John Paul II and CL We Have Been Provoked to a Responsibility on Which Our Life Will Be Judged Fr Giussani’s letter to the CL communities after the Pope’s audience with the university students on March 31st. (In Litterae Communionis - CL, Special Edition, May 5, 1979, p. 9) Dear friends: In the immense Paul VI Hall arose an image that by now is part of our self-awareness and of our own lives. We asked for this meeting with a great and humble desire to make ourselves known to the Pope, to make him know the willingness of our faith and our energetic readiness to follow Him. We use the word “event” to mean a fact that provokes life beyond what we have planned, beyond our prevision or expectation. March 13th was an “event.” How astonished we were to hear the ideal of our life confirmed in the same terms we are used to and explained so clearly and with such unusual effect! So this March 13th is the event that is the greatest “event” in all our history: we were provoked to a responsibility we can no longer turn back from. I felt a shiver in my spine when he told us, “I want to leave you a job: with the Church go trustfully toward man.” Our life will be judged on this. Our ideal, as we know, is the ideal for all Christians. So–as we have been authoritatively invited and as we have always been spurred to do–we mean to live it united with the Bishop and the priest on a journey with all our brothers in the faith, offering ourselves to them as a sacrifice and asking of them only love for our face and for our history. Our ideal–we know–is for all times and for every hour of history. So this must determine the hour we are living, too, the confused and bitter historical circumstances that all the same ask for our tenacious commitment so that the social turmoil may be avoided. Our friendship will be a mutual help in our inescapable responsibility. When I was looking at you in the huge hall, I was thinking: “The greater majority of these young friends of mine will not be able to get close to the Pope, to speak to him. They will see him from far off. Nonetheless, this most human and grandiose gesture is made by every one of them.” Without the presence of each one of you, hidden as you were in the crowd, the great words of faith and love would not have been spoken by the Pope–CL would not have been known. How I would have liked to be one of you, submerged in the crowd, filled with the awareness and the love for this “one body” that we are! I thank you one by one, moved and astonished as if in front of that Man who is leading us, because each one of us is an “event” for me and for everyone. With gratitude, Yours, Fr. Giussani