Why Do We Gather Together? To Free
Ourselves from Evil. The One Who Frees Us Is Christ
50,000
pilgrims gathered from all over Italy and from abroad to take part in the 25th
annual
pilgrimage from Macerata to Loreto, organized
by Communion
and Liberation. As always, Msgr Vecerrica, recently appointed Bishop of the
Diocese of Fabriano-Matelica, led it. Mass was celebrated before the start
of the pilgrimage by Cardinal Ruini, calling upon “Mary, Our Lady of
Mercy.” Following is the text of Fr Giussani’s message
When we get together,
why do we do so?
So as to tear out from our friends, and if it were possible from the whole
world, the nothingness in which all men find themselves. Ours is a “vocational” relationship.
A vocational relationship is just this: that on meeting us, and it can be
even your mother–or rather, first of all your mother–or any woman
or man, someone your own age or younger, a person, feels sort of grasped
in his
innermost self, redeemed from his apparent nothingness, weakness, evil, or
confusion and, all at once, feels as if invited to a royal wedding.
Our Lady is like a royal invitation.
And the more you are willing to acknowledge that you have been grasped, the
more you discover this degree of feeling your own heart and your own flesh,
and beyond this your own thought as heart, as flesh, as soul of the whole people
in which the individual is caught up, in pain and confusion, but never so forgetful
of self or so incapable as to lose oneself and forget oneself completely. And
in the worst moments–when the “I” seems to become certain
of its impotence and nothingness–it is precisely there that the blood
in which the people is born, even to the point of violence, becomes the vehicle
of one’s own need for desire, for freedom, and for happiness.
“
As for you, little child, you shall be called the prophet of God the Most High”:
this prophet of God the Most High is no longer left in peace by that passion
for life which forces man to be born, to look, to listen, to hunger, and to
thirst.
Work is time that becomes things, commitment, and daily toil, because it is
going ahead of the Lord “to prepare His ways before Him,” the ways
of the new land for a people that is really a people.
How do all these leaps of the soul become unbridled celebration of a new life,
a being born as new persons?
In the ups and downs of life, in which every man, in his aridity, feels suffocated,
but not cancelled, even by an injustice at work, there is a figure that comes
to our aid.
The figure of Our Lady is the vehicle of novelty, before which the old no longer
dare say, “Down with everything.”
We have to remember this invitation every morning. This has to be the first
figure, tomorrow morning, of every attempt, of every re-elaborated, every re-lived
security, like the reconstruction of a people: we have to imagine Our Lady
imbued with that passion for things human that a reconstruction sanctifies.
“ You shall go ahead of the Lord, to prepare His ways before Him.”
And thus human life is no longer a lack of something our limbs are striving
for, offering inexplicable reasons.
May the thought of Our Lady and the human affection which carries and intensifies
it make us every day capable of enchanting charity.
Fr Luigi Giussani - June14,2003