A History to Be Relived

The Psalms tie together the ancient people of the Covenant and the Christian experience of today’s man. Fr. Giussani’s book presented at the International Center on May 2nd. Speakers were Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints; Milene Di Gioia; and Fr. Massimo Camisasca

BY ANDREA D’AURIA

“Father Giussani, when he was teaching religion at Berchet High School in the mid-1950s, liked to have us listen to pieces of classical music. One day he proposed we listen to Beethoven’s Concerto for violin and orchestra, Opus 61, in which the violin tries constantly to run ahead in sudden flights, but is constantly chased and pulled back by the orchestra. At a certain point in class, as we were listening, a girl burst into tears, so deeply moved was she at hearing something that, underneath it all, described her. After high school this girl didn’t see Fr. Giussani again, even though he continued to try to find her. A few years ago, Fr. Giussani managed to track down this ex-student of his, and it was as though the two had never been parted. This girl is the person who is talking to you right now.”
Thus began Milene Di Gioia, editor of Fr. Giussani’s latest book, Che cos’è l’uomo perché te ne curi? [What is Man that Thou Art Mindful of Him?], published by San Paolo and presented in Rome at the Communion and Liberation International Center on May 2nd. Participating in the presentation as speakers were Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, and Msgr. Massimo Camisasca, Superior General of the Priestly Fraternity of the Missionaries of St. Charles Borromeo. About a hundred people attended, including ambassadors to the Holy See, prelates, journalists, and representatives of various religious institutes and ecclesial movements.
“One can hardly comprehend the Christian experience without a willingness to relive in some way the history of the people of Israel, in all its accents and all its drama.”
These were the opening words of Jesus Carrascosa (moderator of the event), using the same words written by Fr. Giussani in the preface to the book. The Book of Psalms is thus what most links the ancient people of the Covenant with the timeliness of the Christian experience of every man today.

The Pope’s Wednesdays
Cardinal Saraiva Martins chose to make the connection between Fr. Giussani’s teaching and the Pope’s Wednesday catechesis, which in these very months is centered on praying the Psalms. “We must say that we are particularly happy,” the Cardinal stated, “that the theme treated in the book we are presenting this evening is contemporaneous with the talks given by the Holy Father at his Wednesday General Audiences, starting at the end of last March and still going on. I am sure that it will give pleasure to you, too, to see here not so much a coincidence as the gift and grace to be always positively in harmony with the Magisterium of the Successor of Peter, in whatever form this is manifested.”
The Cardinal then underlined how the prayer of the Psalms is the most complete form of expression of the relationship between God and man, and said, quoting the Pope, “The Book of Psalms remains the ideal source of Christian prayer and will continue to inspire the Church in the new millennium.”
Msgr. Camisasca presented the book from the perspective of his personal encounter with Fr. Giussani, and reviewed the years when, as a young student, he listened to Giussani’s religion lessons. “I was 14 years old,” Camisasca said, beginning his talk, “and was starting the first year out of five at Berchet High School in Milan. I encountered Fr. Giussani and I encountered the kids who were gathered around him, fascinated by his intelligence, by the human fullness that they saw living in him: music, literature, history, knowledge of people, fierce opposition to error, and sweet and tender affection for what is human, to the point of making the tears flow even in class.”
Fr. Giussani’s proposal was all-embracing and insisted on addressing the whole vast spectrum of interests which young people have at heart. “All this was articulated,” Camisasca continued, “in a proposal of life that appealed to the real, common interests of kids then, and that brought these interests to an encounter with the living reality of the Christian tradition, which interprets and expresses the most beautiful and greatest things which man has always been able to create.”

