Fifty years of Communion and Liberation / Experience Make Friends with Five People and You Will Reach Fifty The early seventies, at Catholic University in Milan. No place to meet, to organize a Christian presence, but a group of young students made friends with Fr Giussani who, “with great discretion, tried to make us understand how beautiful the Christian experience is, and how this is the first thing to communicate, rather than stubbornly rebutting other people’s judgments.” Notes from a beginning that still goes on by Laura Cioni In the early seventies, Fr Giussani did not seem very committed to the leadership of the Movement. He had a lot of free mornings and, thanks to a singular preference, I often spent them with him in via Martinengo, Milan, in the small ground-floor room that served as bedroom and study, where he would receive people and the telephone calls that would constantly interrupt the various tasks that filled his day. He would read or write, and I would study. Sometimes we would talk of many things and I was surprised every time he would take the phone off the hook. It was as if all his attention was focused on the person he had before him. A few years later, I was moved to hear him say that seeing me was like seeing his children multiplying. On the floor above was Fr Scalfi, who would invite him for a cup of chai, Russian tea. It was wonderful to see these two men, sharing the same ideal of service to the Church, enjoying each other’s company for a short tea-break. Fr Giussani called Fr Scalfi the “superior,” because he lived on the floor above, and they would greet each other loudly up and down the staircase. Outside, the Sisters’ garden was decorated with roses, and the knotted trunk of a wisteria creeping up the wall of the adjoining convent (of the Little Sisters of the Assumption, who, in 1993, would become the Sisters of Charity of the Assumption). It was a wonder to see it flowering every year. There was always a white powdery substance along the inside walls of the room: Fr Giussani was terrified of insects and this was how he kept them under control. Bringing the flesh back into Christian life One morning, I found him reading the Bible. He closed the page he had been reading and welcomed me with the quotation of a Gospel passage: “How can the wedding guests fast when the bridegroom is with them?” And he commented, “This is the concept of Christian penance,” where penance coincides with joy; this was written all over his face. Like when he said, “Our position brings the flesh back into Christian life, as it has never been since the Fathers of the Church.” Or when assessing the character of a mutual friend, whom he judged to be rather fragile, he used an effective metaphor: “Tenderness is not only flowers; tenderness is a trunk.” Still on the theme of joy, one of my most vivid recollections of his presence at Catholic University was the moment when he met an engaged couple in the first cloister, who greeted him near the John XXIII lecture room. He walked along with them for a while, in a hurry as usual, and he took the chance to remind them of St Paul’s words: hilarem datorem Deus diligit (God loves a cheerful giver). On almost that precise spot, a few years later, when I was made responsible for the community, which then numbered about five hundred people, and I was asking myself how I could fulfill such a demanding task, he gave me the directive I have always followed since that time, though in different life situations: “Make friends with five people and you will reach fifty.” So it was that I found beside me Simone, Amicone, Intiglietta, Banterle and Fontolan, and I began to read Miguel Mañara and The Announcement Made to Mary with them. We became friends for life, even though it’s not so easy to see them, and they, who were much better than me at relationships, spread what was happening among us to their friends. Amongst the others they met were Testori, Tobagi and many other influential personalities in those years of such terrible combat. Even a newspaper, called Kaccomatto, came out of this experience, which would quote Shakespeare alongside the letters of the Lotta Continua militants. That letter to Pasolini that was never sent To return to that little room in via Martinengo: how moving it was to see Fr Giussani reading about the violent death of Pierpaolo Pasolini, and to see the beginnings of a letter to the writer on his desk, a letter that would never be finished, in which Fr Giussani expressed complete agreement with the positions Pasolini sustained in many articles published in Corriere della Sera. We had rented two rooms for our meetings, on the sixth floor of a building in Corso Magenta. At that time, we were calling ourselves “the red guards,” a clandestine name Fr Giussani disapproved of. Despite this, he would climb all those stairs and take part in our meetings and in the associated lunches. We had nowhere to meet in the university to organize our presence, to make posters and to have discussions; it was only later on that we were allowed the use of the St John lecture room. Those were years when the experience of Communion and Liberation was very isolated in both ecclesial and civil environments. At Catholic University, the Rector, Lazzati, didn’t like CL, even though the presence of our movement was appreciated by some lecturers, above all in the faculty of Literature and Philosophy. And the extra-parliamentary movements tried to prevent–even with the