Fraternity Retreat

Event of Freedom

Rimini, Italy, May 2-4, 2003. More than 26,000 members of the Fraternity for the annual Retreat, linked with 56 countries throughout the world. Images and excerpts from the lessons, homily by the Apostolic Nuncio to Italy, and final assembly

Most Rev Msgr
Luigi Giussani
On the occasion of the Spiritual Exercises of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation on the theme “Event of Freedom,” I wish to extend to you and the participants my greetings and good wishes, along with the assurance of my spiritual closeness. While I hope that a renewed experience, in reflection and prayer, of Christ’s freeing presence may arouse in each one the resolution to adhere more closely to Him and His Gospel for an ever-more incisive testimony of the event that changed the course of history, I invoke on all of you a copious outpouring of the gifts of the Spirit; as a token of this, I send to you and the entire Movement a special Apostolic Blessing, the sign of my constant affection.
Johannes Paulus II
Vatican City, April 28, 2003

His Holiness John Paul II
26,000 participants in the annual Retreat of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation in Rimini, and others from 56 nations of the world linked by videoconference, on the theme “Event of freedom,” thank You for the message You sent. Every time we listen to Your words, Your figure is present in our eyes, and our life is always completely stimulated. For this reason, we pray to God that the word of the Spirit may invest the personality of each one of us. Your recent encyclical on the Eucharist cries out to the world that the event of Christ is not a pious remembrance of the past, but a living presence that continues to be seen, heard, and encountered in the mysterious body of the Church, “placing a seed of lively hope in the daily devotion of each of us to our tasks.” The twenty-fifth anniversary of Your pontificate finds us more attached to Your humanity, from which we learn the certainty that the force of the Lord is the joy of His people. May she who “offered her virginal womb for the Incarnation of the Word of God in the physical reality of His Body and Blood” gladden Your days and sustain You in Your daily toil.
Fr Luigi Giussani
Prof Giorgio Feliciani
Milan, May 4, 2003

Attraction: Object of Freedom
How often we wake up in the morning, viewing the day as a piece of the adventure of the desire for happiness and good, and then we reduce the perception of things to a demand for convenience, and we make this convenience coincide with ease, pleasure, instinctivity, instead of following the greater attraction, trying to make it clearer to our eyes! It is a struggle. Our life is a struggle; not a losing battle, but a struggle, militia est vita hominis super terram.
This is why we need the strong call, the urgency of an education, equal to the size and depth of the struggle between men and the struggle within our lives–either conceiving of ourselves as free of the whole universe and dependent only on God, or free of God, and so slaves to every circumstance.
Fr Pino

Our Life Is a Struggle
Reality, creatures, are the way in which the Lord, the Infinite, What satisfies me completely, final perfection, Being as happiness draws me to Him, becomes present, is present as an attraction for my heart, continually reawakens the thirst for happiness in me, awakens the need for justice, truth, and love. The object of my freedom is this attraction, is this winning attraction, delectatio victrix, as St Augustine calls it. We are not afraid to say that reality attracts us, that reality is positive, that it awakens the urgency, the need to be satisfied. We share this need with everyone, we share this original experience with everyone.
Fr Pino