letters

edited by PAOLA BERGAMINI

SIERRA LEONE
The Slaughter of the Innocents
Here seated next to me, watching what I am doing at the computer, is Hassan, who managed to get himself a couple of days in jail. When Ernest, one of our volunteers, went to pull him out, aided by the good sense of a judge who ordered his release, Hassan was still just one great heap of tears. He says he’s sixteen, but I don’t believe it, even though they tried to make him pass for eighteen so as to try him as an adult. What did he do? A little spat at the fountain with a girl his own age. He was filling up his bucket and she grabbed it away from him and stuck hers under the spigot, out of spite toward the “rebel.” A little fight broke out which the girl’s mother made worse by taking her daughter’s side. With a little bit of good sense she could have defused the situation. Instead, she deliberately aggravated it, because these “rebels” bother her. I understand her feelings. She lives in Calaba Town, which was almost razed to the ground in January 1999. Hassan had nothing to do with it, but since Hassan belongs to the category of “rebels” he must be punished. In their tangle, the pail hit her in the knee and she hurt Hassan in the chest, but the police only considered her side and put Hassan in jail. Why she wasn’t in jail too is something I just don’t understand, even though I have been told she has “friends.” Hassan, who was taken away as a small child and has lived for years in the woods, has very few friends. In recent days, when we have had the privilege of being chosen, here at St. Michael’s Lakka, as one of the two places visited by the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, Hassan has always been in my mind, as a typical example of the situation in which our kids constantly find themselves. Addressing the Secretary General in my welcoming remarks, I said to him, “Will the day ever come when these kids will be remembered for their resistance to evil, for having come almost unscathed out of a situation which would have defeated an adult, rather than for the crimes they have been forced to commit by sick minds? Will the day ever come when we shall record the heroic acts of so many people, including young people and children, rather than the cruelty of abnormal people? The guardian angels of these kids in the hands of psychopaths must have worked night and day to protect them and restore them to us, normal. God has loved them as only He knows how to do.” I especially want to thank the friends in AVSI, who have done so much to help me make this dream come true, the dream of restoring to the civilian world so many children who are victims of this war’s worst crime: the slaughter of the innocents.
Fr. Bepi Berton

Muga de Sayago (Spain)
Reliving the Tradition
I do not belong to Communion and Liberation, because for the moment God does not permit it, even though I desire it. Perhaps my path is a different one. I am writing to you in the hope that in some way my letter can give some consolation to Giancarlo Cesana, whose accident (“event”) has deeply affected me. For many years now–more than some of you have been alive–I have been reading and meditating on everything that is published in Castilian by Father Giussani and his disciples (Carrón, Cesana, and others; some of those who used to write for your magazine have gone on to a better life). I would like to tell you that I am convinced that Father Giussani’s writings are the theology of the future, like those of St. Thomas have been up to now. I don’t mean that they will replace them, but that they make them current and concrete for men of our day–for their realism, for their form of reliving the Tradition, and for their harmony with the Pope. Father Giussani has found (God gave him, because this was His will) interpreters and co-workers like Cesana, whose articles clarify in detail the theology of their teacher. And they “resolve” life in a positive manner, as he says. I speak of nothing else and I do it for ten minutes a day to about 500 young people. Cesana’s explanations are impressive. He can well be proud of them!
José Gutierrez Mazeros

The Lord is Great
Dear friends: I am writing this brief note because I am afraid that the passing of time may fade the awareness of these recent days in front of the death, that is, the birth into Heaven, of our friend Francesco (Bobo) Torchiana, which occurred on January 23rd. I was granted the gift of being near him in the last months of his illness, because I would take the Eucharist to him at his home. This also gave me the chance to talk with him and his wife Nicoletta, in a dialogue that was serious and dramatic in the face of what life was bringing them. I was struck by some things. First of all, the entreaty that was always open, wanting an answer more and more as time went by, demanding some answer. To be sure, Bobo had met Jesus in his encounter with the Movement, but now that encounter was taking on an unexpected and certainly painful form. It can be said of him that he lived that dizzying experience almost as though “by law, by my life’s directive, I must hang suspended, moment by moment, upon a will that I do not know… waiting for the nod of this unknown ‘Lord,’ attentive to the signs of a will that would appear to us through pure, immediate circumstances.” For this reason, during his final time in the hospital, in a moment of great physical trial he said to those who were with him, “Why doesn’t the Lord show His face, why doesn’t He take me? He has abandoned me… but if you all are here it means that He hasn’t abandoned me, but I feel so all alone.” Here is the great cry of Jesus from the cross and at the same time the great awareness that Bobo was taught by the charism of Father Giussani: that the companionship of those who are called together is a physical sign of the presence of Christ, it is a substitute for the physicality of Jesus. He himself wrote last October: “The Lord is truly great, as the Unnamed One says, for those who follow Him. We have been granted the grace to encounter Him and to live His presence in this great companionship of ours. For this reason, we must pray to the Lord to thank Him for Father Giussani, for the Movement, and that He may keep them and keep us always in His love.” There is a second characteristic of his personality, of his faith, that impressed me: his complete openness to miracles. He asked for one, and we with him. But in him there was the freedom of the awareness that the miracle could take on a different form than that of healing, that the two things did not necessarily have to coincide. “It is clear to me,” he wrote, “that like the School of Community says, my freedom is my dedication to the will of God, because He loves me, He loves us, and I am certain that He will perform the miracle, and I await it in the form that He will choose to show me.” He maintained this awareness to the end. The day before he died, he told a doctor at San Carlo Hospital, “I don’t know if the miracle will be a healing, but I do know that there will be a miracle.” There is a final characteristic about him that impressed me. It was clear to him, even in this moment of passage that was so dramatic and painful, that everything was part of a task that God had entrusted to him. Sunday afternoon, before his last admission to the hospital, he called his children to him one by one, saying goodbye to them, repeating to them all his love for their lives and their destinies, and saying that the Lord would never abandon them and neither would he. He cited the example of the leap off the ledge which is talked about in The Religious Sense, an experience which he had actually lived with his older daughters during a vacation in Val d’Aosta, telling them that he was now about to make this leap for them, to prepare the way also for them. And he told the hospital priest, who had stopped by to see him, that also in Paradise, like St. Therese of Lisieux, we wanted to continue to do the Father’s will and that his task would be that of distributing good to all. And I, together with our friends, am grateful to God for having given him to us, and to Nicoletta for having taken care of him during almost twenty years of marriage.
Fr. Marco, Milan

