it's a life

It’s a Life

The mother
In my thoughts, in my memory, my mother has always been linked to the time–I was a seminarian still shedding my first tears of homesickness–I went home for Easter (three days including the return trip). There was a beautiful sky and the air was so clear, and there was only one last star in the sky, the morning star. As we walked in the wind–there was a high wind–toward the priest’s house, my mother spoke these words, “What a beautiful world, and how great God is!”, quite simply, like people say, “Milk porridge is very nice.” (…) But there’s a world of difference between the way my mother said it and the way we can repeat this phrase. This world of difference can be summed up in one thing: that what my mother said is true, truly human, and anyone who does not say it is not human. What made my mother so sensitive was not a special brain or a particularly oversized heart; it was a gift of the Spirit.
(Dal Temperamento un Metodo, p. 357)

The father
When I was making my first drawings, which never came out well (not like geniuses who get it right first time!), my late father, on coming home from work, came and stood, tall and erect, behind me and watched me draw. His first feeling was certainly this: “He must get it right; if he has been given this to do, he has to get it right.” Then I would write, rub out, write, rub out, rub out, rub out… If my father loves me, he thinks, “Poor lad!” Then he would come in and say, “This line here should go like this, not like this.” Do you follow? He would come in when he felt compassion, but his first attitude was a judgment: “He has to do it.”
(Si può vivere così?, pp. 296-297)

The seminary
I remember once on the stairs, while we were going down to the church in silence, so, breaking the rule, Manfredini said to me, “Just to think that God became a man like us…” He stopped short at that phrase, and it remained impressed on me, so much so that I said back to him, “If God became man it is something of another world!” And I added, “It is something out of this world that lives in this world!” This makes this world different, more bearable. It becomes more beautiful.
(…)
One winter evening in the seminary, after supper, (…) Enrico Manfredini came up to me with another of our group, De Ponti, (…) and said to me, “Listen, if Christ is everything, what has He got to do with mathematics?” We were not yet sixteen years old. Everything for my life was born from that question. That question channeled everything into an organic initiative; every thought, feeling, and all the diligence my life would have been able to offer. (…) From that question of Msgr Manfredini, the following day began something that was to last a very long time. Along with two other friends of ours, we set up a small group we called Studium Christi: the search for the refection of Christ.
(Presentation of E. Manfredini’s book, La conoscenza di Gesù, pp. 8,9,16)
As Camus wrote in his Notebooks, “It is not through scruples that man will become great; greatness comes though the grace of God, like a fine day.” For me, everything came like the surprise of a “fine day,” when a teacher [Fr Gaetano Corti] in the first year of high school–I was fifteen years old–read and explained the first page of John’s Gospel. It was then a rule to read this page at the end of every Mass, so I had heard it thousands of times. But the “fine day” came (…) when that teacher explained the first page of St John’s Gospel: “The Word of God, in other words, that of which all consists, became flesh,” he said, “so beauty has become flesh, love, life, truth has become flesh, justice has become flesh: being does not stay ‘above the sky’ as in Plato’s view; it has become flesh, one amongst us.” At that moment, I remembered a poem by Leopardi that we had studied in that month of “escape” in the previous year, called To His Woman. (…) In that instant I thought how that poem by Leopardi was, after 1,800 years, a begging for that event which had already happened, that John had announced: “The Word was made flesh.”
(L’avvenimento cristiano, pp. 31–32)

1945–46
The young priest
Late August 1945
I don’t want to live uselessly; it’s an obsession of mine. Then what do two close friends wish for themselves? The aspiration of friendship is union, it is that of becoming identified, becoming part of each other, becoming the same person, assuming the same physiognomy of the Friend. But Jesus is on the Cross… the greatest joy of our life is what in every small or great suffering it makes us discover. “There, now you are more similar,” more “part of Him.” Life for men’s happiness, for Jesus’ friendship. Dear Friend, a blessing? See, I open wide my arms to you and I send it to you with all my heart’s passion: only so that it serve for getting you the only goad in life: the friendship of Jesus Christ–and the happiness of men. All the rest… vanitas vanitatum.
January 3, 1946
In my first Mass, I asked Him for only one thing, that He keep me on the Cross with Him. Because friendship is such a thing that it leaves you unquiet at the thought of being different from your friend; we need to be as equal as possible, identical, united and mixed in together, sticking to each other as the light sticks to the contours of things. And if He is on the Cross, all my pride must consist in feeling myself like Him.
(Lettere di fede e di amicizia ad Angelo Majo, pp. 26,33)

