life of cl
fr. giussani

“My Youth”
She was one of Fr. Giussani’s first students at the Berchet High School, but then she lost touch with him for forty years until, one day… Four years since the death of the CL founder, Milene Di Gioia tells of the extraordinary friendship that marked her history, “restoring my faith”

by Alberto Savorana

I met Milene Di Gioia in 1997. Fr. Giussani asked me to contact her to see if it was possible to publish a collection of talks he’d given over the years at Memores Domini gatherings, brief commentaries on the Psalms and Canticles, and the prayers of the Church, indicated by Vera Drufuca. So it was that Milene edited and wrote forewords for these two books, published in 2000, Che cos’è l’uomo perché te ne curi? [What Is Man, That You Think of Him?] and Tutta la terra desidera il tuo volto [All the Earth Desires Your Face] with the Edizioni San Paolo publishing company.
Today, marking four years from the death of Fr. Giussani (the anniversary is February 22nd), she agreed to tell us something of a story that began in a high school classroom (Milene had Fr. Giussani for a teacher in 1953, when she was a first-year student at the Berchet High School, in section 1C) and then was interrupted for many years. She told her story with great modesty: “I have to admit that I’m reluctant to testify to an old and complex relationship with the figure of Fr. Giussani and his writings. In fact, the attempt demands a certain weighing of accounts, the acknowledgment of what were and are the vectors of my life.” But before reporting the conversation with Milene, let’s read how Fr. Giussani in the 1990s told about their first encounter, which happened through a record player and Beethoven. “When I was teaching in freshman year of high school, to demonstrate the existence of God, I would go from my house to the Berchet Lycée with a record player under my arm… and I made them listen to Chopin, Beethoven… One of the first that I had them listen to was this Beethoven concert.” It was the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D major, Op. 61, directed by David Oistrakh (the recording that forty years later would be featured in the “Spirto Gentil” music series). “I had them listen to this Beethoven concerto, where there’s the refrain which I called the  refrain “of the community”, when the whole orchestra enters and always has the same melody, then the violin, which represents singularity,  takes off three times and leaves for its destiny until, tired, it’s taken back by the melodic theme of the entire orchestra (which closes out the piece). When we heard this piece, in that  classroom, where there was total silence,  a girl who was in the first desk, here on the right, named Milene Di Gioia–I still remember her–suddenly started crying her eyes out,  and wasn’t able to stop. I let her go on a little, then I said: ‘You can see well the difference  between one soul and another, one sensibility and another, between one heart and another.’ Those others certainly wouldn’t have cried. Therefore, from that moment on, this piece  became more meaningful for me. The longing that the fundamental theme generates, it’s such a longing, that for a sensibility like Milene’s, it made her burst into tears–this longing is man’s emblem of waiting for God” (L. Giussani, Is It Possible to Live This Way? Vol. 2: Hope, McGill-Queen’s University Press, pp. 134-135).
“I don’t remember anything more about her,” Fr. Giussani said one day, “not even her features as we walked along the road together. Even the memory of her features is just a blip now, vivid, but limited to a blip. For forty-two years, on every vacation, I asked the kids to look for her in the phone books of all the regions of Italy, but I never found her in forty-two years” (L. Giussani, L’autocoscienza del cosmo[The Self-Awareness of the Cosmos], BUR, 2000, p. 92).
Until that day at the end of March, 1996, which, with Camus, we can call “the beautiful day”: his ex-student was tracked down and invited. “They went to get her at 7:30 and, when she entered the house, in the dense crowd there at the door, I had no problem recognizing her–she was just the same! …Last night, I was telling the kids on M. Street this, and I said, ‘Kids, for forty-two years I’ve been waiting to see again a girl who I last saw when was she sixteen years old! Forty-two years of searching! So, then, tell me please, if virginity is something that forgets women. Can you imagine a fact of this kind? No, you can’t imagine it.’ And, in fact, what made it possible to wait forty-two years was a simple thing, totally positive, like a gift from God! And then, something absolutely gratuitous happens, totally gratuitous, that is, with no kind of self-serving calculation [Ada Negri, Mia giovinezza (My Youth)]. Forty-two years! Tell me please if this isn’t a fairy tale!” (L’autocoscienza…, pp. 93-94) Milene’s memories of that March evening remain vivid: “I wasn’t quite sure where I was going, and then, those winding little roads in the fog to Gudo; it was a real adventure. As soon as I arrived, everyone welcomed me exuberantly. I felt like the prodigal son returning home after many years.” At that moment, their story was like an underground river that finally flows to the surface. Milene recalled, “During a conversation that followed our reunion, I told Fr. Giussani that I wanted to do something.” Shortly after, they came up with the book project  described above.

Milene, in the minds of many CL members, your name is tied to the episode of Beethoven. How did you meet Fr. Giussani, and what impression did he make?
It’s hard for me to limit my encounter with him to one episode. The first impression was that we’d known each other forever, and thus that he was talking to me about Something we had in common. More recently, I’ve discovered an expression he used often, which for me was mysterious and subject to suspicion: the correspondence to the expectations of the heart. I believe that this was the dynamic.

What most struck you?
On the personal level, two characteristics struck me: on the one hand, his energy directed toward action and the world, and on the other, his generous amiability, the tenderness without sentimentalism or sickly sweetness, that moved his way of acting.

During an RAI television program marking Fr. Giussani’s 80th birthday, an ex-student of his, a well-known journalist and writer, asserted that Fr. Giussani wanted in some way to seize the freedom of the students, by the force of his strong personality…
For me, I can say that one thing implicit in his way of looking at us kids was this: the adventure is yours; you’re free! With Fr. Giussani, we enjoyed the sense of the challenge that overcomes diffidence toward reality and doesn’t make false claims. Now I know that his was the most authentic form of love: openness to the mystery and the ultimately good destiny of the other person.

What else do you remember of Fr. Giussani at Berchet?
Even back then, and for good reason, I was fascinated by the depth and breadth, the sapiential aspect of his knowledge, that made his cultural language always lively and generative in the direct impact of listening. For example, music has remained for me a fact of choral communion rather than one of individual fruition.

We’ve read that you had lost touch with each other for forty years. What followed that first brief experience with Student Youth [GS]?
Many years of separation in family and professional commitments passed, until one day, while I was reading in the newspaper about the work of Fr. Giussani, I had the sharp, lucid perception that it wasn’t over, that we’d meet again! And I immediately felt peaceful and glad with this absolute certainty, even though when I’d gone to hear a talk of his at the San Babila Theatre in Milan in the winter of 1992 [Fr. Giussani had given a talk on “Faith and Morality” to a big crowd at the San Carlo Cultural Center, now the CMC], I hadn’t managed to reach him.

Then, in the mid-1990s, you met again. Can you summarize in one sentence the history of that relationship? What remains with you of Fr. Giussani?
The awareness of a bond, established in adolescence, that would come to fulfillment in the maturity of years and trials, restoring to me the face of Jesus, a friendship, and faith in a “faithful God.” I’ve never forgotten to confide in Him, no matter what the circumstance, and I’ve come to understand that He is the one who orders every circumstance.