CL in the world

A Special Quality of Friendship

On November 16th, the Vienna community met with Archbishop Christoph Schönborn. After viewing slides, listening to The Unfinished Symphony and some testimonies, the Cardinal spoke, tracing the history of a friendship, which started one evening at dinner with some students…

By CHRISTOPH SCHÖNBORN

Taking my cue from some of the things that have emerged from the various testimonies, I shall try to find a guiding thread common to them all. I would also like to talk to you about my own experience in this sense.

My first encounter with Communion and Liberation happened during a dinner–and this element, as you will see, is very important.

I was a guest at a dinner organized by a group of students in Freiburg, who lived together in a villa near the university. All I knew about them was that they were likable kids. During that time, I was teaching at the University of Freiburg, and I was tormented by numerous conflicts; I even risked losing my job.

In that house, I found a truly welcoming, pleasant atmosphere. The environment was very Italian, so to speak. A colleague of mine also lived with the students, Dr Corecco, a professor of canon law. I was pleasantly surprised to find a university professor and priest living with a fairly large group of students, living moments of intense communion with them, which I noticed especially during the dinner.

I had already heard of Fr Giussani and had read his books in the German translation by Hans Urs von Balthasar. I was not always able to understand them fully, as they are written in a very special language, and this still happens to me sometimes today.

But observing the life of those students, I perceived that there was “something” special there.

The first thing I noticed was a certain “quality of friendship,” which I consider to be a guiding thread also in my life.

I do not come from a very devout family; we never talked about religion at home. Through my friendship with a Dominican father, I came into contact with the Order of Preachers. The Dominicans became for me like a second family, which I often miss now that I sit on a Bishop’s chair and sometimes happen to think back to my days in the convent.

The experience of friendship with my individual confreres and the overall atmosphere we breathed in the community were very intense. After the Council there was a period of violent crisis, which brought about significant upheaval inside the Church.

It was at this point that I came into contact with the so-called “movements.” They brought to the Church a new authenticity, a rediscovery and deepening of the meaning of friendship, as I had experienced it in the order.

Thanks, too, to the encounter with CL, I became aware that this friendship has a face, that we have an irreplaceable friend, who is Jesus.

Precisely what we believed to be incredible becomes real: the Lord assumes a face, the face and heart of a human being. He speaks, makes human gestures, breaks bread, and on Easter morning addresses Mary Magdalene, calling her by name, “Mary!,” and she recognizes Him by His voice.

His gestures, His words, His voice, His face. As time passed, this would become for me one of the key theological themes.

I wrote my qualifying exam on the icon of Christ, seeking to answer the question, “Can the face of Christ be represented?” The American edition of my book is entitled The Human Face of God. In it is the incredible realization of a concrete friendship, which can take form only in the friendships that are born in His name.

Many years later, in 1991, when the Pope appointed me Archbishop of Vienna, I had to take long bus rides across Rome. I was in great turmoil about what was happening to me; I was about to become a Bishop. I lived in the convent of the Dominican Sisters, located outside Rome on the Via Cassia. This is why I had to travel more than an hour every day. During these long rides, the same phrase always came to my mind: “Vos autem dixi amicos” (Jn 15:15). During the Last Supper, Jesus says goodbye to the apostles, before His passion, with these words: “I no longer call you servants, because I have entrusted to you everything that I received from the Father; I will call you friends.” This is the point–“I call you friends.”

As I see it, friendship is the preponderant element in CL. Over the years, I formed many lasting friendships, such as with Eugenio Corecco, who died of cancer in 1995. He was a true friend, first as a colleague at the University of Freiburg and then as Bishop of Lugano. Or my friendship with Libero Gerosa, lasting many years; or with Angelo Scola; or with Michael Waldstein, which started in Rome, has become more solid over the years, and is a great gift for me.

If I had to define Christianity, I would call it “friendship,” friendship of a very special quality. Madeleine Delbrêl, a great Frenchwoman who lived in a Marxist city outside Paris and was a Christian very active in the social sector, left us some wonderful writings: “Lenin brought about the Russian revolution by systematically building a network of friendships, and one day he pulled in that net, setting off the revolution.” These were, however, friendships built on hate, relationships based on hate; a conspiracy of hate, so to speak. For Madeleine Delbrêl, Christianity is like Peter’s fishing net. The countless knots of friendship have a different quality from the net woven by Lenin.

CL is a revolution, too, but of a completely different kind. It is no coincidence that the Movement was born during the 1968 revolution. In some way it represented an opposite model, not anti-revolutionary–rather, in its way it was very revolutionary, because it proposed a “revolution of friendship.”

I would now like to go more deeply into the first of the four terms that I jotted down during the testimonies: trusting in reality. I believe that the fascinating thing in Christian friendship, in the friendship with Jesus, is its concreteness, its being something real and not an ideology.

As a student, I became familiar with the temptation of ideology. For a period I was intrigued by Marxist ideology, then by conservative ideology and reactionary ideology, which does not accept reality and lives instead in a sort of “apparent reality.”

We can understand this if we start from the premise that inside each of us, a great restlessness prevails, the obtuse restlessness of those who do not ask themselves questions and that easily leads to desperation or ideology. The unique aspect of Christianity is that it leads to a reality. Things take on a new savor; they finally have the savor and aroma that belong to them.

Beauty resides right where the friendship with Jesus prospers.

I am firmly convinced about another concept, which has made me reflect: commitment. Nowadays, we hear this word often. I believe that an unmistakable sign of a Christian community is the way it celebrates festivities. I am struck by the positivity with which the proposal to do or organize something is received: whether it is a party, an outing, or setting up a newspaper–the Movement, in my opinion, is a champion in the publication of newspapers.

I think that rarely are there magazines as well-edited as Traces and Thirty Days.

I believe that the sign of a world without faith is banalization; thanks to the force of faith, things emerge from their banality.

The consequence of this “commitment” is also a continuing effort to improve, to go beyond one’s limits; then everything becomes more fascinating.

And all this reappears in the concept of “mission.” I believe that the essential concept is found in the Acts of the Apostles.

Paul arrived in Corinth after having suffered heavy defeat in Athens. He had tried to show himself as an able man, citing numerous poets and philosophers and making a carefully prepared speech on the Areopagus. But everything went badly. Arriving in Corinth, a typical, not very refined port city, he had barely begun his activity when Jesus appeared to him one night in a dream and said, “Have no fear, I am with you; just speak, don’t be silent, nothing will happen to you, because in this city a great people belongs to Me.”

In these words, I hear a message for Vienna: “Have no fear, just speak; I am with you, nothing will happen to you, because in this city a great people belongs to Me.” He already knows how many people belong to Him and which ones still have to encounter Him. We have the task, so to speak, of contributing to the realization of what Christ has already prepared for us.