Fr Giussani and Karol Wojtyla / Poland At the Roots of a History. Sign and Mystery The following are the words of Fr Luigi Giussani on the occasion of the entrustment of the Polish movement “Living Church” into the hands of the Immaculate Mother of the Church, through Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, then Archbishop of Krakow I feel at home here, because we all participate in the same Body of the Lord, and I see that this idea, this value, is at the foundation of your experience and your fraternity. Our movement too, like yours, has the one goal of restoring, especially in young people, a living faith, and, by Providence, the mottos, the key expressions of our movement, coincide literally with the key expressions of your movement: new life, new man, and new culture. But the world that surrounds us cannot easily accept this work of the Spirit, this true newness of life. Thus, just as you have to work in conditions of toil, adversity, and worry, so we too, from other points of view, but we too have our wearying difficulty and our persecution from the world to endure. I hope, then, that your experience may be of help to ours, because we have already had many exchanges, many exchanges of students, over these years. I hope that it will continue, so that ours can also be a testimony for you. Thank you. The Polish movement, Light and Life, derives from the Oasis. The first Oasis (a 15-day retreat) was organized by Fr Francesco Blachnicki in 1954 to educate adolescents to a daily lifestyle formed on the Christian vocation. In 1969, a new element was added: the concept of a “living Church.” In 1976, the Oasis of the Living Church took on the name “Light and Life,” involving tens of thousands of people. The history of friendship and recognition in the faith between Light andLife and CL began in the mid-1960s. During a symposium for the responsibles of the two movements, held in Podkowa Lesna, near Warsaw, Fr Blachnicki put forth the idea of inviting twenty other movements to a convention in Rome to deepen the reflections begun in the Warsaw Symposium, particularly on the relationship between institution and charism, the ecclesiastical statute of the layperson, and the notes of ecclesiality of a movement. The convention was held in Rome, September 23-27, 1981. On that occasion, John Paul II sent a letter saying, among other things, “As you know well, the Church herself is a movement.” Fr Blachnicki’s 1973 invitation to Fr Giussani to participate in the ceremony entrusting the Living Church Movement into the hands of Our Lady through the then-Cardinal of Krakow, Karol Wojtyla–documented in these pages–is a part of this long friendship.