encounters At Last, with You, a True Revolutionary The former secretary of Palmiro Togliatti (one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, and secretary general from 1927 till his death in 1964), tells us his story. The fulfillment of the dream of his youth: to be a genuine revolutionary, a desire he pursued unremittingly all his life, until the unforeseeable encounter that fulfilled the expectation of his heart. The great discovery: the true revolution is Christianity, lived in the Church by Massimo Caprara Mine was a conversion in itinere, prepared by a long journey. In the seventies, I was struck by this bolt from the blue. Someone was saying, speaking to us, the Communists who had broken with the Communist Party because of its dependence on Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, “You are not Communists, you are conservatives.” He was telling this to us, we who had struggled our whole lives not to be conservatives. He was saying, “The true revolution, the only one in history, is Christianity.” So, reason and faith met each other. I came to know later that the person who had said this phrase that caught my interest, that won me over and completely enveloped me, was a little priest who had taught at the Berchet High School, a priest from Milan who had taught his students to give birth to a new reality. I wanted to be one of them, but I never met him; I wanted to be one of them and today I have become one of you. That little priest is Fr Giussani. I am often asked, “What made you break with Communism? Why did you break with Communism?” I answer, “I did it for Fr Giussani; above all for that truth, for that reality of Fr Giussani who said, ‘You are conservatives, not revolutionaries; Christ is the revolutionary.’” Impassioned love for the world That phrase of Fr Giussani convinced me; that loving the world “ardently”, so as to be able to change it, to assert justice. I was won over by this truth. I don’t feel any hatred; I will not allow myself to hate my past and I don’t absolve myself from it. When I left the Italian Communist Party, Amendola [Giorgio Amendola (1907-1980) another leading exponent of the Italian Communist Party in the post-war years] said to me, “You are one of us, you are not free, you depend on us.” I was upset by this coerced belonging, but I wanted to be what Fr Giussani had said, a revolutionary. I don’t know Fr Giussani– I’ve never met him–but his words are alive for me; every day he speaks to me, he speaks to us, spurs us on and educates us. Today, he invites us to go back to the elementary aspects of Christianity, he tells us to be missionaries. He is right; this is our task and this is our future. I am old, but I tell you this: I am a missionary like you, here amongst you. I recognize myself in Fr Giussani. Along with him, we all join together and free ourselves; we recognize in our life the irresistible presence of God, the presence of His reality, of His truth, the presence of Jesus. Recorded in the baptismal register My break with the Italian Communist Party and the birth of The Manifesto heralded a time of great pain for me. My suffering was deep, true and heartfelt. I really did suffer on being expelled from the Party. This pain shaped me, but it shaped me along with that phrase that we’d been told: “You are not revolutionaries, you are conservatives. You are clearly just like the others.” Then, something else came to meet me, my mother came gently to meet me. She was a devout Catholic. She had never voted for me. Never! But she never stopped loving me, with the firm and obstinate example of a faith that was never imposed. My mother was an incredible character, concrete, protector of the big convent of the Enclosed Sisters of Margaret Mary Alacoque, in Portici. I remember once, shortly before the elections on April 18, 1948, a priest came to the Communist Party Central Office and said, “I want to bless this place.” It was Holy Saturday. The priest kept reminding me, writing to me affectionately. He was the Ecclesiastical Assistant of the Civic Committee, then our great enemies. Think of the men on guard at the door of the Party Headquarters–perhaps they were real killers–and a priest comes along and says, “I want to bless you.” That day, I was there alone; Togliatti was out, and I was the highest-ranking in the hierarchy of Party functionaries. Those characters at the door, partisans, came to me and said, “There’s a priest who wants to bless us.” I looked at him, a little surprised myself, because no priest had ever been seen in the Communist Party Central Office. I shut myself up in my office for a moment and said to myself, “Now I don’t know what to do.” That was when my mother, who was certainly not there, came to me gently and said that it was right to bless the place, and so I told the priest, “Bless the Central Office.” She, my mother, gave me the resolute advice, permission to bless the Communist Party Central Office; in that moment she renewed my Baptism, she reminded me that I was baptized, recorded in that register; she reminded me that I was there. After all, being in that baptismal register is my life, your life, our life, the life of a baptized Christian who recognizes Fr Giussani’s words. When Fr Giussani said, “You are conservatives, not revolutionaries,” he got me to reason, to live life, and, in order to live, I left the Communist Party, with hope and trust. I left because Fr Giussani had “ordered” me to. I just carried out… I followed him, I followed you, I followed us all. Why did we not meet earlier? God knows that the time was not yet ripe. His imagination is wonderful; God knew I was a Communist and should go on being a Communist, get to the bottom of it, not stop halfway. I was deeply struck by something that happened to me in the early seventies. I went to the State University in Milan. I was living in Rome at the time, and I had gone to Milan for an open assembly. All at once, I saw some young people, who were not Communists, standing up all together to protest. They were the majority, but they were not violent or agitated; they were like a peaceful line of troops. They got to their feet and said they belonged to GS [CL Student Youth]. I was struck by their positive violence, their passion, their vivacity, and the serene, persuasive force they expressed. From that day I became, gradually, not a member of GS, because I had already finished university… but one of them. And today I tell you, “You saved us.” I can certainly not thank Togliatti, whom I didn’t even consult, even though those partisans thought I had. I say thank you to GS, and I say thank you to Fr Giussani, who made me happy because he gave me life and freedom. Christ is the revolution Revolution is a false word. Revolution is not talking of economy. A Communist thinks he is revolutionary. This is not true. This was the point I had to reach, perhaps with a new unity, a different, composite, true unity, something different, a revolution that would be justice, too, social and free justice, that would be freedom, democracy. Fr Giussani was right when he said, “Christ is the revolution.” This revolution is the truth, this revolution that I learned through suffering, with immense pain, because Communism was the opposite of my life, of my freedom, of my essence. When I discovered this for the first time, I thought that everything had evidently to be remade, but everything with a true freedom in being conscious, in feeling human, in being truly human. Being revolutionaries, changing the world, means doing as Fr Giussani says: “We have to be Christians. We have to be with Christ. This truth was what I wanted; I met it and I lived it. So I am what Fr Giussani wants: a true revolutionary, a revolutionary of my freedom and of my passion, a complete revolutionary at last, with you in the Church, guided by the most noble and greatest shepherd of souls our time has known: the Polish Pope, a champion of faith and of strength, without divisions, without armed forces, with a profound formation in strong ideas, who has made strong ideas win. Your strength is being Christians, your strength is being Catholics. This is our strength. A confidence Since I heard Fr Giussani say those words about true revolution many years ago, I have loved you, loved you without knowing it, without wanting to, or perhaps wanting to. But I was clearly too weak, too inefficient, too guilty. Today, I love you consciously and I ask you to love me too, to be tolerant, patient and kind to me, to love me as I have loved you. After all, today you are my world, my reality; you are my being. And keep this in mind: you have not heard the last of me, I have not given up, I still want to count, I still want to fight, to be a revolutionary.