RESPONSIBLES

Another Mentality

We offer our readers the notes of Father Giussani’s address to the Assembly of CL Responsibles held on June 5, 2001

Participating in your work always makes my heart move forward into this heaven of man’s earth which is the Mystery: the light of Mystery which has struck the darkness of this world.
Listening to what you say, I would like to be able to clarify once again how it is that a vision comes forth like this; a new vision of one’s way of thinking and feeling.
A few months ago, it became clear to me how the tumult of our shared life, always enriched by a great heap of gifts from God, both for our knowledge and our daily life, still needs final definition, so that the newness, the new event that has entered the world with Christ, may become a support; rather, a correction or, more precisely, a decisive factor for our mens, i.e., for our mentality.
In our fidelity to Christ in the Church, in the life of the Church in the world, we have already experienced this as a new thing (this is why we understand what Fr Negri said about our two friends in Livorno, who dedicated over twenty years to taking care of their handicapped adopted son who has recently died). Yet it is something that still leaves us perplexed, at least as far as being able to communicate it well is concerned.
It is another mentality. Mentality is a radical morality: it springs from the very root of our “I” and in its becoming can only reveal itself so penetrating as to be (not substitute) the true origin of our criterion in life.
I think this is the task that falls to Giancarlo [Cesana] and Fr Pino to plan for in the future. We risk working to make the believers we meet more Christian, or to make all those we meet be Christians, without succeeding in making them Christian. Because what makes people Christian is a different mentality, truly different. Our attitude is like that of children who try to say what they cannot manage to think, or try to say what they just barely succeed in thinking.
We must desire that what we have found become a mentality, if what we have found is so great and all-encompassing. A mentality! Let me hope, therefore, that the Lord will continue His preference and grant us the gift of this development, because seeing the flower is something more beautiful–seeing a flower you feel a greater wonder–than seeing something green which is still undeveloped and has not yet burst into bloom.
This is why it is fascination, it is precisely fascination that makes us adhere. With fascination, our adherence rushes headlong toward totality.