SPAIN  
assembly of responsibles

How Should
One Live?
During a weekend gathering with Fr. Julián Carrón in June, the Spanish CL responsibles gave their judgment on Spanish society and its censure of that which is human. In the midst of all the stories and reactions they shared, a question resounded: “What is our mission in this world?”

 by Valentín Frodo

The summer appointment has become a standing date by now: the first weekend of June, near Madrid, about 100 Spanish CL responsibles gather with Julián Carrón for an intense dialogue, but also to rest and go on outings in the mountains.
The first evening, soon after arrival, Ignacio Carbajosa expressed his personal judgment on the situation of Spanish society. The recent decades of notable economic growth in the country have also been characterized by systematic censure of the human, of the real problem of the human person. One can also speak of “self-censure” of the religious problem, almost a self-limitation of anything that is presumed to be private and unworthy of public attention (and thus not “real”). Today, the consequences are visible: an erosion of the human that brings with it desperation and pain in the people, stunned in the face of reality, deprived of any word of comprehension for their life, any gaze of fondness for their humanity. Not understanding the heart, not having teachers, causes pain.
Consequently, public demonstrations are charged with argumentativeness and violence. People who no longer remember “the Transition” think almost by osmosis that politics is an inevitable battle among irreconcilable factions. They have never seen any other way, and cannot even imagine one.

Reading El País...But Carbajosa did not linger on a description of society–he sensed the danger of a reactionary form of Catholicism, in which CL can unwittingly participate. He illustrated it with a personal example, in his response to two articles by Juan José Millás, a well-known journalist of the daily newspaper El País. In a recent article, the journalist attacked the Education Bill proposed by the Popular Party, which seeks to reintroduce religion as an academic subject on par with other subjects. The journalist considered the bill “a legislative wonder of the Bishop’s Conference, allied with an over-devout government.” The arguments and insults he used were an effective example of the secular and rationalistic mentality that has dominated the mindset of the majority of Spanish intellectuals in recent decades. It was one of those articles that gave you a stomach ache.
However, a few months before, the same journalist had written an article in which, surely unconsciously, he had clearly demonstrated the wound of his humanity, his powerful religious sense: “Desperate, I enter the FNAC in search of a book that saves my life (...) that nobody has yet told me about, that has not come out in the newspapers, that has not been considered one of the ten best of the year, and maybe that has not even been published yet, but that mysteriously is there, for me, and that I can recognize instantly. I go down to the subway, where a couple of teenagers with their kisses (...) save each other with knife blows, if their tongues were knives (...). Then, on the train, an Ecuadorian woman observes the screen of her cell phone restlessly, awaiting a call, a message, a WhatsApp that saves her life (...).” It is striking to think that we are capable of blasting the journalist of the article on the Education Bill with lucid and well founded judgments, but we cannot reach out to the humanity that same journalist demonstrates in his other article.
“At stake is whether today it is possible to have the experience narrated in the Gospel: ‘All the publicans and sinners came to listen to Jesus, underlined Carbajosa. He linked this to the judgment Carrón expressed during the last Spiritual Exercises about our position in today’s world, drawing upon the words of Fr. Giussani: “The great problem of today’s world is no longer an inquiring theorization, but an existential question. Not, ‘Who is right?’ but, ‘How should one live?’ Today’s world has been reduced to the level of evangelical poverty. In Jesus’ time, the problem was how to live, not who was right; this [latter] was the problem of the scribes and Pharisees. This observation also changes the thrust of our concern.” The question re-echoed all weekend: How can this observation change the thrust of our concern? What type of presence are we called to offer the world?

Life is a public fact.The next day, we entered the hall to begin the dialogue. Carrón took up the questions of the previous evening related to the need for faith to become more personal. “We do not exist to be a faction. To be for everyone, we have to belong to One. Not to some. In Jesus’ time, there were many factions. However, Jesus’ was an original presence that drew everyone. For this reason, they tried to destroy Him. What kind of change must happen in us so that we offer an original presence before reality?”
Mamen, a mother of three who is battling breast cancer, effectively illustrated the change necessary, describing an intense dialogue between her situation and the judgment of the School of Community: “I live by attaching myself to the things you say, things that do not happen to me, but that when I hear them from you I see them to be totally pertinent and true.” She recounted the change in her life and the change that is happening around her. “This is precisely what we need,” underlined Carrón, “people who, with simplicity, take into consideration the hypothesis, verify it, and enact it in reality. There is not a private fact and a public fact. Life is a public fact. The change in ourselves disturbs our surroundings and documents His Presence.”

