CHURCH

A New Citizen

Bassano del Grappa, Italy, June 7th. The “Comune dei Giovani” (Youth Commune), the work of Fr Didimo Mantiero, awarded honorary citizenship to Fr Giussani, in the name of an esteem and a friendship already expressed by the awarding of the 1995 Catholic Culture Prize

Edited by paola ronconi

The Comune dei Giovani (Youth Commune) of Bassano del Grappa granted honorary citizenship to Fr Giussani as part of the festivities for the fortieth anniversary of the association. The Comune dei Giovani was founded in 1962, thanks to the initiative of Fr Didimo Mantiero, at the time parish priest of Santa Croce in Bassano del Grappa. His aim was to give a Christian education to the youth and to develop their sense of responsibility by having them participate in the “self-government” of their free time and by helping them to form a real community by themselves, with real problems of culture, socialization, community collaboration, and money. By involving them in various activities, a friendship could be proposed to them that would become the opportunity for a human encounter capable of offering an answer to their real needs.

The Comune dei Giovani is organized like a real civic institution, with a mayor, assistant, and secretary; ministries and under-ministries of culture, social commitment, religious education, free time, finance, and structures. Citizens of the Commune are all young people, between the ages of 15 and 30, who choose to join and who share its aims.

It is structured on the model of a regular civic administration, with annual free elections of the mayor and the various ministers; bimonthly council meetings in which the mayor and ministers discuss the community’s various problems; fund-raising activities to support the life of the Commune; and administration of the resources by the young people themselves.

Among the Commune’s various activities (sports, summer camp, newspaper, theater, choir, aid to the needy, etc.), a prominent place is given to evangelical catechesis. In this, the young people are guided in a critical, systematic way to verify the truth of faith in their experience and to judge what happens in their personal and family lives and in society.

Since the Comune dei Giovani is on one hand a method of co-education among young people, and on the other an educative proposal on the part of adults, the presence of an educator is necessary. Until 1978, Fr Didimo himself filled the function of “chaplain” in the Commune, as a guarantee of the association’s fidelity to its founding idea. But in 1997, the Consiglio delle Opere di don Didimo [Council of the Works of Fr Didimo] was created, which plays the role of educator, while respecting the autonomy of decision of the Comune dei Giovani. It is made up of the presidents of La Dieci, the Scuola di Cultura Cattolica, and all the associations connected with the activity of the organization.

The Comune dei Giovani has granted honorary citizenship, among others, to Msgr J Paul Cordes, Professor Stanislaw Grygiel, and Irina Alberti.

Thus, in the Palazzo dello Sport in Bassano on Friday, June 7th, after talks by the current Mayor of the Comune dei Giovani, Chiara Torresan; Gianpaolo Bizzotto, Mayor of Bassano del Grappa; Sergio Martinelli, President of the Consiglio delle Opere di don Didimo Mantiero; and Gigi Bortolaso, Giorgio Feliciani read a message from Fr Giussani. Honorary citizenship was awarded also to Fr Primo Bertoldi, Fr Giancarlo Grandis, and Sergio Martinelli.

Dearest friends,
I am truly mortified at not being able to be personally present among you, so as to tell you how much your decision to grant me honorary citizenship in the Comune dei Giovani moves me and fills me with gratitude, within the awareness of my limitations offered up with gladness to the Lord.

Your gesture strengthens the mutual bonds of this friendship that is for me one of the most meaningful gifts the Lord has chosen to give my life, for Fr Didimo’s children are among my dearest friends.

The Comune dei Giovani, born forty years ago out of the splendid insight of that extraordinary figure of a priest, Fr Mantiero, today represents one of the most beautiful and meaningful examples of the reasonableness of the Christian experience as something able to have impact on and to move all that is human, corresponding in an unforeseen and fascinating way to man’s inescapable thirst for happiness.

This experience of reasonableness and freedom, as I tried to reiterate in my book L’uomo e il suo destino [Man and His Destiny], is lived by you, faithful to Fr Didimo’s teaching and insight, as an inexhaustible openness to reality in its varied aspects, outstretched toward the verification of the truth of the Christian ideal, wellspring of a new humanity. Moreover, I am struck by the profound consonance of your attempt with the concept of education that has moved my life with so many generations of young and not-so-young people in all these years, from my first steps at Berchet High School in Milan. It is born of wonder at the encounter with Christ as an all-embracing event that has impact on man’s life today, just as it did 2,000 years ago on John and Andrew’s lives. The discovery of the exceptionality of this Man moves all of existence and generates a new gaze on reality so that we can recognize, through the fleeting face of things, what St Paul states: “In Him all things consist” (Col 1:17). Being introduced to the meaning of the whole of reality in all its constituent factors is the fascinating discovery made by the individual, lived as an educative adventure within that locus of friendship and passion for the destiny of each person that is the Christian community. I am grateful to Fr Didimo for what he has brought forth, “a real fraternity that,” as I wrote in the preface to his recently published Diari [Diaries], “through the discretion of the Ten is the soul of your Comune dei Giovani and the Scuola di Cultura Cattolica, works which speak to everyone of the beauty of the Christian life, and which arouse in those who approach them a sense of wonder as in front of something great.” Fr Didimo, with his whole life, reminds us that the root of this beauty and this greatness is sacrifice lived as a condition for affirming Christ’s Resurrection, fount of salvation for every man, in the life of the world. “He died for all,” said St Paul, “so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for Him who died and was raised for them” (2 Cor 5:15).

Joyously accepting your welcome into your community, following in the steps of so many illustrious citizens, I feel forcefully surging in my life the essentiality of St Paul’s call, which I share with you as the clear awareness of “why” we consummate our existence: for Christ.

In sending you my greetings and thanks, please allow me to repeat what the Marquis of Posa, the tutor of Charles V, said to his pupil: “Sire, never forget the ideals of your youth!” Your friendship in the Comune dei Giovani is the locus in which to keep alive and renew constantly your consciousness of the originality of man invested with the Presence of Christ and made one with Him in Baptism. The nobility of the Christian person, as I recalled on the for me memorable evening of the Catholic Culture Prize on October 6, 1995, lies in the living consciousness of having been sent by Christ into the world of his brothers, all equal at the starting line and all destined to the same final goal.

Obeying serenely the circumstances that Christ asks of me, I wish, along with my friends, to share with you the yearning task of this testimony through aware gratitude for the miracle of our friendship and unity in the maternal bosom of the Church, which make evident to the world, through the poverty of our existence, the human glory of Christ in history.

Thank you!
Fr Luigi Giussani
Milan, June 7, 2002