On Both Sides of the St. Gotthard Pass

The second stop on Traces’ tour of Europe takes us to the country of chocolate, watches, and Zwingli. The CL communities in the cities of Switzerland, where solitude is masked as freedom and discipline. The first Memores Domini house outside of Italy, some mothers, and the latest born

by EMILIANO RONZONI

On approach, Switzerland appears as an indefinable crucible of mountain passes, cantons, peoples, languages, and religions, with the St. Gotthard Pass standing guard like a god acting as a watershed. But in the Bible story, the God of Moses intervened to divide the waters to allow the people to pass. This one divides for the sake of dividing. Italian Switzerland on one side, French-German Switzerland on the other.
As always, lately, in human affairs, it is a question of meaning. What is a community of Communion and Liberation doing in that crucible, embedded there like a splinter in the flesh? This is a question (Why?, or, What does it mean?) that is valid in every epoch, latitude, or situation, but here in Switzerland it is more immediate and compelling. And even if we ourselves did not ask this question, it is certainly raised by the Swiss, whether mountain or city-dwellers. In 1523, in Zurich, the city council, influenced by Ulrich Zwingli, established by decree that Christ was not really present in the Eucharist. Thus more than four centuries ago, some brewers and merchants in Zurich made a decision concerning that enormous matter which is the presence of God in the world. Do you think they are not asking questions, raising an eyebrow, about a group of people who dare to prepare a dwelling for the presence of God today?
The Swiss community of Communion and Liberation has grown up mainly in Ticino canton, at Lugano and Bellinzona, with an oasis in Fribourg, and territorial incursions into the Swiss-French cities that have universities: Zurich, Bern, Lausanne, and Geneva. There are communities of families with adolescent children and, building up works in Ticino, communities made up mainly of students in the university cities. About 400 persons are guided by a National Diakonia, with Schools of Community, Fraternities, and thirty-two members of Memores Domini distributed among three houses.

A mistaken address
Kathrin, tall, red-haired, with five children in seven years of marriage, is held up as an icon, so unusual is it for a Swiss German to come into the Movement.
A Catholic and the daughter of Catholics who in turn were reborn to new life after the failure of the protest movement of 1968, she owes her presence in the Movement to a mistaken address. After finishing high school and before starting her university studies, like so many other Swiss youth, she took a year off to travel throughout the world. She thought she would end up in Peru doing a year of volunteer work, and when she was there she discovered she was in Chile, in Santiago, at the house of the Hermanos del Buen Samaritano (Sisters of the Good Samaritan). The good sisters intuited that in Switzerland the general problem–and Kathrin’s problem in particular–was that people were essentially alone. “Kathrin, when you get back to Switzerland, look for a group, a place where you can continue what you began here.” No sooner said than done. When she got back to the university, the first time she asked a priest where to find a community, she was harpooned by Bernardo who happened to be passing by and overheard her. He was in CL. The desire to participate was matched by the effort expended by those who did not leave her alone. And this Catholic daughter of post-1968 Catholics was not at all happy about it.
If she missed a meeting, they phoned her to find out why, and then they would invite her to come with them on vacation, and then… “How dare they?” So Kathrin, as she tells the story, begins tracing the outline and revealing the fierce reserve that over the centuries has shaped the face of this people scattered between mountains and valleys: “Everyone here has a guaranteed freedom to do what they want to do. But no one dares tell someone else what to do. Or to say in public what he or she believes in.” Her mother, who really loves Kathrin, at every announcement of a new pregnancy makes some ironic comment about “papal birth control roulette,” and just to keep her on her toes against anything “organized,” cuts out and mails her all the newspaper articles that appear against the Pope and the Church of Rome.
But Kathrin, between one child and the next and one newspaper clipping and the next, is discovering and learning that what is “organized” is an aid to freedom. It is a support that enables and aids freedom to grow greater and greater. A little secret, a big rock, and a rough crag against which the rising and falling Protestant tide crashes and breaks.

