The Renewal of the Origin of the Question

The Pope’s letter to the Fraternity of CL on the twentieth anniversary of its pontifical recognition is a document rich in direction for the Movement and for the Church.

The letter which Fr Giussani subsequently addressed to the Fraternity grasps its value: it “is the most momentous gesture of our history… Our Lady urges us to collaborate in the greatness of God’s plan of salvation for all our brother men.”

This issue of Traces is largely devoted to this event and the comments it aroused, in the secular as well as the ecclesial world. It is a “special issue” also because of the greeting Fr Giussani sent to the National Council of CL that, on Saturday, March 2nd, discussed these topics. We publish those words below: a special editorial for a special issue.

I thank you for giving me the chance to emphasize, to reiterate, to repeat, to take up once again the responsibility I have and that the Mystery Himself always assigns in the face of one thing, this: that Christ is something different from everything and thus posits the difference that we would not have thought possible.

Christ is the new thing in the world, He is the beginning of the end of the world, He is the demonstrating, the revealing, the demonstration of a face, of the supreme “because,” of a victorious force over the world.

When I think that a man, a young man, an individual, cannot marry a woman except through the love of Christ–it seems I’ve already said this before: except through the love of Christ–when we say this we feel all the immensity (immensity means not commensurable, not comparable in size), the incommensurability of a point of view, which is “the” point of view, but also the point of birth, of the birth of rebirth.

We cannot be friends, we cannot be friends if not because of this, if not because of Christ, to whom we must–this we understand–first of all entrust what we are, what our things are, what our things are not.

Let us help each other to get up in the morning without anything defining us more greatly than how we are defined by the eye of Christ.

Fr Giussani