Letters

edited by PAOLA BERGAMINI

Wise and Ardent

“I rose to give you assurance that everything that is in you,
and was born with you, will not perish”

Sunday, October 29th, Giancarlo Cesana and his wife Emilia arrived in Paraguay, after spending two days in Rio de Janeiro with the CL communities and with Auxiliary Bishop of Rio de Janeiro, Filippo Santoro. Giancarlo and Emilia were celebrating twenty-five years of marriage. Cesana was going to take part in the “Happening” in Asunción.
Early Monday morning, they went to visit the Reducciones of the Jesuits in Misiones, accompanied by Giovanna Tagliabue, the leader of the Movement in Paraguay, and a young university student, Mario. Near General Delgado, a town near Encarnación, their jeep ran off the road and turned over. Emilia was killed instantly, Giancarlo broke his knee, Giovanna was injured but not seriously, and the same was true for Mario, who was driving.
Monday night, Emilia was taken to Asunción, to the parish church of San Raffaele, whose priest is Father Aldo. The friends in the community watched over her like her own family until the day she was brought home to Carate, Italy.
Emilia Vergani was born in Carate Brianza on November 6, 1949. She received her diploma in social work and her degree in philosophy from the State University of Milan. Married to Giancarlo since 1975, she had three children: Giovanni, Francesca, and Caterina. In November 1997 she founded “In-presa,” a social work cooperative operating in Carate to help young people at risk, a project very close to her heart. For years she took into her own home, temporarily, young people in difficult circumstances.
The day before the accident, during a meeting with Fr. Filippo, Cesana said, “Only Christ makes it possible for a man to say to his wife, ‘I love you forever.’ And talking on the telephone to his children as soon as he reached the hospital in Asunción, he said, “Mama was happy, she had enjoyed some wonderful days; she was pure and ready to meet the Lord.”

To all the communities of CL in Italy and throughout the world

Wise and ardent: this is how Emilia’s life with her husband Giancarlo Cesana has been among us. They had gone to Paraguay at the repeated invitation of the enthusiast Giò (Giovanna, who started one of the most beautiful national CL communities).
A fatal car accident resulted in Emila’s death. The Lord had preserved her for her husband and children, and thus for all of us. Now may silence, which was so natural and deep in her character, more easily mark our wait for the final resurrection of Christ.
Let each community pray to the Lord so that Emilia will intercede for us that, while still on our journey, we may share in her purity and joy.

Father Giussani
Milan, October 31, 2000 

On the death of a friend, the creator and protector of works,
foremost among them Giancarlo Cesana

Emilia met her date with Destiny on the other side of the ocean, thousands of miles from her homeland and the little town in Brianza, Carate, where she brought up her children and where she generated so many children not in the flesh, but in faith in Christ. This Christ was the ideal for which she lived and shared with Giancarlo the sacrifice of a life totally dedicated to witnessing to friendship with Jesus, which is human happiness. A social worker and active in charity, she showed to those who, as we, were granted the gift of knowing her and spending time with her the affection and majesty of true friendship. She was the home where any evening you could find welcome and hospitality. She was the faith, the hope, the charity that generated works like In-presa, where Christianity was the flesh, the intelligence, the passion of a woman who took in, raised, and started in jobs poor young people whom the world talks about, yet refuses. There is no way we can say that you are no longer here, Emilia, for you are still here, more present than before. We cannot measure the time or the space that separates us from seeing your dear, beautiful face again. But we continue to say to each other “you” and we shall say it again one day more strongly than before. You, in the meantime, for the instant that remains to us, you who kept everything in your heart, hold fast to the life of God for all of us, your Giancarlo, Giovanni, Francesca, Caterina, and all of that companionship to the Destiny that you loved and served above all other things.

Luigi Amicone

Dear Giancarlo: When on Monday evening, in dismay, we went to your house in Carate, your daughter Francesca said to me, “You are a close friend of Papa’s; be even closer to him now.” Your children, the first great witnesses of the love between you and Emilia, are the ones most aware of what their mother meant to their father. In these many years of friendship, we have experienced, in the examples that you often offered of the meaning of the relationship with the woman of one’s life, with one’s wife, what God’s mercy has chosen to place next to you, always ready to acknowledge the work of God, the “flesh” of a true love. That Mercy which has brought us together in the discovery of our humanity, gave to you a face and a love, a “sign” for you and for all of us. This “sign” which is now “accomplished,” exalted your devotion to the history of the Movement whose leader you are to the world, and to us the brothers who, also in your love for Emilia, have shown forth the reasonableness of your “yes” to Christ. We want to be closer to you today, closer to your strength, closer to your limits, conscious of the fact that the truth of what has happened to you, that has happened to us, offers the opportunity for our relationship to become ever more “flesh,” as with Emilia, and thus a hope for the whole Movement. The encounter that we have had with the Christian event–the extraordinary nature of the relationship that each one of us has lived with Father Giussani, the beauty of a history that, lived together, has marked our hearts, even in our shame for our errors–demands that today we be witnesses in the certitude that God accomplishes great things, just as He accomplished in you and Emilia, who are for your children and for all of us the sign of the kind destiny that God has granted us through His mercy. We are all witnesses of a judgment on the world that is clear and simple; a judgment that Emilia knew how to bring about, tenderly, and in happiness for our friendship. Thank you, Emilia.

Antonio Simone

Now watching over you are faces of Indios and an air
By Mozart that sounds strange in those shadows
Far, far away from the house in Carate
Brianza, and just as far away now
Is your death, silent
In our hope 

Come back, Emilia, come back from every
Paraguay of death in your gesture
Of always being there, given to us
Never to vanish
In your being forever woman and mother 

Davide Rondoni