Faith and discipline
Kathrin tells of the friend of her youth, her greatest true friend (even now that she is married and living in Bellinzona and they see each other only very rarely). She speaks of her admiringly. Her friend was part of a Lutheran community, with a very great faith and iron discipline. Up every morning at six, an hour of group prayer kneeling on the floor, and then a communal life marked by the rhythm of the recitation of the Hours, read from a book from which any hint of the Virgin Mary and the Saints had been removed. Today this community no longer exists each one having gone his own way, scattered throughout the world. And once again they are alone. Her friend keeps up her devotional practices. At the beginning of every Lenten season, she fasts for a week.
Solitude is the great presence in Kathrin’s story, almost as though it were, in her eyes, the daily bread and necessary destiny of Swiss Germans, of her people: “Solitude is what makes them so well-disciplined. They have to be well-disciplined. Because everything falls, completely and solely, on their shoulders.”
Kathrin, tired of seeing her Movement friends only when they would come to their classes at the university (and then go back to their own towns), decided to follow them. She married and set up housekeeping in Bellinzona. She is active in her parish, has worked with other mothers setting up the Nativity Scene, and started a pre-kindergarten program. With the wonder of someone who–as she says–has a lot to learn, she sees her faith becoming the “very human” experience of facing concrete things. She reads School of Community, and says that she has found in Father Giussani the teacher she was seeking. Don’t you want to meet him? She looks surprised at the question. It has never occurred to her. Just as, in the same way, it has never occurred to her to see Jesus. “I have already been rewarded. I can’t think of disturbing Fr. Giussani. And too, when I listen to my friends Lucia and Claudio, it is as though I were hearing him.” She adds, “However, it is important to know he’s there.”

Freedom, freedom
Authority and freedom, structure and freedom, organization and freedom: this is the problem. Here, the same question comes up in every dialogue; it wraps around and gives shape to every encounter. Even stating it as a rough, rigid opposition of poles is meaningful; how can it be possible to remain free while following someone? Maurizio, a philosophy teacher, describes his encounter with Father Giussani: “He spoke with authority and respected my freedom. He did not impose anything. It was up to me to make my choices, and the passage of time was there so that I could make them. This has always been a trait of which I was very aware.”
Maurizio by now has been in the Movement for some years. He tells his story in the big kitchen of the Memores Domini house in Lugano, where ten or so women with good professional positions are living. The big house is not perched on a mountaintop, but for some reason it brings to mind Montvierge, the rock on which Claudel’s The Tidings Brought to Mary is set.
This house has seen a lot from its beginnings in the early 1970s, when it received the full approval of Father Giussani as the first house outside Italy. It has seen the events that make up the Movement’s history, it has taken sides, discussed, and struggled in the certainty that the mystery of adherence that lies in personal freedom is sufficient by itself to justify the history of the world and to maintain the assurance of final fulfillment.
Here too, at the beginning of the house’s history, and of the history of Lucia who has been responsible for it from the beginning, lies the tangled and intriguing scandal of an invasion of territory, of an invasion of the territory of one’s personal history. It was the middle of the 1960s when a little group of friends had received from a Catholic association an invitation to participate in a spiritual retreat. This association had invited a young, unknown priest from Milan, Father Luigi Giussani, to speak, and he (Lucia recalls) had immediately irritated and scandalized them: “I shall tell you things that will make you change your life.” One of the more ingenuous and straightforward among them was immediately pushed into the front line by the others: “How can you dare to say that you will make us change our lives? Who are you to interfere like this?” The young priest had listened, smiling, “Tomorrow morning you will hear things on which you cannot avoid taking a position. In one way or another your life will be changed.”
In the big kitchen of this house, the long history of the Movement in Switzerland shows what it is in reality: the history of faces and friendships, stories of meaningful relationships and of friends who are closer friends than others because more than the others they have given a face to the common ideal: Claudio, Egidio, Pietro, Carla, Albino, Carlo Felice, Father Willy, Father Libero, Father Angelo, Father Gianni, Father Mauro, Father Bruno, Flavio, Giorgio, Patrizio, Pepi, Urs. Other friends are no longer here, like Eugenio, the great bishop friend, and Urs von Balthasar, or Carlo Felice.

