Excerpts from the Homily of Archbishop Paolo Romeo, Apostolic Nuncio to Italy

Saturday, May 3, 2003

The Holy Father prays for you. The Holy Father keeps up with you, and there are many examples, many moments, many high moments of this reality.
Ever since the beginning of His pontificate, the Pope has wanted the name of Christ to be proclaimed and shouted out to today’s world…
“ Do not be afraid: throw wide the doors to Christ!”
Thus the theme of evangelization, of the commitment to evangelization has prevailed throughout his pontificate and prevails today.…
John Paul II has watched particularly, with special attention and esteem, the life of Communion and Liberation and its founder, Msgr Luigi Giussani, whom I would like to greet here and to thank in the name of the whole Church for being, in these fifty years, a transparent sign of the initiative of the Father, who continues to recreate His people in the midst of the peoples of the world.
John Paul II has manifested his closeness to Msgr Luigi Giussani on more than one occasion. I would just like to recall the long, important letter sent him by the Holy Father for the twentieth anniversary of the recognition of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation, and the more personal one, filled with affection, for his eightieth birthday. These are special signs not only of the Pope’s nearness, but also of his very high esteem for everything that Communion and Liberation is doing throughout all the continents, not only for the Church, but also for the men and women of the whole world….
I was told that the central theme of these days of retreat is the event of freedom. Such is man’s fulfillment, through steps that only God knows, through the opening to being which God put inside him by creating him, but which an infinity of contradictions–the biggest one being original sin–seems to impede.
The fatherhood of God, which never ceases to accompany man, arouses within his existence encounters that break through the clouds of extraneousness to oneself and the world. In this way, man overcomes the reduction of his desires; he comes out of the renunciation of living which in the end can constitute the tragic face of an age that should be the age of maturity.
Can our freedom be aroused? Is it possible–as Fr Giussani wrote in one of his texts–that man can have clarity and an adequate affective energy?…
We shall be satisfied, our nature as creatures will be satisfied only when we see Him face to face. This is where freedom lies. This is the great revelation of Jesus: the reality that man calls “destiny” has a face, it is a present human reality. It is a human reality through which God, binding Himself to it, reveals Himself, educates man, leads him to discover day by day–even through his weaknesses, defeats, and pitiful falls–the unstoppable fact of the merciful fatherhood of the Father.
This is the great promise, the great hope contained in this evening’s Gospel: “Whoever believes in me will do the works that I do, and will do greater ones than these.” For this mustard seed has to grow, this handful of men has to grow. Look at how many there are of us! Look at how many people!…
Fr Giussani wrote in an article published recently, “Salvation is given by following Christ, by identification with His feeling about man and invoking the grace that man may do with his freedom what Christ did with His: abandon his own mortal weakness in the hands of the mercy of the Father, that is to say, of the Mystery of being.” This passage from Fr Giussani’s article reveals to us in depth the mystery of freedom. Our freedom cannot be unless it is an imitative participation in Christ’s freedom: He lived His freedom as abandonment to the merciful hands of the Father…
Life thus becomes a fundamental school of the Mystery….