Culture

How a Judgment
Is Born
Bombarded by a thousand interpretations, how can one judge without being a prisoner of clichés, and a slave of power? Every day we are provoked by our impact with reality, which makes us ask questions and becomes a “problem.” Life, then, is played out in the response each of us gives to the problems posed by reality. The first way to respond is judgment, which is realizing how things are. The following pages offer the transcription of a dialogue that Giorgio Vittadini had with the high school students of the Italian GS Equipe last September. It is an example of how a critical and systematic awareness of one’s own human experience comes to be. The ingeniousness and originality of a judgment lies in the consciousness of belonging

by Giorgio Vittadini

I want to give you four examples of how a judgment is normally made. Terrorism. A year ago there was the massacre of children in Beslan, in Ossetia. And then so many other acts of terror, of various kinds. What is the common judgment? They are all reactions to a previous injustice–the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war in Iraq–the injustice suffered. You can keep going back, trying to find who the guilty one is, ad infinitum.
Natural disasters. The tsunami at Christmas, and now, Hurricane Katrina. Thousands of deaths. Who can you blame? Whoever you can, with men. It’s Bush’s fault, for not signing the Kyoto Protocol, and now the greenhouse effect is provoking disastrous hurricanes. Where you can’t blame a person, you can take it out on God, with the usual question, “If God is so good, why does He allow evil?”–forgetting, perhaps, that if there had been more checks…God would have been better.
The battle over assisted reproduction. Why deny a woman the right to have the child she wants? Why stop science, the chance of finding the cure for mortal diseases through embryos? Progress and rights are at stake (the woman’s, not the embryo’s.) Politics. The Fazio controversy. Prodi. Berlusconi. Everything comes down to “Who’s right? Who wins?” It’s a question of power. Certainly it is also this.
In all these examples, the alternative is between who’s right and who’s wrong. Let’s stop here a moment.

Forgetting our desire
Something is missing. Who will restore the dead children to the mothers of Beslan? Who will respond to the desire for life of those struck by terrorism? The same holds for natural disasters. Who will respond to the desperate cry of those who are left? And what if we also ascertained that those who murdered had the right to do so? Is the only way out the affirmation of a bad God? What does my desire have to do with all these analyses? Once Giussani said, “If one of those struck down, who is no more, were to rise up, he would say, ‘What has become of my desire for life?’” Whether the cause is nature or humanity, an analysis of guilt eliminates this desire. The first thing we forget is the desire for happiness that each of us has the right to. One of the first things Giussani taught us was precisely this: each person is unique and unrepeatable; each man is worth more than the whole universe. Normally, when we judge, we analyze the mass, we don’t start out from the fact that this exigency is in man. Who starts out with this cry, this demand, “Who will give me back the affection of my dead friend?”

Forgetting evil
Let’s be careful here. There is another key forgetfulness: not only do we not look at the desire of man, but we don’t want to see that this desire has been destroyed. That is, we don’t look at the existence of evil. Seeking at all costs to identify guilt, we forget that man is made for life, but something–in nature or in man–leads to death. We turn to inquiry commissions, programs to organize adequate civil protection, and expect the next government to resolve the economic problem, and so on and so forth. We try to pin the guilt, and in this way, we censure a slice of reality.

The only response: Christ
But, instead, is there something, does someone exist (not an abstract entity) who can free me from evil? Who values my desires? This is true judgment! It concretely means, “Who can comfort the mothers of Beslan? Who can give hope back to the victims of terrorism or a natural cataclysm? Who can render justice to the millions of embryos destroyed every day? How is it possible for politics to start from the exigencies of man?”
Christianity is this response. Our civilization was born from this response. There was Someone who told the widow in tears, “Woman, don’t weep. I am with you.” To Zacchaeus, the publican, the Mafia man, He said, “Do you want to start again? Start again with Me.” To the man born blind, He said, “See,” outclassing the Pharisees, who asked whose guilt had made him blind. In history, there was One who said, “I am able to free you from evil. Not because I explain it, analyze it, or eliminate it, but because I live with you and I give you my example. I take evil on my shoulders, and I defeat it.” Only a Christian can tell a New Orleans resident who has lost everything, “There is hope.” Fr. Orione told the inhabitants of Messina when he went to see them after the earthquake, “Have hope. God does not abandon those who have died, nor those who are living.” In history, the Church has said to poor, suffering people, to the unhappy, “Have faith. God has defeated evil, and He is with us.” He has dried people’s tears, coming alongside them to walk with them, like in the Tarkovskji film, Andreij Rublëv, when the monk says, “Walk with me, courage.” It is a concrete correspondence to the desire for good that each of us has. It means looking at reality with a hope certain of goodness. It’s what struck the journalist, Walter Tobagi, murdered by the Red Brigades. Just a few weeks before he died, he wrote an article in Corriere della Sera quoting a poster we’d put out at the university. He was struck by the fact that in such a dark moment, with the violence of terrorism, there could be someone who spoke of hope.

