1970: Open Letter to the Western Christians

Brethren you presume to be useful to God's kingdom by taking on as much as possible: the saeculum [the secular world], its life, its words, its slogans, its way of thinking. But, I pray, reflect on what accepting this word means. Does it mean perhaps that you have slowly lost yourselves in it? Unfortunately, it seems this is precisely what you are doing. It is now hard for us to find you again, to distinguish you in this strange world of yours. We probably still recognize you because in this process you are taking your time, since you do identify with the world, fast or slowly, but always late. We thank you for a lot of things, or rather, for almost everything, but in something we must differentiate ourselves from you. We have many reasons to admire you, this is why we can and must send you this warning: "Do not conform to this time, but transform yourselves by renewing your mind, so that you will distinguish what is the will of God, what is good, what pleases Him, what is perfect." (Rom 12:2)
Do not conform yourselves! Mé syschematizesthe! How well this word reveals the verbal, perennial root: schema. In a nutshell, every scheme, every external pattern is empty. We must want more-the apostle imposes this on us-'to change our way of thinking into a new form"-metamorfoûsthe tê anakainósei toû noùs. How expressive and plastic is Paul's Greek! As opposed to schema or morphé-a permanent form-there is metamorphé-a change of the creature.
Man does not change according to any model, which anyway always becomes outdated, but it is a full novelty, in all its richness (anakainosis). Not the dictionary changes, but the meaning (nous). No protest, desacralization, secularization therefore, for this is always little compared with the Christian anakainosis. Reflect on these words, and you'll be rid of your naïve admiration for revolution, Maoism, violence (of which you are not capable anyway). Your critical and prophetic enthusiasm has already brought good fruits, and in this we cannot condemn you indiscriminately. Only, we realize, and we are telling you sincerely, that we hold the calm and discriminating question of Paul in better esteem: "Examine yourselves, to see whether you are holding to your faith. Test yourselves. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?-unless indeed you fail to pass the test!" (2Cor 13:5)
We cannot afford to imitate the world, precisely because we have to judge it, not with pride or superiority, but with love, just as the Father loved the world (Jn 3:16) and because of this He pronounced His judgment on it.
Rather than phronein (to think) or hyperphroneîn (to think in circumlocutions), sophroneîn (to think wisely) (cf. Rom 12:3). To be wise enough to discern the signs of God's will and time. Not the catchword of the day, but what is good, honest, perfect.
We write, and are sorry to write this, precisely because there are some excellent ones among you who endure well in the faith, who do not run after the world's novelties; it is necessary to write foolishly, as the apostle St. Paul taught us when he repeated Christ's words, that the Father has hidden wisdom from those who know many of these things. (Lk 10:21)

In 1970 the great Czech theologian wrote a letter to be delivered to the other side of the Iron Curtain by two Italian friends.

BY ANTONIO SIMONE

All right, I confess, I've been a spy, and even more, a double-crosser, because I was at the same time a spy for the West and for the Communist countries. I took from the East and the West the most precious things they had and turned them over to others. In the seventies I made dozens of trips between Milan, Prague, and Warsaw. The Czech border was the most difficult: long and careful frisking, with problems taking in Bibles and books, managing only a few letters wrapped in cellophane and stuck into jars of jam. But we were full of the wish to meet our persecuted brothers in the faith, stuffed with the desire to tell them about the Movement.
If I had known that Mitrokhin's list [Mitrokhin is the name of a KGB agent escaped to England with a list of persons who were spys or spied by the Soviet Intelligence Service] would have raised such a fuss, I would have revealed it myself sooner! All of us spies knew about the training camps for Red terrorists on the outskirts of Karlovy Vary in Czechoslovakia. I had been to Karlovy Vary and people knew it, they knew about the presence of Italians. So for a number of years, in the mountains, participating in choir practice and various diversions, we managed to meet with our oppressed Christian friends, their spiritual guides, the then Cardinal of Krakow Karol Wojtyla, the Cardinal of Prague Tomasek, the theologian Zverina, who as a victim of persecution gave us a sublime lesson in his Open Letter to the Western Christians. How rich our history has been, thanks to Father Ricci, "Christian Russia" ["Russia Cristiana,"an organization started by Fr. Scalfi to promote an intrest for the tradition and the Church in URSS.], and us spies from the CSEO (Centro Studi Europa Orientale, Center for Eastern European Studies). Above all, it was the confirmation of the dimension of the catholic nature of our experience in the Movement, the encounter with all Catholics, Orthodox, Greek Catholics, the opening toward recognition, the passion of the Church outside the stricture that we felt was poisoning things in our own country.
But for all spies, sooner or later the day of reckoning comes. It was night, at the Hof border between the two Germanies. I was traveling with a friend (who is today a journalist for a leading national newspaper) and a mimeograph machine hidden (so to speak) in an old Fiat 128. For all the young Internauts and children of the computer age, I must explain that a mimeograph machine is that contraption which, if you cranked all night, enabled you in the morning to pass out flyers in front of the schools explaining your ideas, eventually getting hit by leftist students (maybe even D'Alema was one of them). The mimeograph machine had to be taken to a city on the border between East Germany and Poland; there "collaborationists" would take it across the river dividing East Germany from Poland and then, once we had reclaimed it, delivered to its destination in Poland.
The customs official did his job well and discovered the mimeograph machine, the alarm went off, the border was closed, and we were dragged into a bunker. They left us only for a minute, just long enough to wake up the other soldiers (who, given the hour of night, were asleep), and just long enough for us to dig out the addresses of the people we were taking it to, hidden among pills and medicines, and eat them like I had seen in spy movies on TV. After swallowing the compromising pieces of paper, we waited while they took our car apart and put it back together again, and then were interrogated for hours, etc.
Since that day, I was never able to cross a border into an Eastern European country until the days of the Polish pope: I was an uncovered spy, but don't worry, that night I didn't go to jail, for this I preferred to wait until the Tangentopoli investigations.