Begoña
The Lord has called Bego to him. Suddenly. Therefore, just as suddenly, her life has become luminous forever. She had been working in the administrative office of the Movement for some months, after turning down a very good job, and she did it with her usual efficiency, “very happy to do it and ready to go on in the way you will tell me to.” Wherever she went, in the office, among the university students and professors, in the Cesal, in the Fraternity of St. Joseph–she was the first to live this experience in Spain–shining through her manifold personal relationships was her belonging to an Other, to us. Her house was open, like a natural extension of her work, which was the same thing as her life. She prepared delicious meals for us, never letting the chance pass to impart some affectionate scolding. When she laughed, our hearts would open wide. We needed it. Life is relationship with Mystery. He establishes it with us and gives us its beginning, its shape, and its fulfillment. Bego lived an intense relationship with Mystery, and one that was often tormented. Now that she rests in Him, she too sees what we were already glimpsing: that it was so easy to love her and that she treated us so tenderly because this was a reflection of the One Whom she was always passionately seeking. We were never able to look at her without pronouncing the name of Christ. On St. John’s feastday, she was folded into Jesus’ arms for ever. The Lord calls us back to ourselves. Our sacrifice has begun to purify our way of being together, reviving the awareness of what we are and why we are living. Our hope grows ever stronger of meeting again.
Javier Prades, Madrid

The Way to be Reminded of
Dear Father Giussani: While giving a witness to the New York community a while ago, I was deeply aware of my call to speak of my experience of your charism with “simplicity of heart”. This is really my only way to offer a gift for the Glory of Christ, in following you. Others are called to announce an explanation of your teaching, but mine is to stay with my experiences in simplicity–and my experiences are numerous. As Pastor, I desire to remember your words all day long and to constantly say, Veni Sancti Spiritus, as a way of being companion to you. While confronted with pastoral situations, I ask myself what your words would be and how you would listen to this person. You are very present in and with these people as I wonder with them and stay with them in the name of Christ. You have become my way of remembering and my way to stay with Christ in companionship. Our Memores Domini House has some beautiful struggles together and I love the call to follow you in this way.
Father Jerry, Rochester