1954
The train journey
The first time the idea came to me to “do something” (…) was on a train. I was traveling from Milan to Rimini, and I had met some boys. I began a discussion with them and I found them totally ignorant of religion and Christianity; their skepticism, their derisory attitude, their disbelief didn’t make me angry but sorry, because it clearly came from ignorance. It was this contact that gave me an “anger” so that they could get to know, that they could come to know more, that there be more people knowing what had been given to me. (…) I remember as if it were now, the instant in which, for the first time, I entered the Liceo Berchet in Milan. There were four steps from the sidewalk to the entrance. As I climbed up them I was saying, “What am I coming here to do? Why am I coming here? To tell these students what I have heard and understood because without understanding what I have understood and hearing what I have heard, I cannot understand how anyone can live.”
(Realtà e giovinezza. La sfida, pp. 43–44)

I belonged
to the unity with them
So, when I faced the first three kids in the street after my first period in class (...) in Berchet High School, I went home wholly concerned for myself: with what responsibility, with what self–awareness, with what personal involvement was I to respond and correspond to what I was beginning to sense as I spoke to them! I realized I could not face them the day after without taking a stand in front of this broadening of the matter: I belonged to those three kids; I belonged not to them, but to the unity with them.
Something had happened. (...) It became clear when, a week later, they raised a third motion at a students’ assembly of Berchet High School, whereas the whole history of the previous years had always seen the presence of only two motions: the leftists’, and the monarchist–fascists’. Barely one week after our first encounter, they presented a third motion. The presentation of this third motion caused an earthquake in the school.
(“Belonging to the Home as Movement Toward the Unity of Life,” Tracce, January 1997, p. III)

1954
We burst onto the scene
The beginning of our Movement is extremely significant (to understand a history, you always have to look at its origin). In 1954, we burst onto the scene of the state schools, which were not yet Marxist–even though the Marxists were already setting the climate in many places–but were substantially liberal and thus secularist and anti–Christian, like the Marxist schools that are their direct result.
We did not come into the schools trying to formulate an alternative project for the schools. We came in with the consciousness of bringing What saves man also into the schools, what makes living human and the search for truth authentic, that is, Christ in our unity. And it happened that by virtue of this passion we brought about also a new interpretation (which we called a “revision” at the time) of the contents of history, philosophy, and literature, which represented for the students the true alternative to the liberal–Marxist interpretation prevailing in the classes. We enacted an alternative project without setting for ourselves the purpose of enacting it. Our purpose was presence.
(“From Utopia to Presence”, Traces, no. 11, 2002, p.VII)

1964
Lessons at
Catholic University
The horizontal line represents the trajectory of human history, above which looms the presence of an x: destiny, fate, the ultimate something, mystery, “God.”
Throughout the trajectory of history, in theoretical and practical terms, humanity has sought to comprehend the relationship binding its contingent reality, its ephemeral point, and its ultimate meaning, to imagine and live the link between its own transitory nature and the eternal. Let us suppose that the enigma of x, the enigmatic presence looming beyond the horizon (without which reason could not be reason, because reason is the affirmation of the ultimate meaning), were to penetrate the fabric of history, join in the flow of time and space and, with an unimaginable expressive force, become a “Fact” incarnate in our midst. But, in this hypothesis, what does “incarnate” mean? It means to assume that this mysterious x became a phenomenon, a regular fact that could act upon and be registered in the trajectory of history.
(At the Origin of the Christian Claim, p. 29)

1968
The crisis
The history of the Movement began to dim in 1963–1964, up to the darkness of 1968, which burst open the consequences of those five or six years when the influence of certain people had overturned the original situation and made the purpose of our action not a presence in the schools, but a project of social action. Thus, the density, the identity itself of our presence was lost. In 1968, only a certain group remained, inflexible, not knowing what to say.
(“From Utopia to Presence,” Traces, no. 11, 2002, p. VII)

1969
CL Is born
Most people fell away, into betrayal. What did they betray? The presence. The project had taken the place of presence; utopia had knocked it away. What happened from 1963–1964 to the explosion of 1968 was a process of adaptation and giving in to the environment; a reactive presence was brought into being, thus no longer a true, original presence.
In 1969, some realized the situation and took up the original idea again, out of fidelity of heart: “We have to be a presence, because communion with Christ and among us is liberation; we must therefore make our communion become a presence once again.”
(“From Utopia to Presence,” Traces, no. 11, 2002, p. VII)