BY LAURA CIONI

July 1972. Once you reached the border between Austria and Czechoslovakia you had to go along a very long straight stretch imprisoned by barbed wire; every 100 meters the soldiers pointed their guns at the rare automobiles passing by. This was the first image of a country to which I had been bound in 1968 by indignation at the fate of the Prague Spring and my dismay for Jan Palach, but even more it was where Josef Zve?r?ína lived, the theologian and friend of Father Ricci and of others of us, relegated by the repression to Praskolesy, a little town north of Prague with just a few hundred inhabitants, left untouched by the wave of hope evoked by Dubcek. When, the three of us arrived, he took us in with his good-natured face and let us stay in his house, in a room divided by partitions: he was preaching spiritual exercises to a small group of elderly nuns who took care of the handicapped, the only service of love that was permitted them by the regime. Just a few old women would attend Mass every morning. This was the Church in that country.
I remember that speaking of these common friends, Father Giussani had said to me: "Tenderness is not flowers, tenderness is a trunk," and thinking again after so many years about the thread of friendship that has not been broken, not even by death, it is the tenaciousness of the communion of the saints. At the time we lived it with the enthusiasm and taste for adventure of young college students who felt they were part of something bigger than they were, a bit because it was in the air and a bit because among the cloisters of our university, the Università Cattolica, one breathed a refined air.
We had our problems, the seeking of our own paths, our studies that did not always go well, the identity of a university which was being lost more and more, the weakened voice of our teachers, the last gasps of the Student Movement that we didn't know how to stop. Father Giussani's presence among us accompanied us with discretion, in the main classroom where he taught us what the Church is and in the tiny room on staircase F where he received students; we did not perceive him as the head of a movement, but as a man so attentive to our life as a whole that he could even correct our early attempts at a newspaper posted on the walls, in which we analyzed the situation with eagerness to succeed, and he turned everything upside down, making us set forth above all who we were, thanks to the One who is present. Not a reaction, but the calm of a presence.
August 1976. We entered Poland on a Saturday night. We ran out of gas, but the few service stations were marked on the map and stayed open also at night, so two of us set out with an empty can along a tree-lined road in the middle of the country. Here and there were squalid bars where you could drink bad dark beer, and along the way we would see pairs of drunks.
We had been invited to know more closely the "Light and Life" Movement of Father Blachnicki, which met in a semi-clandestine building at a place in the middle of nowhere in southern Poland. We were put up in the house of some peasants nearby, for the sake of caution. We left there a few times to meet with Father Blachnicki. I remember his tall, austere figure and the fact that in the movement of the oases no one drank beer, but only cider, as an act of penance for alcoholism, the social ill of Poland.
We decided to go to Oswiecim, better known as Auschwitz; it was a leaden day with a low hanging sky. Here too were the barbed wire and barracks and miserable pallets and piles of hair and all the horrors we learned to know better from books and saw again in the movies. I remember that day as a great meditation on original sin: the last buildings we visited were the ones used for the gas chambers, and the only one in color, with horrendous frescoes in the Socialist Realism style, glorified the Communist liberation.
The eve of the Feast of the Assumption we went to Czestochowa and knelt, like all the other pilgrims, before the Black Madonna. Her sad air of absorption is linked to the image seen so many times at the crossroads of Polish roads, that of the pensive Christ.

