fr. GIUSSANI
the biography

FIRST GLANCE  AT THE CHARISM
The first biography of Father Giussani has been presented in Milan and Rome, where intellectuals and religious explored the life of the CL founder. Cardinal Marc Ouellet, who was a speaker in Rome, explained why this figure “is significant for the Universal Church.” The text of his speech is published herewith.

by Marc Ouellet*

“None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself. For if we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord; so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s” (Rom 14:7-8).
Alberto Savorana’s Vita di Don Giussani (Life of Father Giussani) left me with the powerful sensation of having met a great personality, who lived his belonging to the Lord intensely, and who has not ceased to intervene in the history of his people.
The man, the priest, and the founder that Fr. Giussani was, the imprint that he left on the Ambrosian tradition, the challenges issued to Italian Catholicism, his memory, which remains alive in the works that he founded or inspired–in a word, the witness of his life–is now accessible, thanks to the talented journalist who put together this extraordinary biography. It is a moving and engaging story, supported by a forest of documents that cover almost a century of Church history.
Friend of poets, companion of great thinkers, familiar to Supreme Pontiffs, Fr. Giussani was interested first of all in the faith of young people, whom he certainly wanted to protect against the attacks of atheism, relativism, and nihilism. But above all, he wanted to render their faith capable of generating a Christian culture in the age of secularization.
The ecclesial Movement that was born out of his apostolic enthusiasm has distinguished itself by the incisive presence in society of laypeople, who, in the name of their Christian faith, risk being misunderstood or even opposed within the Church itself. Fr. Giussani guided his Movement with wisdom through stormy seas, anchoring it in prayer and keeping it from running aground on the sandbars of rationalism. He submitted his Movement to strict obedience to the pontifical Magisterium, which, in exchange, recognized his work as an authentic fruit of the Second Vatican Council. The book that we have available to us today narrates the affairs of this charismatic figure, who interprets the Council as a “reform in continuity,” according to the formula established under the pontificate of Benedict XVI.

What does this priest say to us through the documented memory of his life and works? He is willingly recognized as having a particular charism as an educator of faith and apologist of Christianity. But are these categories sufficient to account for his profound influence? Fr. Giussani is a figure of contemporary Christianity who resists attempts at ideological confinement, in the present as in the past. His animated existence and his volcanic thought speak to us about Life and Truth. They urge us to ask ourselves what God wants to say to us today through this enflamed and uncomfortable apostle, who certainly does not want to be laid completely to rest, not even after his death. May it please God that he continue to disturb us in order to better serve us!
Please allow me, as an external observer, and at the conclusion of a quick reading, to consider some aspects of this charismatic figure that I think are significant for the universal Church.

1. The young priest who asked to go teach at the Berchet high school distinguished himself in the field by sharing his experience of faith and communicating certainties that he had acquired in the Venegono Seminary. Fr. Giussani discovered with consternation the growing divide between the formal piety of young people and their intellectual culture, which was ever more extraneous to the mystery of faith. In order to overcome this divorce between faith and life, he created an original and provocative method that impelled the young people to take a stand according to their personal convictions. Drawing broadly on the sources of art, science, and music, he relied above all on a realist philosophy that calls one to be seized by wonder before the mystery of being. But the feather in his cap was always the Mystery of the Incarnate Word, which he presented to young people as the ultimate criterion for judging the value of everything.
The first requisite of his pedagogy was to rely “not on a synthesis of ideas, but on some certainties of life.” Fr. Giussani had the good fortune of coming into contact with teachers who, beginning in his adolescence, initiated him to the experience of the central truths of Christianity. Throughout his entire life, he conserved a moved recognition for the Colombos, the Cortis, the Figinis who had rooted an esteem for reason and the certainties of faith in his spirit. Commenting later about his own teaching at the Berchet high school, Giussani affirms: “The things I told them were born not of an analysis of the student world, but from what my mother and the seminary had told me. It was a question, in short, of speaking to others with words dictated by Tradition, but with an awareness that was visible, right down to the methodological implications.”