First modality
You can’t stop at evil. Even if you fall a hundred times, there is always someone who shows you the way, who makes you lift up your gaze, like when a man told Fr. Giussani in confession, “I have killed,” and Fr. Giussani asked him, “How many times?” Another example is Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Who made her stay in the midst of lepers? There is a reality in the world that tells you, “Go on, have faith,” just as it said to the adulteress or Zacchaeus. In the tragedy of the tsunami it is important that there be someone with a cross in his hands to say Mass, because it means affirming that there is hope. It’s an entirely different way of judging and embracing reality. Why else did people applaud for over eight minutes after Carrón’s talk at the Meeting? It was evident that those words corresponded to the desire of each person.
The point of departure is the correspondence that each of us can feel. This happened at this year’s Meeting with people like Giuliano Ferrarra; Magdi Allam; Claudio Morpurgo, Vice-President of the Italian Jews; and the President of the Italian Senate, Marcello Pera. All four are “secular” but perceive that only the presence of the Stranger, as Eliot defined the Church, permits hope, because in her the desire of man is conserved.

Second modality
In a tragedy like that of the tsunami, or terrorism, or economic disaster, there are those who never stop hoping, those who, imitating the hope brought into the world by the Church, never give up. They enter into contact with people who keep this desire alive. Just think of Fr. Giussani’s relationship with the Bonzes, the Buddhist monks of Monte Koja, or when he spoke in the pages of the newspapers about the Jews and our shared experience of sonship. It is the birth of a new, totalizing friendship, born of a judgment. The first thing to search for is not an idea, but all those who conserve this desire, who look it in the face and respect it. Only from this point can dialogue be born. This is the reason we invited some Muslims to the Meeting.

Third modality
At a certain point, man wants desire to become a different way of looking at things. The history of the Church is spangled with works that responded on the material level to man’s desire for goodness against evil, because it is the concrete attempt to respond to the desire for goodness, for happiness, against evil. Think of St. Vincent de Paul, St. Camillus of Lellis, Fr. Bosco, Mother Teresa, the hospitals, the schools, the works of assistance that they established. And today: the Zerbinis in Brazil, the work of the artisans in Bethlehem… At the Meeting, the flow of video showing works of charity was a brilliant example. Works are man’s attempt to make desire, and faith, a way to make life and reality more human. Works are the way we move in a reality.

Fourth modality
A position like this gives rise to 360-degree openness. Everything interests me–it wasn’t by chance that the Meeting spoke of everything, from science to economics to art–because everything contributes to the satisfaction of the desire for happiness inherent in each man.
For this reason, we look to those who seek this hope in the world, those who live of desire, who do not give up in the face of evil; those who seek someone who can free them, who identify with those who live this, and who establish works, as opposed to those who censure, stopping at sterile analysis, trying to pin the blame, to identify where the power is, whose breath then becomes shallow, those for whom happiness is a mere dream.
We have to look at those who teach this judgment and witness to it in front of us, like the Pope. For me, the Movement in all these years has been this, ever since when Fr. Giussani, arriving at Catholic University at a quarter to eight, the first thing he looked for was to see whether we had put up the posters, because it meant that we had put into act, in the particular, our judgment. Since then, the Movement has become for me this factor of different judgment, of hope for everyone.