BY GIOVANNA PARRAVICINI

The first attempts to lay a bridge between Italy and what was then the practically impenetrable Soviet Union date to the end of the sixties, when Father Scalfi undertook to drive across the country in his Volkswagen. This expedition was made up of two cars, who passed the official map back and forth so that the car without a map would inevitably get lost in some village. There, in the main square, with the hood of our car up (which could be counted on to attract a crowd of curious onlookers), we would start a conversation. The answers we got back were not very satisfying. "We went into space but we didn't see God, therefore he doesn't exist!" And, at the end of our trip, the customs officer told Father Scalfi openly that "if Russia hasn't yet made you sick, you should know that Russia instead is sick of you!"
So, for twenty years, Russia kept its shutters closed, without achieving great results, however, because in fact the exchange of people, books, and reports never let up, moving through the most diverse channels, from diplomatic bags to Russian language students. In the samizdat the texts of the Movement began circulating, seminars were organized periodically in which Italian friends participated together with the communities of young Russians brought together by the desire to find a real answer to humanity's question. All of this, naturally, took place in a climate of complete conspiracy: calling only from public telephones, to avoid as much as possible the ever-present microphones in the hotels and boarding houses reserved for foreigners; in the houses of friends, writing information and the most important facts and figures on pieces of paper that could be torn up immediately and, in any case, as a general rule, talking only with the radio on in the background, in order to "disturb the enemy as much as possible."
In July 1979, I myself became a part of this chain. A little group of seven friends, led by Father Fernando Tagliabue, set out as part of one of the many group study tours organized by structures connected with the Italian Communist Party (it was the only way to get into the Soviet Union). We were stuffed, under our clothes and in our suitcases, with "compromising" material: Bibles and religious books, rosaries, addresses and telephone numbers camouflaged in our agendas (every once in a while we masked them so well that even we couldn't reconstruct the original text!).
There we were in customs, suitcases, purses, and pockets of the group members were turned inside out: our throats tight, we passed along the note we had forgotten to hide from one pocket to the other - was it better to keep it in plain sight pretending nothing was going on, or to stick it under our clothes? And if they frisk you, will they understand you're doing something wrong? What is the best tactic? After a couple of hours of anxiety, we found ourselves all on the other side of the barrier, "in the fatherland," as Father Scalfi taught us to say, and we discovered to our great wonder that they did not find anything on us seven, while some of the others, young Communists at that moment somewhat subdued, had had taken away from them pornographic magazines and other "immoral and anti-Soviet" material.
The fact is, in the new world in which we found ourselves, where one had to be afraid if he or she even looked at a church too long (we were still a long way away from perestroika), where the morning classes were used to find out about you (where were you yesterday, who did you talk to, what do you do in your free time…), we learned immediately some fundamentals about reality that here can be breathed with the air: above all, that we have the wind in our sails, and that blowing on them is Another, the one who sent us all the way here; that chance does not exist, because everything that happens is an occasion that this Other has sent you; that every person you meet is a miracle, because in the widespread grayness and lies there suddenly bloom the flowers of truth and friendship, another world in this world.
In the summer of 1980 there was a turn of the screw: the friends whom we had met in the preceding years were all interned in a lager, because the regime had decided to clean things up in preparation for the Olympics. And one of them, Vladimir Poresh, answered the judge who had asked him rather dumbfounded, "But really, you have a family (his wife was expecting their second daughter), a good job (researcher at the university), couldn't you pray on your own, why do you want to create a community at any cost?" with these words, "Why? Because for me that was too little! We want the whole world!" A wonderful answer, which helps us to see that Christ is worth your life, and in the meantime for him it was worth five years in a lager and three in exile.
In those same years, our friendship grew deeper with Father Aleksandr Men. One day he would be known as the Apostle of Russia in the 20th century.We met this saint, we walked, laughed, ate together with him. The first thing that charmed you about him-when after great adventure you finally arrived at the little wooden church forty kilometers from Moscow where he celebrated-was the luminous smile with which he came to meet you, as though you were a precious gift, and you understood that this man truly saw in you something that you did not know, your limits did not matter to him because he went straight to the heart of the "I"-"I am You who makes me." He is "a man who leaps to meet us from the undivided Church," as one of his spiritual children defined him, a man who saw the positivity, the beauty, the agreeableness of all aspects of reality, who looked at it with clear, investigating, wondering eyes. Among the books we gave him, his favorite was The Religious Sense, so much so that he wanted to write the introduction to the first Russian edition.
May 1991. Perestroika had begun, and we had started sending the first translations of the Movement's books through the mail to a few dozen of our friends. All at once hundreds, thousands of letters started coming from all over the Soviet Union, unknown people who had found out, who knows how, that we printed Christian books and were asking us for them, and at the same time they asked us to help them live the Christian experience. One of the "hottest" spots was Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia: we didn't know a whole lot about it, except that there was a very enterprising young Franciscan there, Father Pavel.
So there I was on the airplane between St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk, only because at the last minute Father Scalfi had been refused a visa (the Wall had not yet come completely down). On the plane I found out-I hadn't thought about it before-that there were four hours time difference; that is, the plane would not land at 10 p.m., as I had thought, but at 2 a.m. The idea of finding myself alone at night in the middle of Siberia was not a pleasing one to me, so when at the airport I saw a Franciscan habit I ran to meet it. "But how did you ever recognize me?" asked the beatifically astounded Father Pavel, the only Franciscan in all of Siberia. And he took me home with him to a miniscule, sparkling clean parish house in the grayness of the city. The first things I saw, coming in, were our books on the shelves. Then the sensation that I was on the other side of the world which had gripped me until that moment was immediately replaced by the certainty that I had arrived home. I only stayed there two days, but they were so thick with meetings, with hunger for Christ, with pain for the humiliated humanity all around us, that while the plane took off I prayed with all my heart that the destiny of this people might be fulfilled. And once again, miraculously, a presence would come forth, from a "promised" land Siberia would become a "chosen" one.