01-02-2014 - Traces, n. 2

Fr. GIUSSANI
anniversary

A Prophetic invasion
Nine years after Fr. Giussani’s death, the archaeologist Giorgio Buccellati tells us how reading his biography was a kind of “face-to-face” encounter with the founder of CL, and he relates how elements of the narrative resonated with his own life experiences. Though he never met Giussani in person, he describes the impact of the charism on his middle class world in Milan, and beyond. Today, he feels as if Giussani is ironically asking him, as Jesus did Nicodemus, “You are an intellectual–and you don’t understand?”  

by Giorgio Buccellati*

An extraordinary book about an extraordinary subject, The Life of Fr. Giussani by Alberto Savorana has yet another element of extraordinariness. This book intentionally seeks to engage the reader in a personal evocation, a response to the encounter that happens through reading, precisely the way it could happen concretely with this historical figure who, even if never met in person, seems to reach out to meet us, suddenly jumping out from the printed page. This encounter happens because Savorana manages with exceptional fluidity to merge Giussani’s words into a captivating narrative, weaving seamlessly from narration to quotation and vice-versa with the naturalness you would experience in a face-to-face meeting. In this way, we feel as if we are repeating the experience of those who encountered him, almost as if we could identify with the experience of the numberless witnesses quoted here who felt “read”–a beautiful metaphor–by his words.

The reverberation. It is this way for me, too. Reading the book led me to re-encounter myself, a very young self. The year Fr. Giussani began his ministry at the Berchet High School in Milan, I was a freshman at Catholic University, also in Milan. I had attended high school at the Gonzaga Institute (all of these places were quite close to each other) where the tradition of Ambrosian spirituality had been strong since the 1930s, when Fr. Carlo Gnocchi began his own ministry and then brought it to these same young men of his who had set off for the war–another very lively testament to that healthy and irresistible Ambrosian restlessness that always characterized Fr. Giussani as well. Reading Savorana’s book thus invited me to follow Giussani’s itinerary, intertwining the detailed account of his life with that of the society I came from, producing a full, rich description of the situation in which I grew up.
Fr. Giussani’s was a prophetic invasion, the reverberation of which I also felt, even though I never met him personally. I felt it in the context of the era, which had nourished his educative experience. Usually we associate the aspect of prediction with the concept of “prophecy,” but the prophetic dimension goes well beyond. It is the ability to proclaim in the concrete the reality of the spirit.

“His” cardinals. It is illuminating to see how his relationships with Cardinals Montini and Colombo must have profoundly shaped this prophetic dimension in Fr. Giussani. A true counterpoint dialogue developed between them, one that, far from causing alienation and degenerating into conflict, instead nourished his spirituality down to its deepest roots. It is impressive to see–and the book illustrates this magnificently–how the comparison of ideas became an opportunity that enabled Fr. Giussani to deepen, precisely at their roots, the convictions that were already his. They were reinforced and clarified, and this made his prophetic presence, however painful, far stronger, more solid, and irrepressible. Let’s look at these two moments: the decade with Montini (1954-63) and the 15 years with Colombo (1964-79).
The arrival of Fr. Giussani powerfully invaded the solid social system of our Milanese bourgeoisie to tell us that what we needed was a mystical relationship with Jesus. Exactly this: “mystical.” This was the great newness of how he preached experience–a religious sense that could take flesh as experience lived consciously, and not as “religion,” that flat dimension of living that simply paralleled the other dimensions of common “living well” in society. This was precisely the challenge from which the “Catholic” bourgeoisie instinctively backed away, comfortably settled as it was in a solid social framework that reserved a safe pigeonhole for “religion” as well. But every prophetic announcement moves as if on the crest of a wave, with the intrinsic danger of drowning on one side or the other. In this case, the risk of drowning meant the danger of proposing “mysticism” for its own sake, a satisfied narcissism (the type, to return to my own personal story, whose prototype I would later find in the California touchy-feely-ness to which I emigrated a few years later). This is where the counterpoint of the dialogue with Montini joined in, and I do mean “counterpoint,” never clash. In Savorana’s book we see how Montini acted almost like the voice of Giussani’s conscience: Montini told Giussani what he was already tending toward.
This is the way a foundational aspect of Giussani’s thought–the importance of verification–became even more foundational.
Mystical inspiration cannot be reduced to a self-referential reality. Experience must measure itself against a reality outside the subject, a reality we must come to understand through a critique that highlights its reasonableness. In this, it seems to us that Giussani relived with Montini the teaching he learned as a child from his father. The moving tone of sonship in Giussani’s communications with his Cardinal resonates with the sonship that marked his early years, because it was precisely from his father that he learned the importance of verification; this same filial sensibility would now guide him in responding to the heartfelt exhortations of Montini.
The danger, therefore, was in letting mystical inspiration be a mere experience of working oneself into an excited state. The challenge was a new culture. Culture is a term with a double meaning; in the negative sense, culture conflicts with experience, while in the positive sense, it verifies experience. The “mystique” that Giussani proposed has nothing to do with evanescence, but was solidly anchored in the concreteness of verification, of reasonableness. The counterpoint dialogue with Montini helped him clarify this need. The daily reality of the dialogue with his middle class Milanese students helped him refine the terms of a new message: there is no divorce between culture and mystique.
The dialogue with Montini revealed that experience must be based on culture. In the dialogue with Colombo, the mirror image of the issue emerged: culture must be based on experience. Colombo felt the need to support the load-bearing structures of Christian social coexistence, and feared that an excessively individualistic outlook could lead to the weakening of the institutions and thus their collapse. Coming from the comparison of ideas that led Giussani to clarify the cultural dimensions of experience, in this new comparison of ideas he became even more sensitive to the need to make individualism and “associationism” fit together. What emerged with clarity was the conviction that an organization must be an organism, and that a Christian organization can be nothing other than the sacramental organism whose every moment and aspect is bound not just to the figure of Jesus, but to His presence.

