The words of Fr. Luigi Giussani. Smooth, polished words that are punctiliously precise, for "words," says the Founder of Communion and Liberation to the journalist interviewing him and hoping to grasp his life itinerary and his judgement on Italy, shaken by a hurricane of unforeseeable changes, "have a value." A value with an etymological and philological foundation of its own. Therefore, the words on politics of the founder of an ecclesial Movement which had intense and uneasy relationships with the Italian politics of the First Republic, starting from its now dissolved "secular" arm, Movimento Popolare, are measured and pondered words. For instance, the word "integralist", commonly used by the papers for a Movement like Communion and Liberation- which has certainly aroused furious aversions-causes a smile from Fr. Giussani ("they are forced to talk rubbish" escapes him in a good-humoured moment.) Whereas it is the word "event" that is a crucial one for this 72-year-old man, who, from the times when he taught students in the Berchet High School of Milan, has made the central "event" of the "Christian Fact" the horizon of a forty-year-long cultural experience. Words. And judgements that touch political and judiciary Italian issues to the quick.

Do you think that the end of political unity of Catholics is a good thing?
I don't know if it is a good thing. It is a fact, perfectly foreseen by the Church's authority and foreseeable in the fact of the freedom of the Christian conscience. However, if the unity that Catholics maintain as an object of faith -as members of the one Body through baptismal communion-were to be realized also at a socio-political level, it would nevertheless be a comforting example for human society, wherever one's sympathies lay. A unity in function of the Church and not of a political party or a faction. The Pope repeated this at Palermo, and during the Te Deum on December 31st.

Don't you feel that you are better guaranteed by a Christian person in Government?
No, I don't. The problem is a sincere dedication to the common good and a real and fully adequate competence. There can be a Christian person tied up with ecclesiastical problems whose natural honesty and competence may leave room for doubts. I'd rather it were not so. As, in my opinion, it is not so with De Gasperi, La Pira, Moro and Andreotti."

You often use terms like "humanity" and "justice." Why is this? Do you have the impression that we are heading toward more human and just world?
Our point of view is to offer the method for the answer. But no method can face these two words, humanity and justice, with a meaningful approximation to the truth. To begin to understand words that are a sovereign indication of what is most worthy in man's and society's experience, man needs to participate in an event. In such an event the meaning of these words is at play in a dramatically naked way, with a shiver of loneliness and within a horizon that is always inadequate. After everything is taken into account, there is always something definitively enlightening and important missing: there is always a "something more" missing, whereby the more man remembers the needs that synthesize these words, the more the event to be looked into and to be listened to corresponds to the "something unexpected" of which Montale speaks. The content of the event is an encounter (in the banal meaning of the word) with an integrally human reality, just like when, along the road, one meets one's old teacher who says good things: good things about humanity and justice. That which the Hebrews awaited throughout their history and which only a small minority would acknowledge when it happened, must happen. This is why we live a sorrow for the Hebrews, even before a form of gratitude for what happened.

"Justice". Yet in Italy this word is almost a synonym of a "judiciary revolution." What are the consequences of this superimposition?
A tiny section of the whole people sets itself up as the enlightened teacher and the judge of everybody. This is the characteristic concept of every revolutionary attempt. Hence derives the superimposition of one "class" over the whole people, the exasperation of a detail that creates in the people the image of the magistrate as the "pure one" by nature, as happened for the Cathars and Albigeois teachers. It is the fanaticization of a detail, so that laws which the progress of civilization has devised precisely to safeguard the action of this detail in relationship to the usefulness of the whole are easily overlooked. But the exaltation of a detail makes man forget the rules: the rights of the person, and almost every sentiment of pity, are nullified, making idols of the actors on the stage. No. All of this does not annul the need for enquiry and for punishing the culprits. To have carried out this task, albeit improperly, is the useful contribution of the representatives of this "revolution."

Yet you have hinted that the "judiciary revolution" heralds serious disasters. Why did CL invite people to pray to Our Lady of Loreto and the Patron Saints of Italy for the salvation of our country?
The situation is serious because of the total loss of a natural, objective point of reference for the people's conscience, which could push the people itself to look for the real causes of the malaise, and to save itself from the idols. This loss involves an unavoidable-if not planned-destruction of wellbeing, which is thus totally undermined in its own peaceful making. For, start again we must!

Do you maintain that this sentiment is shared by the young people with whom you have been in constant touch since your Berchet High School days?
Today's youth come from a historical trajectory in which culture is more standardized as a revolution than as a deeper discernment of the causes of things. This is why they find themselves weaker in front of the scenario of events: they are more humanly insecure. But their need for the truth is instead fleetingly sharpened. Just like the masses of Bosnian and Yugoslav children that seek homes. Today's youth don't know what the truth is, for no one tells them and no one engages them in a journey that has a positive aim. Education has lost credit, so that skepticism, negative irony, and insufficient trust transform the most impassioned human activity, namely education, into "dust in the wind" as Psalm 1 says.