A CL monopoly!
Polemical statements against CL are a recurrent phenomenon in Swiss newspapers, almost a cathartic surfacing of fears that run along underground. The most recent occasion was the approach of the date in February when the citizens of Ticino canton are summoned to take a stand on a system of subsidies to free schools. Albeit camouflaged as a question (“An integralist attack on the liberal State?”), the title of a long article in the Neue Zurcher Zeitung, the most authoritative Swiss daily, no more than two months ago brusquely reopened the eternal question and the eternal fear. Whatever can they be aiming at with this way of understanding faith, which demands to be the center of life, its needs, its interests? And what will happen? The obsessive campaign immediately identified the enemy: the subsidies will go to schools run by priests and CL. It is useless to point out that, along with CL, others were also protagonists of this initiative, useless to point out that two political parties have recognized the value of the proposal and have taken up the battle. Everything, they say, is done by CL to favor CL. And, fast in the wake of this debate, the newspapers immediately published the usual, and unfortunately for them, laughable list naming the positions of power held by CL people in the universities, mass media, business.
It is true that in human affairs it is always a matter of meaning. But it is also a question of ears. Because if one does not have ears to hear, why ever does he act? “… in truth CL wants to educate absolutely ordinary people to faith… What should these ‘dangerous’ Catholics do? Try to find a job in less important positions? Stay away from the schools, universities, mass media? Or become unemployed? Go back into the catacombs?” More than once, CL people have tried to reply to the numerous articles in the daily newspapers by writing letters. The elementary nature of the questions has never been answered by a corresponding simplicity in the answers. We must therefore ask tolerant Switzerland: how should these CL people live, except in continual apology? It does no good to remind people that other free schools, even secular ones like the Steiner School, are present in Ticino canton; it does no good to remind people that only a small percentage of the students are children of CL parents. It does no good to recall that most parents are ordinary citizens, believers or non-believers, who act on the strength of an educational need that is common to everyone. Nor does it do any good to bring up the social issue, that is to say, the matter of families who, wherever they are from and whatever their creed, if they are in need, they pay what they can.
Usurpers of the autonomy of the liberal State, fundamentalists and intolerant, this is what they are and this is what they must remain! “What do you mean by intolerant?” someone tried to object during public assemblies. “There are parents who, even though non-believers, take an active part in the life of our schools. How can you say intolerant, when Muslim parents send their daughters to us because in the tolerant public schools they are laughed at for wearing a chador, and here they are respected?” “There is nothing to be done,” an adversarial member of Parliament went so far as to say. “The non-believer parents who take part are not a witness to the openness of the schools, but rather the sign of their personal progressive deterioration toward a fundamentalist shutting out of the outside world. And as for the Muslim daughters, well, that’s no answer, it’s clear that fundamentalists understand each other….”

