BY LAURA CIONI

The publication of Claudel’s masterpiece in the “Books of the Christian Spirit” series brought back to my mind some episodes that may be minor ones, maybe not destined to remain in the archives of Movement history, but are meaningful for me certainly, and maybe also for others. They happened at Catholic University in Milan in 1975, at a time of “renewal” of Movement life which would then find expression in the memorable CL leaders meeting in Riccione in October 1976. At Catholic University, I had close friends–Simone, Amicone, Intiglietta, Fontolan, Banterle, and many others who are less well known yet friends of these above, and friends of friends. When I asked Father Giussani how I was going to “guide” a community of 500 people, he said, “Become the friend of five of them, and you will reach 50.” And so that’s what I tried to do.
Those five friends came either from a highly politicized experience or from a school that had not taught them much, and this may have been why, in my opinion, they had not read some of the basic texts for understanding the heart of the Movement. One of these texts was Claudel’s Tidings Brought to Mary. And so we started reading the book in the Aula San Giovanni, the classroom we had finally managed to obtain a few years earlier from the university administration as a headquarters for the community (and had cleaned up a little from the usual messiness beloved by militants, although it was still ill-suited to reading and listening.
For me, this play was like a companion: I had read it already in my GS high school years, and reread it a number of times at the university, pulling out the connections, the dominant themes, the symbols hiding behind the words, the temperament of the characters. There is nothing like youth for being fascinated by the allusiveness of situations and events, for falling under the spell of an identification with this or that figure. Time, then, purifies any aestheticism we might feel and fills everything with a more profound truth, because it is more real, more a part of life.
All of us were living that spell then. It was just like the dawn of a prologue and all of us, like Violaine, in the grace of the promise of which she was still unaware, had in front of us, with us, the figure of Pierre de Craon, the builder, the sentinel. We were perhaps far from foreseeing that the Angelus was ringing for us too in those decisive years, and yet we felt as true that “Pax tibi. Everything reposes with God in a profound mystery. But what was hidden returns visible with Him.”
Now, after some years, we are all perhaps more able to understand how easy it is to be like Mara, or like Jacques Hury, and we have to recognize that many times we have been like this, calculating or lacking an ultimate openness to Mystery. Or we can intuit even more the greatness of Anne Vercors in the fourth act: “I live on the threshold of death, and in me is an inexpressible joy,” maybe because some of our friends have passed on, and with them also so many of our loved ones, and each of us has lived many things that, if we had a reunion, would be too much to tell, and would remain untold in a long silence of gratitude to God for having let us live moments like the ones we lived in those years.
This is what The Tidings Brought to Mary means for me, and I hope for all those friends, the ones I’ve named and the other, unnamed ones–it is all the same; they are all present. A book that rings true, read without predefined schemes, with a heart that is still a bit uncertain but already rapt by the beauty of Christ, and a great friendship which has been an introduction to life’s vocation and for which the least inadequate feeling is gratitude. The book alone is not enough, in my opinion, to explain the fact that we take it up again so often, or that certain lines from it pop into our minds in unexpected and serious moments. There is also the messiness (just barely straightened up) in the Aula San Giovanni.