2. Another significant aspect of his charism is the rational approach to Christianity. Young people are influenced by the scientific culture and, consequently, must be led to the threshold of the mystery in a rational way. Giussani’s book, The Religious Sense, establishes the principles and steps of his method. The author excels in the religious analysis of the human experience. His “passion for reasonableness” stimulates him to develop a realist, critical methodology that places the question about God at the center. At the end of his reflection, he poses the hypothesis of Revelation as a “possibility,” or even a legitimate and reasonable “expectation” of the human heart, thirsting for meaning and for the infinite.
This first volume of his formational trilogy remains one of the classic introductions to faith, an itinerary confirmed by experience that prepares one to embrace Revelation. This book has been the object of strongly positive comments by figures as diverse as the Archbishop of Buenos Aires Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Rabbi David Rosen, writer Giovanni Testori, and Buddhist monk Takagi Shingen.

3. Giussani’s discourse on Christ, the center of Revelation, echoes his teachers at Venegono, but also his thorough reading of many and diverse authors, including Orthodox and Protestant writers: Vladimir Soloviev, Karl Barth, John Henry Newman, Reinhold Niebuhr–without, of course, neglecting his friends Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger, who attributed to him an influence on the choice of the title of the journal Communio. His vision is radically Christ-centric, and this entails as a corollary a unitary conception of the destiny of man, which the Second Vatican Council would take up again with the affirmation that the vocation of man is one and divine, and does not take on light except in the mystery of the Incarnate Word.
This profound correspondence between anthropology and Christology would later be confirmed by the encyclical Redemptor Hominis after the accession of John Paul II to the Chair of Peter. These events would have a profound and liberating impact on Giussani precisely because he would find in them his understanding of the human person in Christ. He often repeated, “There is no understanding of what the ‘I’ is outside of the Christian event.”
His anthropological perspective overcomes the modern dualism between nature and the supernatural that has devitalized Christianity. Giussani expresses the relationship of man to grace in terms of life, in which people’s encounters and their communion are inseparable from their relationship with God. What results is a new phenomenology of grace, which describes it as an “encounter” with the Risen Christ whose “presence” envelops and stimulates human life in all of its dimensions. Thus comes the description of Christianity as a fact, an event, a friendship, a companionship, a communion with Christ that realizes the profound identity of people in their insertion into the ecclesial communion.
Giussani not only renews our vocabulary by starting from experience, but he also teaches us to see the realities of faith in a way that allows us to verify the truth of what we believe and to judge everything in this light. An experience of this nature is liberating because it reinforces the awareness of belonging to the Mystery of Christ and of actively participating in it by living one’s own destiny of communion: “History is for us the continuity of Christ’s resurrection, writes Fr. Giussani. Every moment of history, by now, is for us the way in which the mystery of the Resurrection is accomplished.”

4. This experience of the Risen Christ in history leads to the Pauline formula, “Christ, ‘all in all’” (Col 3:11), which brings to its peak the identification of Christ and the Church. Here is another key to Giussani’s vision. The more he meditates on the Mystery of Christ and helps others to discover it, the more he emphasizes the mystery of the Church as the continued Incarnation–the total Incarnation, we could say–with the admonition to maintain the distinction between the Incarnate Word and His ecclesial body, constituted and animated by the Spirit.
At the height of the post-Vatican II crisis in the 1970s, some young people proposed to Giussani to identify their Movement with the name “Communion and Liberation.” The teacher accepted the proposal, since it translated well the experience of total belonging to Christ and the Church. “Because communion is liberation,” Giussani would say. That is, communion with Christ in the Church is liberation from the limits of the “I” in the “we,” in the image of the Trinity. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger would later comment on this name in light of the Ambrosian tradition: “In order to be true, and therefore in order to be efficient, freedom needs communion, and not just any kind of communion, but ultimately communion with truth itself, with love itself, with Christ, with the Trinitarian God. Thus is built community that creates freedom and gives joy.”
Giussani witnesses to this in these terms: “What dominates in us is gratitude for having discovered that the Church is life that encounters our life: it is not a discourse about life. The Church is humanity lived as the humanity of Christ, and for each of us this marks the value and the concept of sacramental fraternity.”
This concept of sacramental fraternity applied to the Movement corresponds to the ecclesiology of communion in the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium, which extends the concept of sacrament to the Church as a whole, as the effective sign of the Risen Christ. The political and ecclesial vicissitudes of the Italy of our time have conditioned the activity of the Movement, with the risk that the mystery of communion, of which it intends to be a sacramental expression in the most peaceful and constructive sense, for the Church and for society, is sometimes forgotten. The evolution of the Movement in time, beyond the decade of the 1970s, has restored the balance.