On the other side of the St. Gotthard Pass
In Fribourg, Patrice, a journalist, recounts that lately he has received a real blow. To be more precise, Patrice, smiling to himself, says that he has had “a Joan of Arc experience.” Someone at La Liberté, a daily with Catholic origins and tradition, had dared not to bury Cardinal Ratzinger’s just published Dominus Iesus under a mountain of criticism. Who? None other than Patrice, while all around him dailies, weeklies, TV stations all reacted indignantly to their latest wound from the papal forces. An editorial meeting was called by his co-workers, who spared no blows. Their sentence: Patrice can write, rather he must write, about these things. But the next time something like this comes up, he won’t be the only one writing about it. Hence, not being the only voice, but just one among many, he won’t seem to be the most authoritative. In this way, Helvetic neutrality is saved.
Patrice more or less keeps up with all the communities on the other side of the St. Gotthard Pass: Fribourg, Lausanne, Geneva, Neuchâtel, Bern, Zurich… some seventy persons in all, more of them in Romansch Switzerland than in German Switzerland. When He was around, Jesus sent His people out into the world two-by-two, but here, in French-German Switzerland, there is a recession and our friends have to make do by themselves in their places of work or study. Maybe at the end of their careers they will go before their boss, God, and ask for back pay plus interest, overtime, and per diem. But not even the Pope does much better in catching Swiss attention. The Jubilee pilgrimage to Rome from all of Switzerland did not amount to more than 3,500 people. “This solitude has taught us to cherish our unity,” says Patrice, “and to become more adept in the periscope method. We keep our periscope up, scanning the horizon, and as soon as we can see in it the outline of a friend, we celebrate because he or she will bring us a bit of the Movement to which we belong.”
What is the life of this people who lives perched on the peak of their own tolerance like? A good French-German Swiss sacrifices to the idol of work, leads the good life with pleasant soirées, has an enjoyable time traveling all over the world, never leaves cultural dishes off his leisure menu, and to help his digestion, always has next to him the sodium bicarbonate of humanitarian satisfaction. Yes, there is some volunteer work, even if the sacrifice of one’s free time is increasingly replaced by the offer of money.
Patrice, who loves his people, suffers for a picture that he wishes were not so crude: “Maybe here, Christianity has taken on the aspect of sexual morality too much, rather than a human event. And maybe this is the reason that the reaction to the Pope, when you come down to it, always ends up in that sphere, the sphere of sex, abortion, and birth control.” But he tells about a true encounter, speaking of Cristina who is from Geneva but working in Bern, who encountered the Movement and became excited, “maybe because she didn’t know the first thing about Christianity. When she was a little girl she didn’t even go to catechism.”
What makes a great impression is that the champions of modernity, of the secular conscience that owes obedience to nothing except the rationality of its own essence, the champions of modern rationalism against fideistic obscurantism, end up in the festival of the most banal religious sentimentality. Debates, polemics, scandalized claims… in the end, the essence of all this intelligence is that Ratzinger is bad, the Pope loves power, homosexuals love each other too much to be evil, euthanasia is born of too much love. But will there ever be a datum of reality on which reason can work? For this reason, Patrice is grateful to a Movement that has taught him to respect reality and reason.
And yet something is moving, a welcomed surprise. Renewal seems to be coming from above, from the most recently appointed bishops. The Bishop of Basel, Koch (who studied in Fribourg with Corecco and Schönborn, now Cardinal in Vienna) told his faithful at the outset that he considers the new ecclesial movements a blessing for the Church. The clergy was none too pleased. But he does not back down. With the new Bishop of Fribourg, Bernard Jenod, Catholicism gains visibility there too. His Excellency loves to put Catholicism in the spotlight and enjoys festivities. Thus people have come together in the town squares once again in great numbers, united and happy as they have not been in a long time.

Something old, something new
Did someone say somewhere that Christianity did not appear in the world as a religion, but as a passion for man? Yes, someone must have said it. To be sure, a group of mothers, with families in Lugano, said it and their experience continues to repeat it. Rossella, Patrizia, Hope, Ivette: mothers, with a raft of children apiece (at least three, in the smaller families), with their feet solidly planted on the ground and who had no time to waste with religion, its emotions, and the silly questions that some enjoy bringing up over and over again, as the baggage for their journey through life. But all of them, for some months now, have been living the experience of the Movement. Rossella knows for a fact that she was not looking for anything. And perhaps, faced with the alternative, she would have preferred not only not to look, but also not to find. She cannot even talk about it, because to do so brings back all the pain that she won’t mention. It’s been two years like this. Yes, there were some friends who, foreseeing how things would turn out, kept her husband company a lot, for hours and hours, maybe even without speaking, almost to the point of irritating her: “What are they here for, if they don’t have anything to say?” Then, after a few months, she who did not want to hear about religion went to look up those friends of her husband, saying, “I am not here because I believe, nor because I am seeking anything. I am here simply because I can’t make it alone, with four children. I am here because I need you.” Today for her, even in the mystery of great grief, a new life has begun.
Looking at them, Rossella, Ivette, Hope, and Patrizia, seeing them together, seeing their happiness which has no need for words, they evoke anything but the depressed emptiness of dissatisfied women looking for some sentimental-religious consolation.
Patrizia had not even guessed that certain questions existed. She knew nothing about the Movement. Or, to be more precise, she did know something. She knew the prejudices that everybody knows. She was fine and everything was as it should be. Her husband, her job, family, children, life… except for one son with some problems at school. His problems were eating her up inside. Inside, because outside, she had no one with whom she could talk about him.
Then she met Roberto, the school principal, decided to send her son to the Movement’s school, and made the simple discovery that you can be a friend to others in your life. Today she donates her time to the school lunchroom and has involved also her father, who is a retired cook. Her husband does not stop her, but doesn’t encourage her either. With her friends she does School of Community on Giussani’s texts, and continues to think about Jacob, who fought with God until he was marked by the struggle. No, Christianity did not come into history as a religion, but as a response to man’s needs. This is what the coming together of these mothers, who have been friends for only a few months, is saying.

