Budapest, December 10, 1999. In the Great Hall of Peter Pazsmany Catholic University, among the stuccoes and Art Nouveau decorations from the early twentieth century, emerge some strange patches of color and words. They are the panels displaying the CL posters for Easter and Christmas of the last few years, placed there as backdrop for the event that is about to happen.
The Movement arrived in Hungary when the Iron Curtain still existed and party control was total, despite the so-called "Goulash Communism," which made it seem a little more attractive than elsewhere.
Some CLU (CL university) students came here fearlessly to study or to make contact with the Catholics who were in hiding and were trying to survive the ideological freeze. Thus, little by little, they met the first people with whom they spoke of their own experience, their faith, School of Community, and that Lombard priest who was at the root of their stay there.
That hidden network of relationships resisted and lasted over time.
Today, finally, the Hungarian translation of The Religious Sense is being presented officially, in the series issued by Vigilia, one of the country's leading publishers. The series already included texts by De Lubac, Von Balthasar, and Ratzinger.
The text, like other shorter ones by Father Giussani, had already been circulating for some time, but in typical samizdat form, typewritten, photocopied, and transmitted according to need: in some way or other School of Community had to go on!

A proposal for all
Everyone was there: the first ones to have met the Italian students but who had drifted away over time; colleagues from work, curious about a new book by an Italian author; young people who don't even know what their country was like under Communist dictatorship.
Speaking at the presentation were Peter Erdo, Rector of the Catholic University, Bishop of Puppi and author of the preface to the book; Father Luigi Negri; and Miklos Blanckenstein, one of the first to have met the Italians in Budapest and now Director of the National Pastoral Institute.
Introducing the program, Tomas Nemeth, leader of the Movement in Hungary, said, "Our actions today might seem important and meaningful only within our community. Why then did we think it was important to invite all of you? Because we feel that in the Church every charism speaks to everyone, and today we want the charism of Father Giussani and the life experience that has come out of it, and that allows us to live, to be encountered by all."
In the stucco-decorated hall rang the words we love to hear, emphasizing the essential nature of the movements to the life of the Church itself, and vice versa. The rector said that Father Giussani's catechism is not based only on traditional concepts, but on his personal experience as a teacher. Discussing the book, Monsignor Erdo showed that the era of rationalism, that is to say, the time when man thought he could know a perfect world and eliminate faith as superstition, seems to be over. The failure of this thought is evident, and for this reason the importance of faith is growing. Father Giussani's book is meaningful, according to him, also because it presents the truth in Christ, overcoming the relativism now in fashion.

The right perspective
In his speech, Blanckenstein put the accent on what, in the gray social and ecclesiastical torpor of Hungary in the 1970s, had awakened interest in real people, corresponding over time to the deepest needs of the heart.
Father Negri went into detail about the book's contents, saying it "reproposes the lines of an adequate understanding of man as a religious demand, which opposes a centuries-old process that has constructed, on the elimination of religious demand, an ideologization of life. Thirty years ago, Father Giussani prophetically indicated the outline of a rigorous summing up of the anthropological and cultural experience of modernity and at the same time the outline of a possible and real way out of this crisis. The way out consists of a reproposal of the demand for meaning as a definition of human ontology and a movement of man's intelligence and his heart." In conclusion, he said, "Thus we retrace the path that goes from man to God and we prepare for the encounter with Christ, in whom the religious sense has found its final and insuperable fulfillment: the presence of Christ, definitive revelation of God and communication of His life to man. Father Giussani wrote The Religious Sense because he is a great Christian. In fact, only a mature faith allows one to turn toward man and to bring into focus all that nostalgia for truth, that is, for Christ, which constitutes the profound substance of the human heart, what the Pope has so often defined in an Augustinian way as creative restlessness."