Rome Giving the Reasons for Our Hope On last March 5th, over a thousand people filled the Sala della Maternità to listen to Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos and Giancarlo Cesana speaking about Fr Giussani’s book by Riccardo Piol «I am glad for this meeting, as it gives me the privileged opportunity to celebrate with you the forthcoming fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Communion and Liberation and to keep the Christian identity more alive in our life, to live with ever-greater loyalty our faith in Christ, “ready to answer to anyone who asks us the ‘reasons for the hope that is in us.’” With this warm greeting and with a quote from St Peter’s letter, a renewed invitation to follow the road begun by “Fr Giussani that autumn of 1954,” Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos, Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, began the presentation of Why the Church? in Rome on May 5th. There were many people there to hear his address and that of Giancarlo Cesana. Some say there were more than one thousand there, and maybe they were right, because after filling the 850 seats, the CLU students, in charge of the seating, sent people to stand along the corridors, then at the back of the auditorium, and some people were still left outside, listening over the loudspeaker system¡despite the fact that the rain had been pouring down since the afternoon. The doors were closed at 8:05 pm (in Rome, five minutes late is like a quarter of an hour early), and the meeting started. In the first row was Cardinal Sepe, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples; Bishop De Paolis, Secretary of the Segnatura Apostolica; and Bishop Danzi, Secretary of the Governatorate of the Vatican City State; the government undersecretaries, Sestini and Uggè; then other ecclesiastics, ambassadors, and regional, provincial, and local councilors and members of Parliament; and then a mass of other people: the CL community, friends (new and old), colleagues, neighbors, university lecturers and fellow undergraduates from the state university La Sapienza as well as from the pontifical “Lateranense”¡all invited to hear, for the first time or over again, the thread of thought from which CL is born, so as to celebrate the Movement’s fifty years of life. A new song It began with a song, Povera voce, “the first song of our history, which Fr Giussani has defined ‘the Movement’s hymn,’” said Roberto Gerosa as he introduced it. Then Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos was invited to speak. In his address, the book, too, became a song, or better, “a new song,” because “we are not used to an ecclesiology expounded with a discursive and articulate style, founded on the sources of theological learning, close to the specific questions of contemporary culture and expressed in a language at home in any contemporary learned or academic environment.” The Church is life, communion of God with man; it is the answer to present-day man’s demand for meaning. The Cardinal spoke of these three aspects that emerge in the book, and presented Why the Church? as one would present a work of art, defining it as a kind of self-portrait of the painter and as the manifesto of an impassioned Christianity “able to understand and make itself understood by the culture of the third millennium.” “It’s not an intellectual question or a guiding principle for a ready-made theological system,” Castrillón said. For the author, Jesus is an imperious need, and before the emerging “human questioning,” his reply allows no doubts. It is rather those doubts which attack today’s man that are defeated “by healing the rift between reason and faith” and with them are challenged whoever wants the Church marginalized, far away, at most the courtesan of history. Certainty and challenge “ In the Christian conception, there is nothing profane; that is to say, there is nothing that stands in front of, or outside of, the temple, because everything is in function of Christ.” Cesana started off with these words, a quotation from the book, which set the tone of his intervention at once. His was the witness of an experience, recounting the reaction to the book and to the fifty years of CL’s history, which, in the third volume of the Trilogy are, in a way, summarized. “The fascination I feel for Christianity is not the understanding of everything, but the discovery of what we are made for.” So the challenge of life is to live, walking in the certainty of God’s companionship to man, today. The book’s title already contains the characteristics of certainty and challenge that the Church presents in history. He said, “Why the Church? is an affirmation, but it is also a question. It is the affirmation of a fact that is certain: ‘God has not left us alone. He left us authority, tradition, the sacraments and witnesses to show us what we are made for.’ And it is the challenge of the daily acknowledgment of Christ’s claim to be the only answer to man’s desire: ‘The Church exists for me, for me personally: Giancarlo Cesana.’”