CL in Rome - Jubilee

For the Church, Our Mother

Cardinal Sodano inaugurates the new home of the Movement’s International Center in Rome, in the presence of bishops and ambassadors. Father Giussani’s message and a letter from John Paul II–an extraordinary gesture by the Pope

On Wednesday, September 18th, the new home of the Communion and Liberation International Center was inaugurated in Rome. Cardinal Angelo Sodano, His Holiness’s Secretary of State, presided over the gesture and blessed the rooms at the end of the event.
Attending, among others, were Bishops Crescenzio Sepe, Francisco José Cox, Stanislaw Rylko, Diarmuid Martin, Bruno Bertagna, Agostino Superbo, Karel Kasteel, and Msgr. Timothy Broglio. Among the Ambassadors to the Holy See, present were Yosef Neville Lamdan (Israel), Raymond R.M. Tai (Taiwan), Mark Edward Pellew (Great Britain), Alin Dejammet (France), Vicente Espreche Gil (Argentina), Mohammad Hadi Abdekhoda’i (Iran), Blanca Elida Zuccolillo de Rodriguez (Paraguay), Gustav Ortner (Austria), Teodor Baconsky (Romania), Husein-Fuad Mustafa Kabazi (Libya).
After a brief introduction by Jesus Carrascosa, head of the Center, a message from Father Giussani was read. Before blessing the rooms, Cardinal Sodano read a letter from John Paul II, sent to him for the occasion.

Greetings from Father Giussani to His Eminence Cardinal Angelo Sodano

Your Eminence,
I hope that the sacrifice of not being able to be present at the blessing of the International Center may lend even greater force to my prayer to Christ for the mission He has given us. It has been our desire that this International Center be set up in Rome in the Great Jubilee Year as a sign of our will to serve with all our energies the Church, Our Mother, in her ultimate structures, almost part of her sacramental reality. This is how we look to the Church, aware as we are that our heart belongs to Christ.
In this way we are urged to collaborate in the testimony which the Holy Father offers to the world today. To the Bishop of Rome has been given the greatest task in all history: to make Jesus Christ known to the world. What a great emotion it is to come upon the humanity of John Paul II, who is untiring in talking about Christ at work to the very marrow of man’s life!
Through a certain way or accent, the grace of the Spirit in us has made faith easier, more understandable, more persuasive and more creative, that is the acknowledgment of the great Presence that exists in the world ever since God was born of a young Jewish woman in Palestine two thousand years ago. And since that day, remaining within the channel traced by tradition establishes the sureness of the Christian journey.
For this reason, the authority of the Church is not a mere principle of discipline for us, but first and foremost the locus of our belonging to the unity that the Risen Christ brings about until the end of time: “Every one of you that has been baptized has been clothed in Christ. There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither slave nor freeman, there can be neither male nor female–for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal 3:28) 

On this occasion, through your hands, Your Eminence, we wish to place in those of the Pope our existence–frail and yet certain through the grace we have received–so that through the intercession of the Holy Spirit and the Blessed Virgin he may use us as an instrument for the human glory of Christ, testified by this miracle of unity with the man who is the successor of Peter.

Thus today, along with all the friends in our communities all over the world, I thank you, because your person makes Christ, and thus also the Pope, present to us. Bless us, Your Eminence, as a father does when he bends over his children at the end of the day.

October 18, 2000