Something that is not half-way
Hope is an American Jew originally from New York. Her father, when he was a young post-World War II law student, on vacation in Miami, found himself reading signs on hotel doors that he would never have thought possible: “No entrance to Jews and Negroes.” Hence, to defend Negroes and Jews, he became a criminal lawyer. This decision caused him to be excluded from the Jewish community, so Hope went to public schools in Miami, looking always at her father who had been expelled from the community “for defending Negroes,” and grew up with her own personal search to find in the religions and history of peoples the traces of her father’s teachings.
She was fascinated by the history of the Middle East, a great school of tolerance. She was fascinated by the story of Jesus, presented in her family as an older brother. Her search had already led her, years before, to know and read Father Giussani’s texts, and she had been won over by his strange ability to give answers where others had usually stopped short. But when, recently, Hope encountered the Movement, she was not looking for religious knowledge or an answer to spiritual questions. No, she was looking for people who were living the attempt to go to the depths of their own humanity. She was looking for a movement, something “Catholic that is not half-way,” she says, people with whom to live the idealism she had perceived in her father’s teaching and glimpsed in her reading, in the concreteness of every day, in raising her children, in her relationship with her husband, in a word, everything. Now Hope does School of Community. Some time ago she requested that her children be baptized. Her oldest goes to the Movement’s school, and two months ago she concluded her testimony in an assembly with her new friends by saying, “I feel that, thanks to this friendship with you, the religious history of my great-grandparents, my grandparents, my father, is not ended. Easter marks the twentieth anniversary of my father’s death. I am sure that he is very proud of all of us.”

From Liguria to the Bavosa
Marco is the latest born. To the life of the Movement, that is. Last month he took part in his first School of Community. From Liguria, he has spent a large part of his twenty-six years as a drug addict. He has completed his program at the “Bavosa,” a half-way house that takes the name of a farm that Father Gelmini rented with the help of friends in the Movement, and fixed up with the help of his young people in Lugano. Marco works there, raising grapes, and lives with Massimiliano. When the Bavosa soccer team challenges the Movement’s team, Bavosa always wins, so full of stamina are they and so fast do they run. Because they work hard there, they pay attention to their physical condition, and condescendingly put up with the ironic comments of the humiliated and defeated CL players (“Oh, we know why you run so much…”). Marco makes sure that Father Gelmini admonishes his young people, once they have finished their program, to get to know and to take part in the friendship of the Movement of CL. He says that Father Giussani and Father Gelmini know each other and are fond of each other, and that Father Giussani went to see for himself what Father Piero was doing in the Mother House.
Marco describes his experience: “The first time I met friends in the Movement, I thought they would be distant and standoffish because they had an education and I didn’t. Instead everything turned out to be very simple and normal. In the same way, when we went to the Meeting in Rimini with Father Gelmini, I stayed with some people that I didn’t know and I thought they would have been patronizing toward me. Instead I was just like one of them, everything was very normal, they paid neither more nor less attention to me than to their own children. In a word, the encounter with them revealed to me my own prejudices and told me again what I wanted. Besides, Father Piero’s community is called Encounter and I know, from School of Community, that also for the Movement the word “encounter” is fundamental. After all, what we are asking for is an encounter.”
An encounter. The answer is too easy, and thus the question is too easy. But just to ask it anyway, with a pinch of rhetoric: who knows why what is clear to Marco, 26 years old, without a formal education and with a history of hardship, remains hidden to the rich and liberal Switzerland?