Document

The Method of a Presence

We offer here the text of Fr Giussani’s contribution to the International Congress organized by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Congregation for the Clergy, ten years after the publication of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and held in the Vatican October 8-11, 2002. Extensive passages from it were published on the front page of the Italian daily Il Giornale on December 24, 2002

by Luigi Giussani

I - “Ego sum via, veritas et vita… The words of life (of everyday life), the living words can only be preserved alive, / nourished alive, / nourished, carried, warmed, warm in a living heart. / Absolutely not kept moldering in little wooden or cardboard boxes. / Just as Jesus took, was forced to take a body, to wear flesh / in order to utter these (fleshly) words and make them understood, / in order to be able to say them, / so do we, in the same way we, in imitation of Jesus, / so must we, who are flesh, take advantage of them, / take advantage of the fact that we are fleshly, to preserve them, warm them, nourish them in us living and fleshly.”1
The poetic genius of Péguy offers us a perspective for approaching the relationship between the catechism–understood as the book of the faith–and catechesis–understood as the overall ecclesial action of education to the faith.

1) The comparison with the birth and spread of the Gospel is crucial. It was never the mere proclamation of the content of a doctrine, but the proposal of an experience of life, within a human community, which certainly housed and preserved faithfully all the content of revelation, guided by the authority of the Apostles. The well-worded Council formula, gestis verbisque intrinsece inter se connexis (DV no. 2), has become a true reference for sifting the methods of transmission of divine revelation.2
Therefore, in the wake of Dei Verbum, it is necessary to value the methodological direction given by the General Directory for Catechesis when it maintains that “the disciples had direct experience of the fundamental traits of the ‘pedagogy of Jesus,’ and recorded them in the Gospel” (no. 140). With the encounter with Christ as a starting point, a “designated educative journey” is developed, “that, on the one hand… assists the person to open himself to the religious dimension of life, while on the other, it proposes the Gospel to him. It does so in such a manner as to penetrate and transform the processes of intelligence, conscience, liberty and action, making of existence a gift after the example of Jesus Christ” (no. 147). As a consequence, it avoids any “opposition or artificial separation or presumed neutrality between method and content… the method is at the service of revelation and conversion” (no. 149).
Thus, as a comment, so to speak, on these valuable indications given by the Directory, we can state that the Church is not so much the Truth as the method by which God gives the Truth to the world, and that, in this sense, the Church is the continuation in history of the Person of Christ.3 The problem that continues to arise for the Church will thus be that of living the method that Christ used. This method is no longer manifested through the search for meaning characteristic of natural religiosity, but in the encounter with a man, Jesus Christ, who offers to man’s religious attempt the opportunity to be fulfilled completely. Since the day of the Incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth, religious methodology has been turned upside-down: while earlier it was a search entrusted to man’s ingeniousness and initiative, now it is first and foremost a matter of obedience to an historically perceptible Fact. Ten years ago, presenting the text of the new Catechism, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger stated that “St Paul tells us that faith is the obedience of the heart to the form of teaching to which we were entrusted.” 4 For this reason, in the inevitable human search for an exhaustive meaning to everything, the encounter with Christ cannot be seen as the result of a study or an interpretation of ours, but presents itself as the evidence of an experience we have had. The encounter is not an intellectual construct, it is not a theory, but an ineluctable fact.
This is why we received, gratefully moved and with a sense of great responsibility, the words the Holy Father wrote to us on the twentieth anniversary of the pontifical recognition of our Fraternity: “Man never stops seeking... The only answer which can satisfy him and appease this search of his comes from the encounter with the One who is at the source of his being and his action. The Movement, therefore, has chosen and chooses to indicate not a road, but the road towards a solution to this existential drama. The road… is Christ. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, who reaches the person in his day-to-day existence. The discovery of this road normally comes about through the mediation of other human beings. Marked through the gift of faith by the encounter with the Redeemer, believers are called to become an echo of the event of Christ, to become themselves an ‘event.’ Christianity, even before being a sum of doctrines or a rule for salvation, is thus the ‘event’ of an encounter.”5

2) In the face of the re-presentation of the event of the Gospel of Jesus Christ for what it is–in the way the Church presents it, in particular in the liturgy and in all the other manifestations of her life–the educative indication that translates obedience is that of following. In order to understand the announcement of the Gospel, it is necessary to follow the human reality of Jesus, in accordance with the persuasive invitation that He Himself gave His disciples from the beginning of His public life–“‘Follow me!’ And he got up and followed Him”6–to the end. “Follow me!”7 For in the dynamic of the Gospel, understanding takes place only when recognition reaches the point of adherence, of loving the Presence that has been encountered. The Catechism makes this very clear when it states that the “whole concern of doctrine and its teaching must be directed to the love that never ends. Whether something is proposed for belief, for hope, or for action, the love of our Lord must always be made accessible, so that anyone can see that all the works of perfect Christian virtue spring from love and have no other objective than to arrive at love” (no. 25). This is the method followed by all the great evangelizers and educators in the faith.8