From Leopardi to Pasolini. In this way, the prophetic and mystical dimension of Giussani invaded the new reality not only of Milan or Italy, but of the world, echoing the challenge of his Cardinal. The crisis of the 1968 student protests lacerated Giussani personally. The storm violently shook the solidity of the institutions, including those that had arisen through his initiative. The pages of the book describing this time convey that sense of heartfelt horror, that sort of “get thee behind me” with which he confronted the temptation for the “movement” to shift from its ascensional nature to a purely lateral and self-referential one. Giussani did not want to be sucked into the vortex of activism, did not want to be the Frankenstein of prophetic mysticism. It was like a dramatic verification of what he had always instinctively felt to be a danger: that of an organizational culture unto itself.
Instead, there was ever greater need for a communitarian culture. A whole range of events and talks contributed to maturing his long-held conviction that the foundation of the reality of the association is communion, specifically the loyal faithfulness to the living–even if mysterious–presence of Jesus. All this was lived with an extraordinary openness to true human realities, different though they may be, with a sensibility that incarnated the “risk of education” and its commitment to accepting a diversity of needs and answers.
All this casts light on a surprising and luminous aspect of Giussani: his enthusiasm for human realities that, when genuine and deep, cannot help but be consonant with the Christian experience. This was seen in his enthusiasm for Leopardi, discovered in his youth, and his enthusiasm for Pasolini, so well described in the book as a moment of re-lived youthful excitation. I think his interaction with the culture of North America can be seen in the same light. In reading the book, this emerges for me with a particular resonance, since in the same period I found myself, solid member of the Milanese upper middle class, immersed in the world of the American university.
The central importance of “experience” is crystallized in what Giussani calls the “dimensions” of Christian life; namely, culture, charity, and mission.
It is striking to see the strong coherence with which these principles remained operative throughout his life, becoming clearer and deeper in response to the circumstances that tempered and modulated the original intuition. If the emphasis on culture serves to characterize with assiduous verification the mystical and prophetic inspiration; if the emphasis on charity serves to highlight that which must emerge as the true root of being together, of “communionality” as Giussani began to call it at a certain point; so too the emphasis on mission finds its reflection in the urgent need to share experience, to broaden the community beyond the limits of the group. It is one of the prerogatives of the Christian experience to want to proclaim mysticism instead of closing it in a solipsistic box. In harmony with this, Giussani developed the concept of mission, to which the very concept of “liberation” refers, because a true “communionality” frees us from anonymity.  No matter what numerical threshold is reached, that is, no matter how many members are in the group, we are always personally identifiable, called by name individually.
The word “movement” lends itself well to describing this set of factors. Giussani used it increasingly, because it is a term that also comes to express well that constant propulsion that wants to communicate the joy experienced within the community to those outside it. Thus, it is both centripetal “moving” (affirming identity) and centrifugal (opening to the world), a dynamic of communion whose existential premise is to affirm first of all the quality of the interlocutor.
This is the great message of freedom. The foundation of testimony is seeing the religious sense, and more generally the sense of life, in the more vast multiplicity of its possible expressions. This emerged powerfully as I read the book, and once again I found a substantiation in my own small personal vicissitudes, re-experiencing my encounter with Islamic spirituality–not that of readings, but that of exchange with many friends with whom I shared a long human story during more than 30 years of archaeological excavations in Iraq and Syria. I found myself increasingly immersed in a kind of reciprocal movement between those who instinctively reach out toward the other to share the deepest thing they possess.

Jesus’ ironic humor. Culture is one  of the themes running most pervasively through the book. In 1979, in his conversation with John Paul II, Giussani gave this very beautiful definition: “Critical and systematic consciousness of an experience of life.” It is the verification upon which he had always insisted. There is also emphasis on culture as a social bond, that mentality based on more or less tacit and in any case shared conceptual constructs, a mentality that instinctively colors our reactions, at times even suffocating spontaneity, almost opposing experience. On the one hand, there is the “dominant culture,” and on the other–no less dominant for having been reduced over the centuries to a numerically inferior number–there is the “religious consciousness of the people.”
But we do not read about the culture of intellectuals. Not that we intellectuals should feel excluded. However, it makes you think, and makes you return to the human vicissitudes of Jesus. The only intellectual we are told He spent time with is Nicodemus and, according to John, they met at night. This detail is given twice, to underline the “prudence” of this socially visible person, potentially bourgeois. It is heartening to read that Jesus did not ignore him, nor did He reject him as He usually did with the other Pharisees. Instead, He took him seriously. I do not know if it was intentional, but precisely on this occasion John reports the first of Jesus’ long discourses, as if to suggest that the conversation with an intellectual stimulated the aspect of Jesus’ personality given to exposition of systematic reasoning. At least, it is nice for an intellectual to think so. But in this episode, we can also hear a touch of irony on Jesus’ part, one of the few hinted at in the Gospels: “You are the teacher of Israel and you do not understand this?”
Well, it seems that I am hearing Giussani ask me: “You are an intellectual–and you don’t understand?”

*Professor Emeritus  at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA)