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Christianity Identified with the Human It is Man Realized!

With what courage can one speak today of Christianity as the realization of man and of marriage as the act that gives most value to the human, as Fr Giussani did in writing about the Pope in the italian weekly newsmagazine Panorama (cf. Traces vol.5 N. 10 November 2003)?
We threw this question at Giuliano Ferrara, Editor of the Italian daily, Il Foglio, and Eugenia Scabini, President of the Faculty of Psychology at Milan’s Catholic University. Ferrara, the most secularist of journalists, replies, “Man as lord of the world is a humanistic mistake, but in Fr Giussani’s words addressed to John Paul II, he is something else: he is history and human condition looked at from the divine angle. A material divine… that announces the fulfillment….” The professor at the Catholic University stresses the words on marriage: “Long-lasting love between man and woman… is the most eloquent sign that man realizes himself fully through a bond with an other… This is why Giussani defines marriage as ‘that sacramental act that most values the human.’”
Then Aldo Brandirali, the former Maoist leader of “Serve the People,” (an Italian Marxist–Leninist party born in 1968) re-examines his political action, in the era of the collapse of ideology, in light of the reference to Christianity as the victorious mother of civilization: “My conversion… is coming out from the limit of the head bowed in penance and raises its eyes boldly in the awareness of this victory.”
In these pages, we also offer some letters from young people whose encounter with the Christian community has meant the fulfillment–as unforeseen as it was longed for–of the desire for a happy life, and the letter of a man for whom the positivity announced by Christianity has become a pacifying experience, albeit within an infinite pain.