a moment to judge the experience of the previous years, and to ask questions, about the reality they are living in. Fr. Julián Carrón met them

By Dino D’Agata 

A world financial crisis that trickles down on a very personal level to people among us, the election of a new U.S. president and the ensuing temptation to disparage the fact that the new leader of the free world may not have Catholics’ interests at heart–as well as a similar temptation to think our former leader was irreprehensible when it came to our interests… All of the questions that press upon us–and how the encounter with Christ through the charism of Fr. Giussani offers hope in front of them–were the core of the work done together at the 2009 National Diaconia from January 16-19 in Jersey City, overlooking the very spot on the Hudson where a U.S. Airways jet lay anchored downstream from where it had successfully landed with no casualties the night before.
At 5 p.m. on Friday at an assembly of university students, Julien Leduc, a nursing student from Montreal, posed the question to Fr. Julián Carrón of how to face a particular class that was not “well-organized.” Carrón responded, “It’s you who need to answer this question. What does the encounter mean for you in facing this situation?” And he persisted: “I don’t come here to solve your problems but to challenge all of you, because this is the verification you need to do. You need to understand these kinds of things from within your experience.”
It was this that was the definitive provocation during the weekend for both CLU students and adults alike.
At the diaconia’s official opening that night, national responsible Chris Bacich thanked Fr. Carron for his “love for our life in its truth,” citing how this was concretely evident in Carron’s efforts to master English in order to comprehend our experience as Americans and to accompany us in the work of realizing how Christ is our only hope in light of the problems of the culture in which we live. Bacich told participants, “The success of your life–that your life be rebuilt by this charism–is something so terribly important for the world, not only for you.”

Witnessing Hope. On Saturday morning, participants addressed Carron with their experiences. Among many others, Stephen Sanchez, a teacher from Washington DC, explained how, having lost a job last year, the Movement had become “a point of consolation, but not something in which I use a method to verify in my experience something real and true.” He recounted how this year, although he obtained a new job that did not pose the difficulties of the previous one, this wasn’t enough, and he wanted to see how he could still verify something true for himself that addressed this lack. “I began to look at what I really wanted,” Sanchez stated. He went on to describe how the formation he’d received working with GS was something he desired at his school with his students, yet he didn’t want to impose GS as a form on the situation.
The result?
“Someone began to respond to me there. The satisfaction didn’t come from an idea that I could fit, but in looking at what it is exactly that I desire and seeing that He answers me.”
To this, Fr. Carrón responded, “This is the answer to the situation. Nobody, nobody can avoid this experience– as in a school when somebody can see the school as something against him yet, another person in the same situation can have another kind of experience. Every circumstance is a challenge for us. If we accept this challenge, we can verify what Christ means, what the real meaning of Christ is–which isn’t an empty word, but a real one, so powerful, so strong that it’s able to change reality, to make possible an experience of satisfaction that we cannot have imagined before. This testimony contains all the elements needed to face the conditions in which we are involved in this moment. Somebody took the proposal the movement offered him and risked a verification with two elements: heart and life. Every one of us has his heart and all the problems of life, and a proposal to face every circumstance.”