3) Transmission of the faith as a phenomenon of education can be structured according to the following factors:
a) Firstly, an adequate proposal of the past must be given, because without an adequate presentation of the past, the present has no context and is deprived of the richness of reality. The great word that expresses the testimony of the past is the word tradition.
b) This tradition, however, would remain unknown if it were not communicated within a present that is lived, within a reality that makes it present and lives it, emphasizing its correspondence with the heart’s ultimate needs–needs for beauty, truth, goodness, justice, and happiness.
c) And there is a third factor that should be highlighted: the call for an adequate proposal of the past would not be understood, nor would be the need for a life experience that makes it present, without the concern that all this be aimed at an education to a critical sense. Ours has always been an insistence on a critical education, capable of enabling the individual to compare the Christian proposal with his own heart and to say, “It is true,” or, “It is not true.” In this way, with the aid of a guided companionship, as time passes we take on the physiognomy of an adult.
We can articulate this integral educational itinerary for the individual in some pedagogical directives: first of all, the need to face one’s humanity seriously and live it consciously; secondly, becoming aware of the fact that our humanity alone is not able to find exhaustive answers, and that thus it has to live everything starting from the sense of our own dependence on something that goes beyond ourselves. Finally, we have to commit ourselves to acting in accordance with the Christian hypothesis in all circumstances, so that a personal verification of the encounter we have had may take place. The freer personal experience is, the more incisive it is, and it can thus become a stable mentality, that is to say, it can enact an effective transformation of a person’s reason and freedom to the point of offering oneself, where all of the “I” is synthesized in front of the You.

II - In the past ten years, the Catechism of the Catholic Church has occupied a special place in the process of the transmission of the faith.
1) The Catechism is a book of the faith, which makes readily available to everybody a synthetic, clear presentation of Catholic doctrine and offers an answer to the questions that can come to many Christians concerning the content of revelation. Thus, the usefulness of this instrument for the clarity of those who wish to be faithful to the Church is evident. On one hand, it works as a guarantee in the face of the ever-latent danger of particular interpretations on the part of individuals, and on the other it presupposes a guarantee also for the catechistic freedom of the Church in the face of the possible imposition of attitudes not concordant with the Magisterium.
In accordance with the divine pedagogy recorded in the Directory, the book of the faith must always be presented by a witness and accompanied by experience, so that the correspondence between content and method typical of Christian revelation may be grasped. Paraphrasing Emmanuel Mounier, this journey of faith, often initiated in the child’s relationship with his mother who introduces him to Jesus in an elementary way, has to be traveled patiently from milestone to milestone, according to times that cannot be set, in stages of the journey that are filled with joy because of the certainty of the goal: “It is from the earth, from solidity, that a labor and birth filled with joy necessarily derive… along with the patient feeling of the work that is growing, the stages that come one after the other, awaited almost with calm, with sureness.”9 “It is necessary to suffer so that the truth not be crystallized in doctrine but be born of the flesh.”10 The truths of the catechism thus become, through the witness’s flesh, not crystallized doctrine but the echo of a living event, of an all-embracing encounter that makes the incisive permanence of the Mystery of Christ in history possible.11
Whoever remains faithful to the sacraments and dogma, also through an intelligent and affectionate use of the Catechism, safeguarded by memory, can be facilitated in the recognition of the living Reality expressed by the dogmas through a personal encounter that comes about according to times and ways that only the Lord knows.

2. Concerning the doctrinal contents of the Catechism, we must still recall what authoritative commentators pointed out at the moment of its publication. The very structure of the text shows the primacy of the event of the grace of Christ, as divine free initiative, from which all the moral life of the Christian follows as a response in freedom to the gift of grace.12 Since the purpose of man’s life is to know the Father, the one true God, and the One He sent, Jesus Christ,13 the Catechism emphasizes a journey of introduction to living communion with Him, as the very core of faith and the beginning of all of Christian life.
Today, in this world wounded by so much misery, the proclamation of the inconceivable mercy of the Father, which is reflected in the face of the Son and is personally communicated to us by His Spirit, is extremely effective in the proposal of faith to God’s people. Just as Jesus was moved in front of His friend Lazarus and the widow of Nain, to whom He said, “Do not weep!”14 even before He raised her son, the Lord bent down to us when we were still sinners15 and called us friends, loving us to the end16 with a superabundance of life and forgiveness that initiated our happiness on this earth and opened to us forever the path to the gates of Paradise.17