use of violence–every public expression of ours in the universities and in the schools. This had led us to close ourselves up in a defensive position that turned out to be stifling for us. Fr Giussani, from the outside and with great discretion, tried to make us understand how beautiful the Christian experience is, and how this is the first thing to communicate, rather than stubbornly rebutting other people’s judgments. He got us to correct a mural newspaper we had hung up outside Catholic University, convincing us to put as the opening phrase the positive experience that we were living instead of our reaction to ideology. This, I think, was the first instant in which the change of course that was later fully expressed in 1976 at the meeting in Riccione began to influence our way of reasoning. This was the remote origin of the feast we organized after the price increases at the University refectory: an ironic student protest in a place where a hard-line contestation by Catholics would never have been allowed. It astonished the whole academic world, from the lecturers to the porters. They found the cloisters invaded by a column of dancers: a way of reacting to an unjust decision never seen there before. And the price increases were dropped. The class in the Great Hall at 8:30 a.m. At the start, Fr Giussani’s lectures were not very well attended; curiously, even the “CLers” boycotted the appointment at 8:30 am on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays in the Great Hall. At that time there were the two courses, on The Religious Sense and on the Church. Fr Giussani would often regret that the arguments were not so well-prepared because of his growing commitments with the leadership of the Movement. However, the students paid great attention to those lectures. Fr Giussani kept on challenging them not only to compare the content with their own experience, but to come up with questions and observations, something very rare at that time in university courses. In one of the three weekly periods, Fr Giussani had organized a series of seminars and the Great Hall was strewn with small groups of students debating under expert guidance the most varied problems concerning exegesis, literature, the Church in Eastern Europe and education. Fr Giussani would supervise and intervene when someone needed clarifications. He had a very penetrating gaze; he seemed to look so deeply into you that some people were almost scared. Despite his hoarse voice, his speech was clear and he never lost the thread of his argument, even in the maze of long digressions. Listening to him was like eating good, tasty bread. Little by little, the Great Hall filled up; the students were so amazed at such ancient and up-to-date teaching that the word spread among them; it was the infallible method of an influence that the whole Movement enjoys today through the School of Community. One memory is very vivid. It concerns staircase F, where there was the tiny office reserved for the lecturers in “Introduction to Theology.” When it was Fr Giussani’s time for receiving people, there would be so many people up and down those stairs. And how many decisions, even definitive ones, were made in that tiny room! Some of these were important for the whole Movement; the idea of the confraternities, then of the Fraternity, was born here, from the need expressed by those completing their degree and considering marriage but wanting to carry on the experience of CLU. I could give the name of the one who inspired that idea. Then there was another friend of mine, intelligent and skeptical, whom I met on the stairs after a discussion with Fr Giussani, and I was struck by his face: it was like that of a child. Dinner at Trezzano sul Naviglio One evening, that bunch of friends organized a dinner at Trezzano sul Naviglio and Fr Giussani came. There were about thirty of us. At the height of the celebrations, Simone took out a Sombrero, I don’t know from where, and presented it to him, to everyone’s surprise. Then the dancing started. It was marvelous to be together like that; you could breathe in the friendship in its best moments. All of a sudden, Fr Giussani interrupted the dance and said, more or less, “It’s wonderful to see you so happy and getting on so well together this evening. But when you discover a note of sadness in the joy of the dancing, you will become aware of an even greater joy, and I wish this moment may come soon for you.” My final recollection touches me very personally. Perhaps because I was very tired by the responsibility of leadership, I had been to the mountains to rest and had taken only the Bible with me. I read it over and over again, until I happened to find a verse of the Song of Songs that struck me as very beautiful: “Who is she, coming from the desert, leaning on her beloved?” On my return to Milan, I went to tell Fr Giussani about it and he answered me, “You are coming from the desert of affection, and today you would follow Jesus anywhere. What you still need to recognize is the sign, and we are that sign.” That day was crucial for the definition of my vocation, if not for the form it would later take up, then at least as the channel in which it would unfold. These episodes I have retold are instants of truth that lie like seeds in the soil of the memory. I offer them, on this feast of the golden jubilee of CL, as a contribution of gratitude for what we have received and as seedlings for the hope of every one of us.