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Education to Ecumenism

An invaluable contribution on the value of ecumenism in the experience of CL: A positive opening up toward everything and everyone, which takes form as a passion for the destiny of individuals and a love for all that is true in everyone, as a temporary but real reflection of Christ

BY JAVIER PRADES

From the very beginning of Communion and Liberation, the word “ecumenism” has been strongly accentuated as a crucial factor in Christian education, as Fr Giussani has conceived and proposed it to tens of thousands of young people.

Fr Giussani’s ecumenical attitude can be detected in all his writings, from Porta la speranza [Bring Hope] (Genoa, Marietti, 1997), which collects his earliest texts, up to the most recent, such as Generare trace nella storia del mondo [Generating Traces in the History of the World] (Milan, Rizzoli, 2001), as though to mark, in the span of all his production, the origins and maturity of his thought and experience.

When he speaks of “ecumenism,” he means, firstly, to designate the positive openness toward everything and everyone, which takes form as a passion for the destiny of individuals and a love for all that is true in everyone, as a temporary but real reflection of Christ. We could even identify here the key to understanding his educational and cultural position as well as his commitment within the Church. “The Christian term that expresses well its originality and cultural development in all its factors is ‘ecumenism,’ taken in its original etymological derivation from oikouméne. By this is meant that the Christian gaze is vibrant with a thrust that makes it capable of bringing out all the good there is in everything we encounter, since it makes us recognize it as part of the design that will be fully carried out in eternity and has been revealed to us in Christ” (cf. L Giussani, S Alberto, J Prades, Generare tracce nella storia del mondo, pp. 156-157). For in order to bring out the good there is in another, I have to love the good precisely inasmuch as it corresponds to the truth of Christ that I recognize.

Giussani’s fecund ecumenical and religious relationships find their place within this position, in the precise meaning that these terms have acquired within the Church over time. During the course of his life, Fr Giussani has kept up intense exchanges of thought and personal relationships with the Protestant and Orthodox worlds, but also with some important figures in Judaism and with the Buddhist monks of Mount Koya, to cite only some well-known examples.

A dimension of experience
Fr Giussani’s position attests to an originary reciprocity between the concept of education and the ecumenical attitude. Ecumenism is not a complementary dimension that is added to a previous conception, nor is it the doctrine which deals with a particular aspect of ecclesial reality. Rather, ecumenism is an internal dimension of the ongoing process of education in the faith as such. As John Paul II teaches, unity “is not something added on, but stands at the very heart of Christ’s mission. Nor is it some secondary attribute of the community of His disciples. Rather, it belongs to the very essence of this community” (Ut unum sint, no. 9). Man is adequately educated when he learns to recognize reality fully, reaching that mysterious openness which arouses an inexorable expectation. Reality, as a set of circumstances, activities, and relations, is the locus where the Mystery takes the initiative toward us in order to reveal its meaning to us and to ask for our total adherence.

A positive hypothesis
Such a concept of education pushes us toward reality and opens up to everything that exists, in accordance with an ultimately positive hypothesis, because it is through reality that the constitutive relationship between the Mystery and the individual “I” is existentially established. In order to become a mature “I”–and the purpose of education cannot be anything but this–each of us must “enter into reality,” in all its dimensions, to the point where man opens up and says “You” to the Mystery.

Historically, the singular event of Jesus Christ claims to reveal definitively, inside time and space, this good Mystery from which everything comes. Whoever has encountered Jesus of Nazareth recognizes the extraordinary correspondence between His gestures and words and the original demands of the human heart (cf. Mk 7:37 and Mt 7:29).

Belonging to Christ thus becomes the condition for being able to penetrate reality as far as its outermost limits, albeit in the enigmatic dimension of creatures marked also by the tragic consequences brought into the world by the disorder of sin–first of all, suffering and death. Ecumenism is born, then, from belonging to the singular event of Christ, inasmuch as He is the truth of life and history. The Word was made flesh, and in this way the truth was made a human presence in history and remains in the present. Where there is clear awareness that the face of Christ is the truth, something good is revealed in our looking at everything we meet. Fr Giussani states, “Ecumenism is not, then, a generic tolerance that can leave the other still a stranger, but is a love for the truth that is present, even if only a fragment, in anyone. Every time the Christian encounters a new reality, he approaches it positively, since it has some reverberation of Christ, some reverberation of the truth” (cf. Generare tracce…, p. 157).

Testimony
The category in which Fr Giussani synthesizes belonging to Christ as a foundation of reality and the free proposal to all men of the truth encountered is that of “testimony.”

In this way, testimony of the truth does not violate the freedom of another, but calls it forth. Indeed, it is only when provoked by reality, in its concrete conditions, that human dynamism is set in motion as reason and freedom. The condition for man to emerge and his humanity to develop is an intense relationship with reality, and in particular the reality of human beings. Anyone who discovers he is in front of a humanity rich in suggestions of meaning and affection will find it easier to become himself. On the contrary, the person who does not have a relationship like this with reality will find himself living his humanity at a disadvantage.

Testimony is the method that, albeit with the proper distinctions being made, essentially guides both mission and ecumenism. Certainly, ecumenical (and inter-religious) dialogue, strictly speaking, requires respect of the condition in which encounters and cooperation on various levels take place. On all these levels, a determining factor is always the submergence of oneself, through the working of the Holy Spirit, in the heart of Christ, wide open to everything and everyone. Nothing is excluded from the positive embrace of one who has encountered Christ. “If there is an infinitesimal amount of truth in something, I affirm it. Thus, a ‘critical’ approach to reality is born, in accordance with what St Paul says: ‘Test everything; hold fast to what is good’ (1 Thes 5:21), the beautiful, the true, that which corresponds to the original criterion of your heart” (Generare tracce…, pp. 157-158). The event of Christ is the true wellspring of the critical attitude, in that it does not mean finding the limits of things, but uncovering their value. This is the fullness of ecumenism.

(A more ample and exhaustive treatment of this topic is contained in the volume published by the Pontifical Council for the Laity and entitled Ecumenismo e dialogo interreligioso: il contributo dei fedeli laici [Ecumenism and Inter-religious Dialogue: the Contribution of the Lay Faithful] Rome, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2002.)