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The Entreaty for the Supreme Awareness of Being that Touches the Believer
Notes from the concluding address to the Responsibles Assembly of Communion and Liberation. Milan, November 4, 2003

by Luigi Giussani

Pardon me if I use this occasion to make the most of your availability and to feel concretely the identity between my personal history and the personal history of each one of you, revealed in the testimonies you have given today.
Because–I can say it–what Fr Pino has done just now is great, as he tried to clarify how the Church becomes the great presence through which Christ penetrates our way of reacting to reality, of becoming aware of reality, of reacting to it and in it. The Movement has never heard an address as clear as Fr Pino’s today. So I am thankful to God and to you, because this is only the fruit of an affection and an intelligence, of an intelligence and an affection surprisingly favored by the Lord. It is what permitted us to hear what we heard today, from the first intervention by Negri to the last one by Emilia, the words of the philosophy teacher from Puglia and those of our friend from Naples; but to explain my tone of gratitude today, I should have to dwell on all that you have stressed.
In the end, there’s just one thing that I want to stress insistently (because the Mystery, what is mystery, cannot be approached by man, unless with a pretension that in the final analysis becomes sour, and therefore useless). It is prayer–many times felt as mere devotion, as a merely devotional act, or as merely moralistic act; prayer: the entreaty to God to make Himself felt in our life. This is what we must ask of Our Lady: to be able to fill the background of our days. I say Our Lady because she was the first being in which the Mystery carried out His initiative completely, the whole of it, absolutely all of it.
I thank you for the example you have given me today, and I hope to have even more of it in future. Thank you.