A Mission of Friendship
During the final week of the year 2000, the Fraternity of families in Northern California received an extraordinary gesture of friendship. Beginning with a simple invitation to lunch in 1996, this group of friends has shared a close companionship that has gradually grown and become more focused. It has not always been easy. The ups and downs, however, have helped us to recall the Presence that unites us and makes us friends in whatever our daily circumstances. When Bruno proposed the idea of a “sister fraternity” in Milan, a group of friends who share the same experience, with whom we could build a relationship, I don’t think any of us quite imagined the event that could transpire. Eleven people arrived from Milan and joined our Fraternity of families for an amazing adventure of pure grace, fraught with reminders, great and small, of God’s presence in our lives. For many of us, it was truly a moment of conversion, not necessarily given to us by the Italians or even because of them. But being with them gave us an opportunity to become more aware of what we have together in California, to understand it better, appreciate it more deeply, and learn how to live it with conscious abandon. We rented homes to accommodate the families, and took several day trips to play together at the beach, in a Redwood grove, at the Russian River, Point Reyes Lighthouse to see whales spouting, and Margaret’s home (complete with horses, cattle, goats, and sheep) where our friend, Fr. Vincent, said a bilingual mass for us. At all of these places, we sang, played games, and ate together like one very large family. Each evening at dinner, the adults had a discussion (with translation provided by Kristi and Bruno) about our experiences, and during the day, Mario introduced us to many “typical Mediterranean games”, which I think actually translates as: “games played to the death.” With absolutely no concrete idea of what events each day might hold, I eagerly anticipated everything, trusting that whatever would happen was a unique gift given to me by God. Having now had a taste of that freedom, I want it to be pervasive to our Fraternity and to all of my life and my children’s lives. Juanita shared, “I was struck because these people were genuinely happy singing and playing together. I have participated in many CL events just going through the motions, but never has my gaze on reality been so clear as it is now… it hadn’t penetrated the core of my being–my heart.” Matilde (from Italy) told us that their Fraternity looks to the life and charity of Mother Cabrini, a missionary in North America. It was interesting for us to understand a new and far-reaching purpose for being together. As Danny said, “It reminded me that this gathering is given by Another, and that our ‘Yes’ to Christ, not our own effort, allows these miraculous events to happen.” Bernadette was also struck: “After spending 4 days with these families, I realized that what we have here in California is the same as what they have in Italy. Our family Fraternity has grown not only in understanding, but also in size. I belong to something bigger than our Fraternity in Northern California.” Welcoming the New Year together was the perfect capper to our weekend. As midnight approached and we toasted “Buon Anno!” with champagne, none of us really knew what would grow from this seed planted together. What we are certain of is that it is an extraordinary relationship which points to Another, announcing again His presence in our lives.
Barbara, Northern California

Into One Body
114 new Memores Domini, men and women who dedicate themselves totally to Christ in virginity. An event that manifests the charism of CL. Father Giussani’s words on December 24, 2000, during the “Profession,” the moment in the life of the Memores which establishes the commitment of their entire lives to adhering to the ideals which the Church has traditionally identified as the fulfillment of true humanity, that is, the humanity generated by the death and resurrection of Christ and continually renewed in Baptism. A witness for all, whether married or single
When, let each of you keep in front of your eyes the sheet with the formula, and weighing the words we say, let us with all our hearts give Christ the opportunity to spread His presence, His physical Presence through the whole world and throughout history. We recite it together, because the way you will live from now on, every year adds to your awareness and to your will to dedicate yourselves to something that we would never be able to foresee in advance. May the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, follow us moment by moment throughout our lives.
Sure of God’s faithfulness,
All: in His presence and in the presence of the community, I ask of Jesus Christ, my one salvation, that in the events of my life, my heart may remain fixed on Him, in whom both the liberation of the world and true joy are found. I entrust this commitment to the Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church, and I ask of Her an ever greater love for the people of believers.
If, from this moment on, this prayer, this formula of our consecration resonates through every day of our lives, then our life will be full of peace and youthfulness. And the world will change, because the world changes through the presence of the person who acknowledges Christ the Lord. And the world will change, the world will change in our own eyes. May our faithfulness correspond to the faithfulness of God. In mercy, each moment of our life will be able to be forgiven. So will it be in the moment when one perceives forgiveness; the positivity and the truth of his dedication rise up. Pardon me, but I would like to tell you just one thing, because I am very keen that none of you may say to God today, “I give You my life” without then giving it, that there be no day on our journey in which this total perspective in everything we do may fail. There is something in the Holy Mass–therefore every day you can have this stimulus, this new root of thought and of life–after the lifting of the chalice: “May all of us who share in the Body and Blood of Christ be brought together in unity [because Christ’s communion with the individual person is so that the world may become true, the truth of the world].” “May all of us who share in the Body and Blood of Christ be brought together in unity by the Holy Spirit [May the Holy Spirit bring us together into one Body: Christ did not come “for me,” He came for me in as much as all the truth of my being lies in constructing, in being a constructive part of the Church of God.” Therefore, I made this digression in order to suggest one last thing to you: take pleasure in saying ejaculations, which are the successes that God wins for Himself in the otherwise vast emptiness and distraction of our days. The ejaculation that I recommend for your health, so that the endurance of faith and charity be more guaranteed in you, is Veni Sancte Spiritus, veni per Mariam: Come, o Holy Spirit, You who created the world, who created the world and redeemed it, You re-created it in Your action against evil, You who have made present in man the possibility of combating evil; veni per Mariam, come into me through the mediation of the Blessed Virgin, through the application of God’s plan in the Mother of Christ. Veni Sancte Spiritus, veni per Mariam, because we are made to be, to take part in the mystical, mysterious, mystical Body of Jesus born of the Virgin Mary; in the real body of the Virgin Mary, this supernatural measure has come true.
Veni Sancte Spiritus, veni per Mariam. Let’s recite it together, as in this way we shall hear its echo. My wish for you is that you may hear this echo every day of your life, even when life seems to be getting out of hand, because the human limitation will appear first of all to you and then to all those who come into contact with you. But you will have in your hearts the evidence of an overcoming of all that otherwise would be the destruction of all meaning: never again will there be the victory, the possible victory of evil over good, of nothingness over being, against being.
Let’s say it all together for the first time: Veni Sancte Spiritus,
All: veni per Mariam.
Fr. Giussani