Collection channel
Fr. Giussani, through his pedagogical work, introduced these young people to the global richness of the entire Christian tradition. “Giussani thus became,” Msgr. Camisasca went on, “without our realizing it, the collection channel of a great history, rich in songs, music, paintings, poetry, literary texts, and prayers, all of which was presented to us in all the force of its timeliness, the word coming from different times, both near and distant, for the man of today.”
“Quite properly, Milene Di Gioia writes in the preface to this book,” Camisasca added, “that Giussani ‘places tradition in a radical, taut, and fertile relationship with human experience.’ He ‘adopts the aspirations and acquisitions of our epoch’ and in front of them ‘reproposes a spiritual heritage which would otherwise be penned up in a tiny enclosure of specialists.’”
But Giussani’s method for teaching the GS [Student Youth] group what the Psalms were was, above all, recitation of the Hours. “These ambitious youths of the early sixties–” Camisasca went on, “the Giessini, as they were called then– when they came together, would pull out of their purses or the back pockets of their pants dog-eared little books and they would start reading, in alternating chorus, using a particular tone which I found out later was called ‘recto.’ These were extraordinary texts of poetry, the Psalms. Giussani thus, without telling us, inserted our present instant into a real history, a history of a people which really existed (even though less and less visible), the Christian people, whose origins dated back to Abraham, as these Psalms taught us.”
By praying the Psalms, the past unexpectedly becomes a present experience. “By spending time with those poetic texts and those prayers,” Msgr. Camisasca added, “every day we became contemporaries of David, of Solomon, of those exiled in Babylonia and liberated by the Egyptian and Assyrian rulers, and felt the feelings of the immense throngs and the individual, isolated, lost faithful of Yahweh who begged for His help. We learned to know ourselves, we acquired a knowledge born almost three thousand years earlier, which rose up before us in all its timeliness and ability to read our most recondite and true thoughts. The Psalms put into our mouths words that we would never have been able to imagine and that we felt to be absolutely our own.”

Happy Coincidence
“These are the Psalms of our existence: the sign of continuity of a history which comes from Abraham all the way to us.” Excerpts from the address of the Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints

BY JOSÉ SARAIVA MARTINS

Giussani’s books almost always, as in our case here, are not theoretical works but are born of life; they maintain their sense of immediacy and their richness of suggestion, which immediately win the reader over and draw him into the message they offer.
We are particularly happy that the theme treated in the book we are presenting this evening is contemporaneous with the talks given by the Holy Father at his Wednesday General Audiences, starting at the end of last March and still going on. I am sure that it will give pleasure to you, too, to see here not so much a coincidence as the gift and grace to be always positively in harmony with the Magisterium of the Successor of Peter, in whatever form this is manifested.
Initiating his reflections on the Psalms at the audience on Wednesday, March 28th, the Pope noted that “the Book of Psalms remains the ideal source of Christian prayer and will continue to inspire the Church in the new millennium” (L’Osservatore Romano, March 29, 2001). Its ideal nature could be summed up in the Christian’s opportunity “to read the Book of Psalms in the light of the whole mystery of Christ,” once again using the words of the Holy Father.
Underlying Fr. Giussani’s book is a conviction that was already held by the Fathers of the Church , which is that in the Psalms it is Christ who speaks.
Whoever lets himself be accompanied daily by their words is changed by this.
First of all, he is saved from loneliness: the Psalms are words which make one live the experience of the nearness of God in the daily occasions of life from which they arose and whose resonant vibrations they are. The Church, by putting them frequently on our lips, favors their memorization and in this way makes the Psalms true companions to the hours of our days.
The Psalms reveal man to man: in them is contained all the infinite range of feelings, questions, and situations in which the human person can find himself, in any country, at any age. But they also reveal God to man and–we can say–God to God Himself. Often they take on the rhythm and form of a dialogue in which man talks to God, and vice versa. The two talk to each other, in a series of infinite nuances of language. And God sometimes gives in to man’s pleading invocation, changes His mind, revealing Himself to Himself as mercy.
But this dialogue is not ethereal, it does not take place in a no-man’s land. It is set within a precise history, which is the history of Israel. Some Psalms punctuate it for us, at times inserting it into the history of the world, with an unfolding of ages and events that is never purely chronological, but always has a didactic purpose: to teach the people a position in the present.
But the time of the Psalms does not go only backwards from the present, but also forward, in the direction of prophecy. The Book of Psalms, which is the book Jesus quotes most, is also an indispensable instrument–together with the Gospels and the books of the prophets–for entering into the secret of the Person of the Messiah, God-made-man, awaited and foreseen by the Psalmist. The Gospels themselves teach us that the Psalms not only lead us to Jesus, but on our lips become the words of Jesus, by which He still today addresses the Father–the words He used for His prayers two thousand years ago. The Psalms identify us with Jesus and make of his people the Church, His Body, that has Him as Lord and Head and speaks with His words, expressing His feelings and thoughts.
The Church, through the Psalms, lives her continuity as the Temple of Jerusalem and the synagogue. It is astounding that the Psalms have found precisely in the time of the Church their highest use and value, uniting the two Testaments in this wonderful way.
These are the Psalms in our life: the sign of the continuing of a history which goes all the way from Abraham to us. In the Psalms, the history of our salvation is fully synthesized and described.