In the Tracks of the Pony Express

In St Joseph, Missouri, in just twenty-four hours, the unexpected discovery of realities touched by the Movement. Among homemade flyers, Schools of Community, philosophy lessons in the seminary, and electronic correspondences, the birth of a presence that answers man’s needs

By Maurizio Maniscalco

Do you know where the outpost of the US Army at the beginning of the Indian Wars was?
St Joseph, Missouri.

Do you know where the starting point of the Pony Express was, the beginning of the relay of those fearless horsemen-postmen who crossed the prairies pursued by the arrows of Cherokees and Sioux?
St Joseph, Missouri.

Do you know where the most recent CL community in the USA was born?
St Joseph, Missouri.

David’s fruits
You may have already read about David Jones, the Army captain, in Traces some time ago. His story gives you goose bumps: an insatiable thirst for God, starting out in the Baptist Church and ending in the Catholic faith, with stops along the way at Islam, New Age, and Masonry. There is nothing more fortuitous and impelling than his encounter with the Movement. The great thing is that his encounter with the Movement has already engendered a little community. The very first to follow him? His family, the same ones who after having introduced him to the Baptist Church have followed him into the Catholic faith and the encounter with CL.

I had planned to go see David even before he met us in person at the National Diaconia in Washington in January. We live in a huge country, and e-mail has become the daily means by which so many relationships spring up, become close, and many times turn into real friendships. These are the usual stories of “computer and liberation,” a term coined by Mike Eppler, another recent friend-phenomenon from southern Indiana. Thus with David, as had already happened with Mike, it all began via e-mail. But at the Diaconia in January in Washington, the curiosity that from the first contact had animated David was transformed into total love.

Thus, when on Saturday, February 16th, we went to the meeting point that David had indicated on the homemade flyer he had left in the barber shop, the school, and the parish hall, a small crowd of twenty people filled the room.

Why? Why does a person with good sense decide to accept the invitation to spend a Saturday morning singing and listening to stories about an unknown movement (“Movement? What’s a movement?”), whose very name sounds like challenge in a land where the Catholic Church is a reality that, albeit very vital, is quite small?

The real thing
This is where so many little big stories begin and intertwine, all of them born within twenty-four hours.

The first shock came at the end of the meeting on Saturday morning.

I was approached by a girl named Lucia, a college student who had found–who knows by what path–a flyer of invitation to the meeting on a table on campus. And she came. Lucia, that’s her name, said to me decisively: “I have been looking for years in the Catholic Church for something that answered my need for a faith that had something to do with life. I truly think this is the real thing.”

In short, you understand that so many other kinds of comments could have been made. Perhaps like, “It seems interesting to me,” or, “I need to understand some things better,” or again, “it is something that gives hope”… but what makes a girl–what is more, a pretty and intelligent one–say something like that?

But this is just the beginning.

“Dr Ed”
After lunch together, a little remaining group set out on a tour in the middle of the middle of nowhere (with all due respect… you know, I live in New York City…).

What is there in the middle of the middle of nowhere, on the border between Missouri and Kansas?

There is a Benedictine monastery, founded in 1870 or so by German monks.

And what is there in the Seminary that is part of the Monastery?

There is a certain Professor Eduardo Echeverria (“Dr Ed”) who teaches philosophy, using The Religious Sense! How did The Religious Sense get to the Seminary of the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Conception, Missouri?

I kept these questions inside me for a few days because, unfortunately, at the time of my visit, “Dr Ed” wasn’t there. But once again, e-mail enabled us to maintain that thin, tenacious thread that ties together in some mysterious way all this unexpected development of the Movement in the United States. Dr Ed had read something by Giussani in Communio, the international theology magazine edited by our friend David Schindler. “I was immediately attracted to Giussani’s work for one simple reason: his approach attempts to engage the whole man and the whole culture with the living truth of the Gospel who is Jesus Christ.” This is what Dr Ed wrote me a few days ago, adding later that “I considered Communion and Liberation to actually be an evangelical movement within the Catholic Church… its intellectual approach to the questions regarding God, man, and the world was engaging, existential, and dynamic rather than a mere academic system or dead intellectualism.” This is who we were supposed to meet in the middle of the middle of nowhere… I almost want to say, this is even why the middle of the middle of nowhere exists!

Three seminarians
But let’s go back for a moment to St Joseph. I was still half in shock at the “discovery of Dr Ed” when we got back in the car: five miles away, this time in the middle of the middle of the middle of nowhere, are some Benedictine nuns.

This is another beautiful monastery, but unfortunately there are few nuns left.

Oddly–as my new friends from St Joseph told me–the reliquary was open and we “had” to go look at it.

It was a huge room. There were three young men also in the room.

All of a sudden, one of the young men went up to one of our new friends and then came quickly over to me. He said, “Are you from CL?” I don’t know what kind of expression I had on my face as I said that yes, I was from CL. “So am I!” he answered decidedly.

Who was he? A seminarian from Evansville, on vacation in Missouri. I hadn’t had time to recover from this when he called his two friends over. One is a seminarian with the Benedictines, he knows Giussani because he has to study him! And then came the third one, and he really took my breath away. He said “CL? Please write down my name, address, and telephone number… I am a seminarian in Green Bay, Wisconsin… we have to meet!”).

These are the facts, and they are the facts of 24 hours of life in St Joseph, Missouri, where it seems that everything has been touched by the charism, where it seems that Giussani is at least as popular as Jesse James.

The next afternoon, I flew to Evansville… but I’ll tell you about this the next time.