John Paul II 1920-2005 The Glory of God Is Man Fully Alive “My friends, let us serve this man, let us serve Christ in this great man with all our existence.” These were Giussani’s words to us as he left his first audience with John Paul II at the beginning of 1979. We have tried to realize these words in all these years of the life of the Movement of Communion and Liberation, according to the task that the Pope himself entrusted to us on the occasion of the 1984 audience: “‘Go forth to all the world’ (Mt 28:19), is what Christ said to His disciples. And I repeat it to you, ‘Go out into all the world to bring the truth, the beauty, and the peace that are encountered in Christ the Redeemer.’ This is the charge that I leave to you today” (for the thirtieth anniversary of the birth of CL, Rome, September 29, 1984). Grateful, we bow before the completion of the life of the Pope, who exercised his authority first of all as a personal testimony to Christ–“center of the cosmos and of history” (Redemptor Hominis), a testimony offered to the world with untiring dedication and self-sacrifice. For the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of this pontificate, Fr. Giussani wrote John Paul II, “Following the Pope’s life over these last 25 years, what is most noticeable is that Christianity tends to be truly the realization of the human. All his travels, like a long march toward death, have had as their reason the evident unity that corresponds to the genius of Christianity: ‘Gloria Dei vivens homo.’ The glory of God is man who is alive.” The Pope leaves the world fuller of the humanity of Christ and the Church more conscious of being herself “a movement.”