1976
The Equipe. From utopia to presence
The problem we have to face this year can be formulated like this: we have to succeed in understanding the opposition existing between two words–“presence” and “utopia”–and our choice in favor of the first one. The fate of our community, in terms of its effectiveness inside the university and in society, depends on the emphasis on presence as opposed to the temptation of utopia. (…) “We are members of one another.” There is nothing culturally more revolutionary than this conception of the person, whose meaning, whose substance is unity with Christ, with an Other, and through this, a unity with all those whom He seizes, with all those whom the Father puts into His hands. Our identity is to be one with Christ. Being one with Christ is the constitutive dimension of our person.
(“From Utopia to Presence,” Traces, no. 11, 2002, pp. II–III)

1980
Movements
in the Church
The International Convention, “Movements in the Church,” envisaged by Fr Blachnicki, was an event that deeply touched all those who took part in it. Thus, just as it is through an encounter that each of us feels reborn, discovering or sensing the faith as something reasonable and incident on life, in the same way, through this encounter, we wanted to acquire greater awareness of our vocation and of the vocation that characterizes the movement to which we belong. (…) What is a movement in the mystery of God, of the cosmos, of history, of the Church as a whole? A detail; and it is in this detail that the wealth of the Whole takes up concrete form, becomes essential. St Paul said that the Lord never wavered between Yes and No; His was always a Yes. Well then, movement is our Yes.
(Concluding remarks in I movimenti nella Chiesa negli anni ’80, [Movements in the Church in the ’80s], pp. 245,248)

1982
The Pope
at the Meeting
The miracle of change in those who believe in Christ is the greatest witness of the truth of his presence. A community of persons who live in this way constitutes the dawning of the new world, the beginning of true humanity. So a community must generate works in which the ultimate value is witness. The Pope reminded us of this in his address at the Meeting when he defined the Church’s aim as “building a civilization of truth and love.” But isn’t the Church’s aim to give glory to Christ? It’s exactly the same thing. Christ’s glory is man’s salvation. This witness is obtained through faith that generates a piece of changed humanity that, as we have already said, makes people ask themselves the motive and ultimate reason for it. This must also be the value of works.
(L’idea di movimento, Quaderni 10, supplemento a Cl–Litterae Communionis, no. 3, 1987, p. 30)

Pontifical Recognition
of the Fraternity
What happened on February 11th is certainly the greatest grace in the entire history of the Movement. (…)
The certitude in the value of our experience implied by this event pushes us with a greater peace and generosity of heart to that obedience to the bishops and that collaboration to their pastoral work without which the up–building of the people of God becomes doubtful. (…) Two circumstances make the gift we have received even more precious. The first is that the Holy Father himself–as the Decree spells out–took initiative to encourage the decision of the Pontifical Council for the Laity. The second is the coincidence between the emission of the Decree and the Feast of the Apparition of our Lady of Lourdes.
(“The Fraternity of Communion and Liberation,” in Cl–Litterae Communionis, March 1982, p. 3)

1984
The 30th
Anniversary of CL
“We believe in Christ, died and risen, in Christ present here and now, who alone can and does change man and the world, transfiguring them” (John Paul II). (…) The reason for the Movement’s existence, that for which we are one thing, is the certainty of Christ, died and risen, therefore present, the only one who “changes man and the world, transfiguring them.” This certainty founds the dynamism of the Movement’s experience, as a seed that sinks into the ground and becomes a plant, a flower, a fruit to communicate. There can be a thousand good hints that providence has had us meet, but the reason for going on in friendship and in charity is this. (…) This mode of encounter in virtue of which the content of the faith appears capable of convincing and mobilizing life, of giving rise to and bringing about a new life, is called charism. Now, precisely the charism, as it is communicative by nature, generates a blood relationship of faith and perception, a capacity for agreement, an operative fraternity–in a word, a movement.
(“Ambiente di vita redenta,” in Cl–Litterae Communionis, no. 1, 1985, p. 9)

1987
At the Convention of the Christian Democrat Party
of Lombardy,
Assago
As politics is the most accomplished form of culture, it cannot but keep man as its fundamental concern. (…) Man’s responsibility, through all the kinds of provocation that reach him in the impact with reality, commits itself in answering those questions that are posed by man’s religious sense (or man’s heart as the Bible calls it). When man commits his responsibility before these values, he has to deal with power. (…) Now, either power is determined by the will to serve God’s creature in its dynamic evolution–that is to say, to serve man, culture and the praxis deriving from it, or power tends to reduce human reality to its own aim.
(“Religious Sense, Works, and Politics,” Traces, no. 9, 2003, p.45)