Cultural Consequences. It was with this sense that we have been given everything that Crossroads Cultural Center initiated the First Annual New York Encounter, two days of public meetings and cultural events concurrent with the National Diaconia in an effort to publicly engage the questions brought out among us in light of what is happening in the world around us. The first event, which took place on Saturday afternoon at NYU’s Skirball Center for the performing arts was a discussion of hope in light of the recent publication of the second volume of Fr. Giussani’s Is it Possible to Live this Way? The panel consisted of Fr. Carrón, John Allen Jr., Senior Vatican Analyst for CNN, and Edward Nelson, Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University. Introducing the event, Rita Simmonds of Crossroads stated, “Hope has been a recurring theme in public life for the past year,” explaining to the audience that “the reasonableness of hope and the possibility of pursuing an idea that is not utopian” would be the content of the discussion.
In the opening speech, John Allen told the audience, “We gather at an especially fitting moment because we are just three days away from the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States.” He went on to state that “his eventual place in history remains to be seen,” and from there focused on the difficulties Catholics have in subscribing to Obama’s idea of hope when it comes to the issue of the unborn.
While Allen spoke of hope in relation to politics, Professor Nelson addressed the question of mathematics and science. “Science,” he stated, “must follow reason.” He went on to attack the prevalence of “scientism,” i.e., an outlook deduced from the violation of logic that assumes that all science is rational and therefore all that is rational is science. “So mathematicians proceed without certainty, hoping that the foundations are consistent. But this is not the kind of hope that Monsignor Giussani speaks of in the book that we are celebrating today.”
Fr. Carrón elucidated the basis of how hope is defined as the consequence of faith in Is It Possible to Live this Way?, and went on to state: “Hope is the most basic test to ascertain if our faith is an experience–an experience of certainty which is so real that we can base everything on it. It is not a vague, unsubstantiated hope, some sort of irrational optimism that goes against the factual evidence. On the contrary, its reasonableness is based on a knowledge which is verified in experience. For this reason we can say it is based on something that has already been given.”
That evening at Symphony Space on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, pianist Chris Vath performed Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the Metro Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Philip Nuzzo. And the following afternoon, Dr. Lewis Alexander, Global Chief Economist for Citigroup, Professor Seth Freeman of NYU’s Stern School of Business, and Economics Professor Dominick Salvatore of Fordham University provided a lively exchange regarding the financial crisis, debating everything from whether or not the collapse of the housing bubble was something economics and financiers could have predicted, to whether it was the failure of trust within the finance and investment banking industry that precipitated the collapse of financial markets. The event was moderated by Anujeet Sareen, a portfolio manager at Wellington Management Company of Boston, who concluded, “If expectation is in the structure of man, and the only thing that satisfies us is the infinite, we need to look at our experience of what offers that fulfillment, rather than forcing reality to fit our idea of satisfaction. The certainty of faith points to a truth that does not depend on the particular swing in cultural sentiment.  It is this hope that guides our conception of work and needs to guide our engagement of economic policy, in a new way.”
On Sunday night, this new conception of work was exemplified. Samuele Rosa, who with a group of friends in Washington, D.C. developed the Work Center in order to accompany people in need of work, recounted that he was able to do this because “my own need has been embraced.” Nancy Albin of Los Angeles, who, along with Guido Piccarolo, began a company for employing the disabled, commented on how she went from a career in corporate finance to “cleaning toilets.” Cristina Benetti of Montreal spoke of “La petite école,” a pre-school in which the children gave her the occasion “to express what’s most true about my life” since children are able to immediately sense of one is speaking about experience. Annie Bacich of New York spoke of the Ed Conference she initiated, which came about from her being generated as a teacher from talking to her friends. In like manner, Dr. Elvira Parravicini, who is in the midst of organizing the same type of conference for medical personnel, posed the question, “If faith is a new knowledge of reality, what is my new knowledge of medicine? Even amid sickness, pain and beauty, what is it we’re made for?”
Fr. Gerry Mahon of Rochester, Minnesota spoke of a 12-band, 12-hour block party for charity he organized with the help of 300 parishioner volunteers, a witness to the city of Rochester that was clearly evidenced by the local paper’s headline, Catholics Know How to Party. Greg Wolfe, founder and editor of Image, spoke of his disillusionment with conservativism and the tension between ideology and the attraction to beauty, while Ezio Castelli, US responsible for AVSI, touched on the fact that AVSI develops “a plan of action according to what we live and not the dominant mentality,” and how he has continued to work with AVSI for 35 years because it “follows reality.”

Sending Forth. In his concluding remarks on Monday morning, Fr. Carrón stressed that “The foundation of our public presence in the U.S. is not an angry disappointment or an anxiousness for publicity, because we are able to recognize within reality the signs of the Resurrection. The prophetic openness of the Movement in America is a witness for all of the Movement,” and this is “a judgment capable of facing everything, in which the basis of life is charity–not [a dichotomy] between conservative and liberal, moralism or sentimentality, but a missionary outlook, a presence that will accompany us wherever and forever–and this is our contribution to the world in this moment. The more we are aware, the more grateful we are for this gift the Lord has given us gratuitously.”
What is the method for this awareness?
After Bacich summarized the closing announcements, Carrón underscored, “If we change the method of obedience from following a presence that corresponds to ‘obeying the boss,’ we reduce it to moralism–even while doing the School of Community. This was Fr. Giussani’s great preoccupation for us, as well as mine now. We are in a decisive moment on our path.”