fr. giussani
anniversary

The Closest Friend
They’ve never seen him. And yet, he is the “real and fascinating relationship” with which they compare everything. Seven years after his death (February 22, 2005), six young people from different corners of the world talk about who Fr. Giussani is for them today, and why “with him I can be myself.”

by Paola Bergamini, Paolo Perego, and Chiara Tanzi

BRIGHT, Uganda
“Father Giussani? It’s hard for me to find adequate words for a man who spent his whole life with this awareness of reality. Just hearing his voice speak to me through his books, through the School of Community, makes me feel like a new man, capable of moving in any circumstance without the fear of losing my life and my humanity.” Bright Jude Lumanyka is 21 years old and lives in a suburb of Kampala, Uganda, with his three sisters and two brothers. His mother left long ago, and his father works in Tanzania, returning only a couple times per year. Bright just enrolled in the university, which will start soon. A restless boy, he was often punished when he was small because he would run away from home to go to the mosques or churches, curious to see this “God” that he had heard about. One Sunday, a few years ago, he ended up by chance at a School of Community that Rose holds with the students of his school, which he attends (with the economic assistance of this same Rose). It’s the beginning of a story, made up of Fr. Giussani’s words and a friendship with a group of young people changed by the encounter with the Movement and with Fr. Carrón. “I found what I was looking for,” Bright said to Rose one day. “Even if you stopped helping me, it would be your problem. What I found, not even you could take away from me.” He was talking about the encounter with Christ, through Fr. Giussani, “a passionate man, who moves me to the point that I would like, more than anything, to follow his footsteps and have his gaze. The encounter with him changed my life in an indescribable way. I want to embrace everything, just like him, with this simplicity that is the greatest thing that the world can offer.” Bright speaks of a man “full of wisdom, of freedom, who dedicated his whole life to educating ‘infinite’ people like me.” And then he adds, “For me, he is a priceless gift. And it’s more and more important to me to follow him in order to reach my destiny. For me, he is a memory that is always alive, in the people that are making the journey with him.”

ALFONSO, Spain
Ever since he was a child, he had always heard Fr. Giussani spoken of at home by his parents. But in the end, Alfonso Calavia, a student of Hispanic philology at the Complutense University of Madrid, had to reckon with that name out of necessity, when a friendship, through which he had begun to acquire a taste for life, took on a new face. “Until I started at the university, I had never felt the need to follow the Movement like my parents. I hung out with my friends. But then, there was a chance encounter with David, in my department...” Suddenly, everything changed. New friends, and School of Community on the books that “that” Fr. Giussani had written many years before... “I started to live intensely, to be happy in a way that I had never been before, to breathe, to want everything from the world. I was sure that all of this was happening thanks to the friendship with David.” But then, in 2007, his friend left Spain to enter a Benedictine monastery just outside Milan. It was like a cold shower. “He said to me, ‘It’s not me, it’s not me.’ Like heck it wasn’t. My life had changed in the friendship with him. And now he was leaving,” recounts Alfonso. “Slowly, I realized that the traits, the characteristics, the humanity that I had seen in David, were present in other people, too, in this companionship of the Movement.” Where was all of this happening? “The School of Community comes into play here, that is, the relationship with a man called Fr. Giussani, who I never met personally. In the beginning, I understood nothing, absolutely nothing. ‘It’s normal,’ they told me. But, little by little, my questions with respect to affection, relationships, David’s departure, started to have answers. I read words that I had heard my friend say. And that described me to the point of sometimes frightening me, because they were so adequate and pertinent to my life, and they offered me a path–like a father who takes his son’s hand, to help him climb the stairs. This became Fr. Giussani for me today, through the companionship of the Movement and Fr. Carrón, as well. Fr. Giussani is someone I never met, but with whom, nevertheless, I have a close relationship, real and fascinating. He is a friend with whom I can compare everything, without leaving anything out. And with whom I can be myself, because he truly embraces all that I am.”

WILLIAM, Italy
“Who is Fr. Giussani for me? He’s Fr. Giussani. He’s the companion of my life.” This abrupt response comes from William, who is in his last year of studying economics at Bocconi University in Milan. He never saw Fr. Giussani. His encounter with the Movement happened “by chance” when, as a freshman in search of housing, he found a place in an apartment of the Ringhiera (the cooperative that manages housing for university students). He met a boy with whom a beautiful friendship was born. William went to the CL Spiritual Exercises with him. “Everything started from there.” But how can Fr. Giussani be a companion if he’s not here anymore? “Through the faces of my friends, in the increasingly closer friendship with Fr. Carrón, and in his books. His is a concrete companionship, and so I go to visit him periodically at the Milan Monumental Cemetery. I find myself talking to him. I understand that without his ‘yes’ to the gift that the Mystery offered to him, I would never have met anything. I wouldn’t have these friends. I wouldn’t be this happy.” In his words, Fr. Giussani is a friend. What fascinates you about him? “That he was someone who was so attached to reality as it presented itself. He never tried to avoid any circumstance, he had a moment-by-moment obedience. Nothing was extraneous to his life, to his faith. I realize it when I do School of Community. It’s the same thing that I desire for myself. A full life.” What makes him feel alive to you? “The companionship of my friends. His ‘yes’ reverberates in them. And I like to listen to Fr. Pino, Fr. Ambrogio, and “Dima,” when they talk about him, about things that happened–but what strikes me the most is their faces when they talk. It’s not the memory of something in the past, finished, but the tension of an enormous friendship–a passion for life without parentheses, black holes. They recall every detail. This awakens my person.” From encounter to encounter. Just as it was for the Apostles.