Concerning education, what influence did the relationship with a father who was a fervent socialist have on your formation?
When one has a father who asks his child on holiday from the tough Seminary routine: "Have you given yourself the reasons for all you attempt to define and do?", a father who continually drew an accent of moving humanity-one apparently more persuasive than the traditional one-from his impassioned, juvenile yet stubborn discipleship to the "new humanity" of the Turatis and Kulisciovas, then the participation in a new proposal that attempted to upset everything made the one listening more of a son, and grateful for an education through which the implications of life flourished. This is why we maintain that education is a continuous introduction into the discovery of a meaning of reality, that is, of the truth.

You have always encouraged those who wanted to express their political commitment. Which mistakes would you suggest avoiding today?
Any lesion either planned or permitted to the freedom of the person. Or tolerating any limitation posed to the creativity of the individual, of the individual groups, or of the unity of the people. The limitation in this is the aware and responsible acceptance of the conditioning in which historically the freedom of the individual is put by the freedom of the others. Freedom as it is traditionally understood is conditioned by the category of possibility, into which flows the care for the choices of others. The ethics of democracy implies this.

Whenever you think of politics you insist on the idea of the people. Why, what is the people to you?
A people is born of an event, it is constituted as a reality that wants to affirm itself in defence of its typical life against those who threaten it. Let's imagine two families on palafittes in the middle of a flooded river. The unity between these two families, and then of five, ten families, as the generation grows numerous, is a struggle for survival, and, ultimately a struggle to affirm life. Unconsciously they affirm an ideal which is life. So people who say they refer to a people think of life as inexorably positive. Through my rationally committed knowledge of the life of both the individual and society, these conditions of the idea of the people touch the apex of conception and actuation in the announcement of the Christian Fact, in which we find the fulfillment of what has qualified the great ethos of the Hebrew people and its tension to change the earth throughout its history. The chief Rabbi, Toaff, in his latest book, says that the Christians wish to take men to heaven, the Hebrews wish to bring God to the earth. But precisely because of this we feel them to be brothers. I dare to say this, because it is the same term Paul Elkann used in a thanksgiving note to a condolence telegram we sent the Israeli Premier for the murder of Rabin.

With the end of Communism, the Church has aggravated her criticism against the "hedonistic" and "materialistic" model of the West. Yet hasn't "anti-communism," the criticism of political totalitarianism, been perhaps one of CL's pièces de résistance?
Political totalitarianism can come in many forms: even that of a certain liberal democracy or unchecked capitalism or revolutionary intransigence barely camouflaged with every kind of arbitrary interpretation of the word "the people", as is done by some trade unions. At any rate, political totalitarianism must be grasped in its derivation from a cultural dogmatism.

Our country continues to define itself a "Christian" one. Does CL insist in affirming that in Italy Catholics are a "minority"?
True, real, authentic Catholics are a small minority. I speak of those who place the essential contribution of Tradition as the synthetic principle of life and of social relationships, and above all identify the ultimate aim of history as a whole (which comes before Apocalypse) as building the human glory of Christ in history itself, not through hegemonies sought at all costs, but through the enigmatic power of God.
The problem is, who leads. Yet a limpid exposition of Tradition comes up against the systematic opposition of the cultural world and of the powers-that-be.

Don't you think that the recent electoral failures in Poland and Ireland are born of the perception that the Churches of those two countries had transformed themselves into instrumentum regni?
I don't think so. In the original content of her proposal the Church is never defeated. She is the locus of an event of salvation which no human power will ever be able to substantially alter or eliminate. Eliot calls the Church "The Stranger" precisely because of her irreducibility to the world's patterns. Of course, the Church can be chastised and struck. But her strength, unlike any ideology or utopia, is that she is an indelible fact which carries the claim to influence history. Perhaps what is happening recalls Christians to the need to be faithful to the authentic nature of the Church. This is, on the other hand, what fascinates and should fill with enthusiasm every authentic Christian: to serve the Church of this Pope in all that we do, and no more. No, this is not enough. There is one thing to be demanded of the politicians who have remained honest: freedom of expression, and therefore of education, for the religious consciousness of an individual or of a people. Right from the first year when I taught religion in the Berchet High School I asked of the students: "Make us walk naked through the streets if you like, but you are obliged to let us be free to express and live our faith. Otherwise you would simply be against civilization."

(La Stampa, January 4, 1996)