5. One last, particularly significant element seems to me to be the flowering, in the Movement, of numerous vocations to the consecrated life, which constituted the object of special attention from the founder. Understood at the beginning as a simple fulfilling of Baptism, this experience matured, with the passage of time and a string of dialogues with Giussani, in the direction of new forms of life according to the tradition of the evangelical counsels. This vocational fecundity is manifested in particular in the Priestly Fraternity of St. Charles Borromeo and in the Memores Domini Association. The latter name does not mean the memory of a past event, but rather the living memory of the presence of the Risen Christ, who calls some people to follow him in a new form of spousal dedication.
“Your profession of life,” says Giussani, “will be the prophetic proclamation of all of these things with the very form itself of your life, that is, the form of one who does not marry... in order to penetrate that phenomenon of total spousal dedication to everyone and everything, that is the promise... of Christ.” This echoes the Pauline formula, “God, all in all” (1 Cor 15:28), which acquires its spousal physiognomy precisely in the light of the formula, “Christ, all in all” (Col 3), of which Mary and the Church are the eschatological icon in history.

6. These few characteristics that we have recalled constitute a first glance at Fr. Giussani’s charism, leaving many other important aspects in the shadows. It is necessary to read the entire biography in order to discover its scope and its branches, since the teachings, the missions, the foundations, the initiatives, the debates, the dialogues, the letters, the spiritual direction, the illnesses, the sorrows, and the chance encounters have left surprising and lasting signs. Fr. Giussani’s charism is more than an ability, a virtue, or the message of a fascinating personality. His charism is he-himself as a unique person that the Spirit of God united to Christ for a singular mission in the Church. According to Giussani, a charism is: “A gift of the Spirit given to a person in a specific historical context, so that the person may begin an experience of faith that can be useful in some way to the Church’s life.... The personal charism is the contribution that the individual makes to the Spirit’s design.”
Here von Balthasar adds that the “personal charism” is the person himself in dramatic tension toward the fulfillment of his mission in Christ. The example of Fr. Giussani, whom von Balthasar greatly esteemed, was certainly an inspiration for and a confirmation of his Christological vision of the mystery of the person. The biography of Giussani that we have in front of us describes the vital energy that set in motion all the fibers of his being in an experience of ecclesial paternity. One example of this is the reminder that Fr. Carrón made when he assumed in full the responsibility of succeeding Fr. Giussani. At that time, he recalled a surprising expression used by the founder in 1992: “To give your life for an Other’s work; this ‘other,’ historically, phenomenally, as it appears, is a particular person; ...I am the one.”
This reference to the person of Christ in one’s own person, inspired by St. Paul, could at first glance seem excessive, but it is in harmony with a sacramental vision of life. The human other for whom one accepts to work and to give his life is the bringer of the Mystery, and therefore commands respect as well as obedience. Fr. Carrón clarifies this paradoxical identification, which could be judged dangerous, with another phrase of Giussani’s that balances its provocative capability: “When we lose the attachment to the mode with which the truth communicates itself..., it is then that the truth of the thing begins to emerge clearly.”
“To give your life for an Other’s work” was the ideal passionately pursued by this Milanese priest, who thus became the concrete modality of grace for a whole people. His authenticity seems to me to be confirmed by the experience of the cross that particularly marked the beginning and the end of his priestly ministry.

Like other founders and foundresses, he was crucified in his flesh and in his relationships, and was often reduced to powerlessness by his illness. It is in this crucible of the Paschal Mystery that his paternity reached dimensions that elude every human measure.
In conclusion, Alberto Savorana’s Vita di Don Giussani succeeds in giving us a good sketch of this charismatic figure and in convincing us that “the greatest joy of a person’s life is feeling Jesus Christ alive and vibrant in the flesh of one’s own thought and one’s own heart.” This biography does not leave us as we were before beginning to read it, but it interrogates us and can transform us. Some modalities of the Church’s response to this charism are yet to be determined. With regard to our personal response, this cannot but be free and put into play our conscience before the Spirit of God, who wants to continue the Incarnation of the Word in our flesh. It is He who gave to Fr. Giussani this great personality that always accompanies our history in the Risen Christ. It is still He who reaches us within and beyond this biography, in order to help us to live the only thing that counted in the eyes of Fr. Luigi Giussani: union with Christ, our destiny and our hope.

*Prefect of the Congregation
for  Bishops
(Translation by Jennifer Cottini; text not reviewed by author.)