JENIA, Russia
In her second year of college, Jenia was invited to a dinner by her Italian teacher. On that occasion, she disliked and disagreed with almost all of the table conversation. But the way that those people stayed together, their friendship, fascinated her. “They were interested in me. It didn’t matter that I was Protestant; what mattered was my person. It was something unthinkable. I could disagree with the School of Community, but there was no denying them.” Today, Jenia, a doctoral candidate in Russian philology at the University of Novosibirsk and a teacher of Russian and Italian in private schools for adults, goes to the Rimini Meeting every summer because she never let those friends go. And Fr. Giussani? “I feel like he’s my friend. I didn’t meet him directly, but through these friends. It’s not in my DNA to have a personality cult. Therefore, the point isn’t Giussani, but something more that he is opening in me. To follow him is to follow Christ. Actually, it’s Christ Himself who makes me meet Giussani.” What do your friends have to do with it? “Giussani is at the origin of the friendship because he made us understand that the point is Christ. We can love each other because of this. Sometimes, I think that, through Carrón, my friends, the School of Community, he is saying something directly to me, just for me. He is my friend.” The verbs that she uses are in the present tense... What fascinates you about Fr. Giussani? “His simplicity in explaining the important things in life. You don’t have to have studied in order to understand him. Here, the professors love to speak in a complicated way; they feel superior to the students. With him, it’s something else.” But did one of these friends, who knew him directly, tell you about him? “Very little. I find him in people, in the way they act. Before I met these friends, I was obsessed with the idea that my life would only be useful if I were successful; now, instead, I think that I am unique, and therefore I have value.”

Ann Marie and Diana, USA
They are both students–Ann Marie dedicates her time to civil engineering, Diana to early childhood education. Two very different courses of study, and yet something else unites them. They have in common a glad resistance to taking things for granted. Where does this humanity come from? On their campus, the environment is frenetic, with 37,000 students running in as many directions. They desire peace and certainty, but for many both feel far out of reach. Instead, these two girls have met friends who showed them a truer way of living. At fourteen years old, Diana started going to GS simply because her older sister was there. As the months passed, it went from being one pastime among many to a place that “I wanted to go and needed to go for myself.” For Ann Marie, it also started with family: her mother had begun attending CL meetings, but she was not interested in these “strange people who sing a lot” until she met some GS kids at a vacation. There, “the way they were together was so attractive that I needed to know why and how this could be.” It was through these friends that they met another friend, Fr. Luigi Giussani. With time, he became more than a name, “more than an author of books, he is a friend who lived an intensely beautiful life and helps us live this way now... His life makes Christianity so attractive to us, in an environment where there are so many attractions.” Diana speaks of one evening in GS, when they watched a documentary on Giussani’s life. There, she began to put a “face to the name” and to find herself grateful to this man she had never met. He did not go about “telling everyone what to do.” Instead, “people followed him because the way he lived, with such a full humanity, was attractive to those who knew him.” This resonated exactly with her own experience, because this humanity is “the same thing that attracted me and what continues to attract me in this friendship every day.”
Now, the two friends live this experience together with a small group of other students on campus, seeking each other out during the week when possible, because these friends, as Diana put it, “remind me of why I work, and for Whom.” And, as Ann Marie said, “CLU constantly brings me to look at my experience and judge what is in front of me, and reading Giussani’s words continues to reawaken an awareness of what is before me.” Following this man, it is possible to grow in gladness and certainty, no longer dominated by boredom and confusion. Ann Marie recounts the beauty of sitting in a difficult engineering class last semester, which cost her long hours of studying. There, she realized how great it is that even in all the things man builds, he always starts from a given, and that her demanding professor was a gift to arrive at deeper understanding. Diana tells of one rainy day, heading home after long hours of class and work with children. At the crosswalk, a car drives by and leaves her drenched. The logical reaction would be frustration, yet she can only laugh, “God really has a sense of humor.” Following Giussani, these students are becoming marked like him by a friendship with the Mystery that wins out over everything, and through everything, even the rain. Thus, the door has been opened: “There is a positivity in reality that Giussani proposes and following his proposal has given a beauty to life that we never before thought possible.”