Disturbance. What does it mean to disturb our surroundings? Ramón told us about a student in Córdoba who went to the police station to withdraw a charge she had filed against a fellow student a few days earlier. The student had threatened her and damaged her car. After going to the police, though, she was not at peace. “How can one judge a person by an isolated fact? How can the relationship be repaired?” At the police station they asked her why she wanted to withdraw her charge. “Did the student pay you for the damages? Did he ask your forgiveness?” “Neither one. Look, I’m Catholic. The other day at Mass I realized that you can’t judge another person by just one action...” The officer said, “Well then, I will note that no action is taken on the charge.” “No, no. Note what I just told you.” And so he began to write, reading out loud: “The complainant is Catholic. At Mass she realized that...” One by one, the other officers got up and approached the young woman. “In 20 years at this job, nothing like this has ever happened.” She disturbed her surroundings, just as in the early years of Christianity, exactly as recounted in the Acts of the Apostles.
The assembly closed with a dialogue on the value of the moment for recognizing His Presence as an event that precedes me. A question arose: “I read Huellas [Traces], attend School of Community, receive the Sacraments, and I realize that they renew me. But in many other moments all this is not there. So then, what does it mean to turn to Him when all this is not there?”  “We lack the ability to discover in everything that happens to us the way the Mystery makes Himself present,” responded Carrón. “Now we can understand better Fr. Giussani’s insistence that ‘Christ came to educate us to the religious sense.’ This is how He saves us, permitting us to live with His openness to reality, aware of belonging to the Father.”
There was no time to do anything else; it was a beautiful day and the mountains were waiting for us. Along the road the conversations were other testimonies to a life that “surges and seethes and ferments.” Javier Prades celebrated Mass and had us note something that one would think obvious: the imposing beauty of the mountains enlarges the heart. We ate and sang. “The miracle is a human reality lived in its ‘day-to-dayness,’ (...) it is the reality of eating, of drinking, of waking, and of sleeping, filled with the consciousness of a Presence,” as Fr. Giussani said in 1990.

Like a child. When we returned to the hotel, dinner was an opportunity to “put more meat on the grill.” A group of university students and professors invited Carrón to their table. Alfonso, a responsible for CLU, admitted that every Friday at the beginning of School of Community he would have a knot in his stomach. He sincerely thought that it was impossible for something to happen that lived up to the height of the desire of the people he had before him. “How I would like to sit down there with the others,” he said. Carrón looked at him and commented that the same thing happens to him, but then he realizes that his only task is to point out what the Other does. “Being responsible for the Movement is simple.” Alfonso was struck wordless because this was his same experience: when School of Community continues, his attitude changes because, in effect, Christ is acting before his eyes. Then he begins to enjoy School of Community like a child, because he watches the wonder of His powerful Presence. And he himself begins to change.
Elena, a Physics professor, recounted her pain in seeing that some CLU kids do not look out for newly arrived students. “It is right to be pained,” Carrón said, but he added, “There is not one method for those who are outside and another for those who are inside; everyone needs conversion. The only interesting thing is to testify to the good you think a CLU kid will experience in a relationship with someone who is new.”
   In the evening, three people showed us three different ways to set ourselves before reality in an original manner, starting from the charism. Guadalupe recounted how it revolutionized her way of teaching at the university, avoiding the complaints of the professors at their students’ ignorance and lack of interest. César, with some friends, found a way to live his old vocation as a cook with a group of South American youth whom he “rescued” from an uncertain destiny by offering them a beautiful and educative context for learning a trade. With the audacity that can only come from faith, they knocked on the doors of the great chefs praised in the Michelin Guide... and, surprised, each chef gave them a recipe for a new dish. Finally, Ferrán related the odyssey of some families who left comfortable positions in the city and took on the risk of opening a school in rural Catalonia, where the Church has almost disappeared. And now, Christianity is beginning again there.
Sunday opened with preparations for the trip home. But still to come was Carrón’s summary, in which he drew together the work of the two days and personally challenged the participants. He began by recalling Fr. Giussani’s words: “The circumstances through which God has us pass are an essential and not a secondary factor of our vocation. (...) If Christianity is the announcement of the fact that the Mystery has become flesh in a man, the circumstances in which one takes a position about this in front of the whole world are important for the very definition of witness.” “This quote of Giussani,” Carrón continued, “is a synthesis of the challenge we have before us. What is our mission in this world? How do we conceive of our presence? We do not have a user’s manual. The things that were useful in another moment are not useful now. Our contribution depends on how we can help to define or clarify the ways of this presence.” And here he took up one of the themes of the weekend: “At the end of an era, we are all called to compare ourselves against reality, even we Christians. For this reason, the pertinent issue is not who is right, but how one should live. We are fortunate because Fr. Giussani accompanied us for years in verifying the pertinence of the faith to the needs of life. This is the challenge.” In showing how faith becomes personal, we can only propose what we have already experienced.

The presence of a lover.  A line of Ratzinger illuminates the journey: “One can only bear the ignominy of life with the presence of a lover.” “We, however,” Carrón continued, “consider this hypothesis abstract: that there is the Presence of Christ, the lover, the one Presence that gives substance to the moment, density to things.”
The Spiritual Exercises are a proposal that the companionship of Giussani offers each of us for facing the challenges described. The way we set ourselves before them, or–and this is the same thing–the way of doing School of Community, is decisive. He picked up the conversation with Alfonso: it is clear that he lives by making judgments on what happens to him, letting himself be corrected by what he sees. His experience is a criterion for living. “This gives us absolute freedom.”
Our return home was transformed into the verification of the truth we experienced that weekend, and everything becomes simpler. That which seems impossible becomes possible in the presence of the beloved.