1988
The Recognition of Memores
Domini
In the monastery, in the convent or in a house [of Memores Domini], these living stones, those who have been called and chosen, have been called upon to manifest, by the very visible form of their lives–you who make the profession today are called to manifest by the very visible form of your own life–that only He is, ie, that Christ is the King of the Universe: “Christe cunctorum dominator alme,” “omnia in ipso constant,” everything has its consistence in Him, from Him. (…) This is the objective value of vocation: the form of their lives works in the world for Christ, fights in the world for Christ. The very form of their life! (…) It is a life that, in its form, cries out, “Jesus is all.” They cry this out before everyone, before anyone who sees them, anyone who bumps into anyone of them, all those that hear them, all those who watch them. Those who live in the monastery, in the convent or in the house have in other words been called to be prophets.
(Il tempo e il tempio, pp. 20-21)

1993
“Books of the Christian Spirit”
It's through education that a people is built in unitary awareness and as civilization. We understand well today how urgent and necessary this task is for those with responsibility. Reading contributes to this educative program for the rebuilding of our humanity. The aim documented in many of the books published in this collection is to meet people who have lived reality intensely and have let themselves be provoked by questions that they didn't evade or, better, they discovered in reality the traces of a good destiny and unexpectedly found a positive answer. We are concerned particularly with showing the reasonability and usefulness for contemporary man of that answer to the drama of existence that is called “the Christian event.” We present this answer as a sincere contribution toward an education, an introduction to reality for a true liberation of young and old.
(“Dieci anni di libri al cuore della vita,” Tracce, July–Aug. 2003, p. 86)

1994
The 40th Anniversary of CL
As we become more mature, we are a spectacle to ourselves and, God willing, to others, too. A spectacle, that is to say of limitation and betrayal, and therefore of humiliation, and at the same time of inexhaustible certainty of the grace that is given us and renewed every morning. Hence, that naïve boldness characteristic of us, which makes us conceive every day of our lives as an offering to God that the Church might exist in our bodies and our souls, through the materiality of our existence.
(1954–1994: Communion and Liberation)

1995
International Prize for Catholic
Culture at Bassano del Grappa
We say that the Catholic faith is not culture in the sense that it does not offer itself to the world as the proposal of a new culture. The object of the faith “happens;” in other words, it is an event. (…) It is a totalizing event. For if it is true that that man is God made son of a woman (…), then it’s a totalizing, catholic event by its nature. “Catholic” means “according to the whole.” (…) If we look at reality with His presence in our eyes, then the experience of correspondence is intensified; we are more able to perceive the correspondence between our own heart and the object under consideration. If you look at things from within the relationship with that Man, you see better, you understand better whether or not they agree with what your “I” is waiting for, with what your heart demands.(…) Faith completes reason; it saves reason. It completes it because reason aspires to something it cannot grasp, to explain itself. Faith saves reasonability, which it has as its great premise. Reasonability is a premise of faith; it’s like the immediate field in which the event of Christ comes into tension.
(“Una fede ecumenica,” Un caffè in compagnia, pp. 145,149,153)

1997
The “Spirto Gentil” Collection
When I was teaching in the lower classes of high school, in order to prove the existence of God, I used to carry in my arms a gramophone from my house to the Berchet. (…) One of the first pieces I played for the student was this Beethoven concerto [Concerto for violin and orchestra, op 61]. (…) When I had them listen to this Beethoven concerto, where there is the refrain that I called “the community,” when the whole orchestra enters, still with the same melody, then three times the violin, that represents the singularity, takes up the fugue and goes off toward its destiny, until, at last, tired, it is taken up again by the melodic theme of the whole orchestra when there was the piece we have listened to, in the Hall of that Class 1E there was absolute silence, and a girl in the first row, here on the right, called Milene di Gioia–I still remember her–all of a sudden broke into an endless stream of tears, and I was unable to stop her. I let her go on for a while and then I said, “You can well understand the difference there is between one soul and another, different levels of sensitivity, between one heart and another.” Those others would certainly not have wept. So from that time this piece has become the most meaningful piece for me. The yearning the basic theme generates (…) this yearning is the emblem of the expectation of God that man has.
(Si può vivere così?, pp. 250–251)

