Dear Father Giussani, looking at the Easter poster and the Holy Week liturgy, I thought about you often for the great gift of our priestly Fraternity, because serving in it I am able to participate in the great and exciting task of love for a charism so that God made man can be dramatically recognized throughout the world. Just as the heart of Christ opens on the cross and gives everything, down to that little bit of water and blood that remains, and is thus obedient unto death with a loving obedience that embraces everything of the other who is in front of Him, whether this other is that person so unredeemably closed within himself like Judas, or someone so young and torn apart as John, both of them keeping themselves more or less apart, or that gift of infinite humanity the Father gave Him, the Good Thief, so may this week which is truly holy be in imitation of Him. And then the Resurrection blooms like the fulfillment of the obedience of the cross, a miracle that also bears a sacrifice.

Father Paolo

Dear Father Luigi, a few weeks ago, one Wednesday night, I was on duty in the emergency room. Around three o'clock an ambulance came in, radioing ahead that it was bringing a patient with cardiac arrest. I waited for him with the resuscitator. When we saw the patient, however, we realized he was already dead. The orderlies told us he had been in an accident. We looked at him: it was a boy, 22 years old. His face was undamaged, his eyes open. I couldn't believe it. The sight of that face upset me terribly, I couldn't take my eyes off it. We thought about his family who were being notified by the police. The father, mother, and 29-year-old brother arrived. They understood immediately what the situation was and burst into anguished expressions of grief. I understood that what I was witnessing was the height of human pain: a son whom you said good-bye to that evening as he left the house in a happy mood, and now... you won't see him again, you won't be able to tell him… he won't come back. Cries, phrases at times fragmented, at times tremendously logical, desperation. Then at a certain point even that strength fails, and an impotent silence falls. No words are sufficient. However, I could sense that my task was not complete. I sat down with them. I wanted to live this enormous void with them. In these moments-I had already been through others like them-you can't help thinking of your own happiness, what you have been given as a pure gift-my wife, my children, my friends. At a certain point in that heavy silence a certainty, an evident fact grasped me: it is certain that the Lord, made flesh in human history, wants to be present also in this moment of pain. This family's drama is a place where He will set up his tent. However, He has only one concrete possibility to do this: me. Christ has chosen to manifest himself by a concrete sign, a living sacrament, which is the Church. And in that moment I was the Church, not because I was especially deserving or capable, but by His grace.
There together we said few words to each other. Small gestures came to me spontaneously: to take their hands, put my arm around their shoulders, hold them while they cried. It was very little, but I am sure that it was only a beginning. The Lord will not deprive them of His companionship. Various times in the following days, also in banal circumstances and relations, I thought again that I was there to be the Church, thus to give Him the chance to be made flesh and in this way available to all to meet. He, the Meaning, the Destiny, mysteriously and fully present in every moment in which… "Here am I, the servant of the Lord."

Walter

Dear Father Giuss, dear friends, I have been wanting for a long time to write you these few lines to tell you about what I am living and wanting more and more. For years I have been immersed in this companionship which every day in every moment recalls me to the ultimate meaning of everything: to live every day the memory of Christ. At work, at home with the family, with friends, in the circumstances which at times can cause bewilderment, and with the ever present awareness of being a sinner. If this companionship were only for saints there would certainly be no room for me. But within this companionship I am learning how to become saintly. For years I have been learning to appreciate more and more what I have encountered, knowing that the more time passes, the higher the risk of an autonomy claimed as a pretext. Thanks be to God, the Fraternity is the place, the call to belonging, to what comes next, to pardon. I was struck by the article in la Repubblica ["We are Jews" in Traces-Litterae communionis Vol.1, No 1, 1999, p.1], which highlighted the theme of "the people." I feel this theme deeply and urgently. To build the people. I must say that I am very materialistic, maybe because a large part of my work is dedicated to union activities in the firm where I work, and this leads me on one hand to know what the problems are, and on the other, to live them first-hand. Thus when I think about "the people" I think concretely about men and women who live, build, create, and leave a mark on history. For this reason I decided about two years ago with other friends from Brugherio to take up again more seriously the activity of the Solidarity Center. Even with hundreds of difficulties and a thousand problems we set ourselves to the missionary task of being present in the town with a work that had as its image not only the club building but our faces and our history. Today more than ever I realize what it meant for my father and his friends to build places where they could be "Catholic men."
I have breathed the of these places, and I want my children and their friends to have these places and these chances. To build, to create the people means for me today to attempt to build and create places where whoever meets us encounters a life where "sharing life's needs means sharing life's meaning." I realize that it is not easy, and the Pope's appeal becomes ever more urgent: "It is necessary for the daily to become heroic, and the heroic daily." Then, even delivering the Bank of Solidarity's packages, manning the jobs window, cleaning "Il Circolino" [a social center], the work of AVSI, are not "tasks" but are "flesh of our flesh," are life itself. If I limited myself to a "task" I would risk giving even less dignity to time itself. Mother Teresa did not "do a task," Mother Teresa loved time, doing.

Carlo

Clara, from the Memores Domini house in Sesto San Giovanni, died on March 18th, at the age of 57, after a liver transplant. She was one of the people who had been with Memores Domini the longest (since 1971), as Father Giussani said in his comment at the news of her death: "Claretta is one of the simplest, purest, most limpid figures in the metaphysical sense of the term, most humble and most generous and oldest of the Gruppo Adulto"
Dear Adriano, I wanted to let Father Giussani know that his inspired words at the news of Claretta's death are perfectly confirmed by the experience that God has granted to so many in her circle. Claretta chose to die in my arms, and the Lord gave me the strength to sustain her in that terrible half hour between the terror and peace, before a coma set the seal forever on the treasure of this creature. Claretta had become the "story" incarnate. No one ever heard her say the same empty phrases over and over again; by God's grace she was incapable of that. But the two or three things that are simply the essence of the charism with which God had associated her, these were the framework of her thinking and above all of her being: loyalty, obedience, offering. She had understood that the Movement was nothing but the coming together of existential circumstances which favored the trial of sacrifice and thus true devotion, the only devotion possible for the charism. When she was forbidden to participate in the retreat, she obeyed. Obeying was a sacrifice, sacrifice was an act pleasing to the Lord and thus immediately beneficial for all her beloved Gruppo Adulto on retreat. This was the way Clara reasoned. Here is what she wrote to me: "… now since I am the first there in Udine, they tell me to be ready, to stay alert. I try to understand these words they say to me concerning my illness, and I ask the Virgin to lean this way: to be in every moment awaiting Him, with lighted lamp. It's not a waiting for something, but He Himself who enters into the situation. Jesus always comes through Clo or through priests, friends, nuns." The telephone call from Udine that ordered her to leave immediately found her meditating on the Traces pamphlet, "Through the Work of Another". She just barely had the time to write these words on the back: "My life is God's mercy, thanks be to Jesus and may He forgive my sins. Jesus I want to be yours. Into your hands I commit my spirit. You know what is best for me.
Thank you for the saints you have placed around me." In her last lucid and terrible agony, the force of evil was defeated only by her renewed certainty that love for Jesus had matured to the point of offering herself, not as a feeling, but as a response to the preference she was shown in the act of Baptism. This is what she wrote to me: "This is precious time. Patience is making me reflect and making me thank the Lord for His patience toward me and His mercy and tenderness that certainly do not fail me. The presence of friends, knowing that they are praying, these are just the visible signs of His presence. He did not ask for either holocausts or sacrifices, and so I have said I am coming."

Father Villa