editorial Christ Is Risen! I Have Done Nothing... Recently, Cardinal Ratzinger and the President of the Italian Senate, Marcello Pera–one a believer and the other a non-believing liberal–expressed, each from his own point of view, their concern at the grave moment we are living. What is at stake, they both agree, is the destiny of a civilization that is founded on the acknowledgment of the infinite value of the person. Though falling short a thousand times, the European, Western civilization has kept faith with this ideal for centuries, taking great steps forward in development, freedom and tolerance, in the name of this ideal. Now all this has been brought to into crisis by internal and external factors. The dignity of the person is the first-fruit of Christ’s work. He was the first to acknowledge that an infected person has the same value as a king, a slave as a freeman, a man as a woman. It was He who assigned to history a positive meaning, and He Himself was the start of it. This is why the crisis we are living calls Christians, in particular, to be aware of what we are called to at this stage of history. In a letter we publish in this month’s Traces, David Jones, a Captain in the United States Army in charge of training recruits, asks himself how one can cope “in the Hell of war,” and writes, “Christ doesn’t promise that it was to be easy, without pain or great sacrifice.” And slightly before this he commented, “Christ is Risen! I have done nothing... This New Civilization of Love happens by living this charism in the midst of the chaos, confusion and bloodshed of this world, right here, right now.” In recent weeks, thanks to the great power of the media and the use of images, we have all, in a sense, been taken to the front line, where we can almost touch the horror, and where the question “Why?” springs to everyone’s heart. “Just this week alone, I was notified of the death of one of my recruits. I had to arrange details for the casualty notification team to inform the family and then deal with his grieving mother. It’s so easy to slip into nothingness…” Planted like an event which seems not to merit attention in a world in flames–today like two thousand years ago–, the Resurrection throws out its challenge: “The victory is the victory of Easter and of immortality. Thus, the victory of Easter is the Christian people. This is Christ’s victory over all the ‘victory’ of nothingness,” Fr Giussani recalled at the recent Fraternity Spiritual Exercises of CL. Major Jones writes that he has those words in his heart and that he is living their meaning in the “here and now” of his Christian vocation in the army, because hope is not nourished by great words, nor by utopias, but by new signs of a changed world, where everything is embraced and everything is for the good. This is not a victory possible for man; it is God who, as Péguy wrote, has “put Himself out” for us.