1998
May 30th
in Rome, St Peter’s Square
Thank you my friends! What happened last Saturday, May 30th, happened because you, you too, are there, together. It is only togetherness that operates. Indeed, God is where unity is. For me, the encounter on Saturday with John Paul II was the greatest day of our history, made possible by the Pope's recognition. It was the “cry” that God gave us as a testimony to unity, to the unity of the whole Church. At least, that was the way I felt it; we are one. I said so, too, to Chiara and Kiko who were there beside me in St Peter's Square: How is it possible not to cry out our unity on such occasions?
And then I perceived–more intensely than ever before–the fact that we are for the Church, we are a factor that builds the Church. I felt myself taken into God's hands, Christ's hands, those hands that mold history.
These are times in which I have begun truly to understand–and all the more on Saturday–the responsibility to which God has called me. I had not understood, but on Saturday it was clear. And this responsibility is such in so far as it communicates itself to others precisely as responsibility. This is true when it is for the whole Church, and therefore for the whole Movement; when it is an obedience to the fact that–as St. Paul says–“none of us lives for himself, and none of us dies for himself, since if we live, it is for the Lord that we live, and if we die, it is for the Lord that we die. Whether we live or die, then, we belong to the Lord” (Rom 14:7–8).
It is God who is at work in what we do: “God is all in all.” Our responsibility is for unity, to the point of valuing even the smallest good that is in the other.
(“Letter to the Fraternity,” Tracce, June 1998, p. 1)

2002
The 20th
Anniversary of the Fraternity
“The Movement”–the Holy Father wrote us–“has chosen and chooses to indicate not a road, but the road towards a solution to this existential drama” of man who never stops seeking. (…) A new beginning is now opening up for us: to demonstrate, to re–demonstrate the evidence of the truth of what, following the Tradition of the Church, we have always said to each other. As the Holy Father also wrote, “Christianity, even before being a sum of doctrines or a rule for salvation, is the ‘event’ of an encounter.” (…) What has to happen is something new, an extremely weighty step in our history. (…) This is why we must ask for a great clarity in the face of our responsibility. Because the individual is responsible for the whole Fraternity in which he is immersed, whatever may be his current condition, of health or sickness, of gladness or trial. (…) God prompts each one of us to be a vanguard for the mission. (…) Let us pray to Our Lady for our miseries and those of the world. Within the adventure of every day, there lies a continuing to ignore God’s faithfulness to our history: this is the biggest sin. Our Lady urges us to collaborate in the greatness of God’s plan of salvation for all our brother men.”
(“Letter sent to the members of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation on the 20th Anniversary of the Pontifical Recognition of the Fraternity”, Traces, no. 3, 2002, p. 21–22)

2004
The 50th Anniversary of CL
Not only did I have no intention of “founding” anything, but I believe that the genius of the Movement that I saw coming to birth lies in having felt the urgency to proclaim the need to return to the elementary aspects of Christianity, that is to say, the passion of the Christian fact as such in its original elements, and nothing more. Perhaps it was precisely this that awoke the unforeseeable possibility of encounter with personalities of the Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Protestant and Orthodox worlds, from the United States to Russia, in an impetus of embrace and appreciation of all that remains of truth, of beauty, of good and of right in whoever lives a sense of belonging.
The capital problem for Christianity today, as Your Holiness suggestively announced, right from the programmatic encyclical of your Pontificate, Redemptor Hominis, is that Christianity is identified with a Fact–the Christ Event–and not with an ideology. God has spoken to man, to mankind, not as a discourse that in the end is discovered by philosophers and intellectuals, but as a fact that happened, and that is experienced. (...)
In the letter to the Fraternity, Your Holiness wrote again, “Before being a sum of doctrines or a rule for salvation, Christianity is the event of an encounter.” For fifty years, we have wagered everything on this evidence.
For this reason, we do not feel that we are bearers of a particular spirituality, nor do we feel the need to identify it. What dominates in us is gratitude for having discovered that the Church is life that encounters our life: it is not a discourse about life.
It seems to me that, in recent centuries, this faith looks at daily life and considers human work almost bereft of eternal value, of solid hope. So the glory of the Word needs to be pursued in regard to everything, in the impetus of every conquest, and the salvation brought by Christ–albeit through every cross–needs to burst out in every new dawn.
Your Holiness, may Dante’s verse, “Here to us you are a noonday torch of charity,” come true in all the relationships that it is possible for the Christian people to establish, under the leadership of pastors who know to invoke the Spirit of Christ through Mary’s mediation.
May our Movement, which the Spirit of Christ has aroused and brought about in obedience and in peace, fraternally inspire the whole of Christian society, so that in all the places where the faith is proclaimed there may be found traces of Mary’s holiness (“In you is mercy, in you pity, in you munificence, in you is found whatever of goodness is in any creature”).
(“Letter sent by Fr Giussani to John Paul II on the 50th Anniversary of the birth of Communion and Liberation”, Traces, no.4, 2004, pp. 1–3)