Studium Christi

Priests
by Imitation

In 1992, a group of priests in Milan began to meet with Fr Giussani. They wanted to help each other to live the vocation to holiness proper to Baptism. The house and the rule: silence, sharing, punctuality. A talks with Fr Giorgio Pontiggia

edited by Alberto Savorana

At the beginning of the nineties, a group of Milanese priests, belonging to the Fraternity of CL, had the idea of helping each other to live more decisively the vocation to holiness proper to Baptism , with particular reference to their call to the diocesan priesthood. Fr Giorgio Pontiggia tells us the circumstances that gave rise to this group, which decided to take the name Studium Christi.
It was 1992. It all started from a negative circumstance: At that time the CL priests would meet Fr Giussani occasionally. Then, for quite a long period, he couldn’t come to see us, and we stopped meeting together. Some of us, however, as well as missing Fr Giussani, felt that there was something ambiguous in our attitude. We understood that the communion among us was not for our life. We began to meet amongst ourselves, and when it was possible again, we invited Fr Giussani. I remember that he made three observations: “There are a lot of you, but you have no incidence; you have no incidence because you are not united; you are not united because you don’t follow a rule.” And he threw down the challenge.

How did you rise to this challenge?

We began to think abstractly about a rule. When we spoke to him about it, he didn’t let us finish, but called out, “The rule is the Movement; and this doesn’t mean first and foremost ‘doing’ things for the Movement, but imitating my experience.” And he began to go into detail: “For example, recite the breviary prayers like I do; recite the Angelus like I do; understand why I say that the synthesis of everything is ‘Veni Sancte Spiritus, Veni per Mariam…’”
What overwhelmed us was the idea of “imitation.” After that time, a small group of us thought that the rule of the Memores Domini was what could be of most help to us. We took it up, even to the point of thinking of establishing a “house,” the first house of Studium Christi, in Milan. Fr Giussani commented that it was right, “because if a value does not take flesh in a concrete experience, you lose it, even though the concrete experience does not exhaust the value.” I proposed this idea to about thirty priests among my friends, and ten of them accepted. For three years, from 1992 to 1994, we met with Fr Giussani every fortnight. For him, this fidelity meant acknowledging something new that was happening and of which we ourselves were not faintly aware.

Why did you choose this name?

Our intention was the same as that which had moved Fr Giussani to begin the Studium Christi in his seminary years along with the future Archbishop of Bologna, Enrico Manfredini. He had no objection; perhaps he glimpsed in this choice of ours a realization of that first Studium Christi.
As the manifesto of our groups, we chose a phrase John Paul II said to the CL priests when he received us at Castelgandolfo in 1985: “Renew continually the discovery of the charism that has fascinated you, and it will lead you more powerfully to make yourselves servants of that one power, who is Christ the Lord.”

In the panorama of the Church’s life, what is the new factor in a group of priests like yours?

Fr Giussani suggested it to us during a meeting, when he spoke of this strange group of ours as the beginning of a “revolution” which could bring something new into the Church’s life. We didn’t see this unity amongst priests as deriving from a role to be carried out, but from an experience, the experience of the charism that makes even the role different. He spoke of the house of Studium Christi as our “residence” and of the parish as our place of mission.

What aspects of the rule do you consider most important?

Firstly, silence. Fr Giussani has often told us, “For priests to keep silence, personally and together, this is already a revolution in awareness.” Secondly, sharing “to the death,” which is to say, charity over the whole span of life. Thirdly, Fr Giussani has always recommended punctuality, “as the expression of your being before the Mystery. So silence is deepening one’s awareness of the Mystery and charity is its manifestation.” In a word, the basic characteristic of the Studium Christi is the sequela of the whole Movement. We don’t want to build something different, but simply to help each other live the task the Church gives us, according to the charism through which Christ encountered us.

How do parishes and bishops react to this novelty of life amongst diocesan priests?

After the first beginnings, I met some people who thanked me because they saw a change in the Studium Christi priests. One parishioner said, “We saw how Father comes back after being with you and we are happy to make the sacrifice of not having him always with us.” This helps to understand that there is no contrast between charism and role as far as we are concerned; this contrast happens when the charism is not lived according to its nature. The experience in the Movement puts you in the best condition for living the role assigned you by the Church.
A bishop had accompanied a Studium Christi priest for his induction as pastor in a lonely abandoned parish; on the way back, he said to me, “I didn’t realize it was such a desolate place, but I take heart when I see the friendship amongst you.” When Fr Giussani heard of it, he made us make a timetable so that that priest would never be left alone. Some time later, he complained to me that I had not assigned him a day to go to visit that priest friend!
There are Studium Christi priest living abroad, in the Kazakhstan steppes and in the huge cities in the United States.

What importance does mission have in your priestly experience?
All the Studium Christi priests have offered themselves for the missions and over the years “houses” have been opened in Kazakhstan, Argentina, Paraguay, Venezuela, Peru and Puerto Rico; these are all related to the Studium Christi in Milan. There are other groups in the United States and elsewhere. At present, there are 250 priests throughout the world belonging to Studium Christi. In Italy, there are a number of groups; in Como and Rimini they have their own houses. One of us, Monsignor Vecerrica, became a bishop two years ago and still takes part in the Studium Christi group in the Marches region.

In what way are you related to the Fraternity of CL?

We are not a “clerical superfraternity,” but a group of the one Fraternity of CL. Through personal responsibility in his own group, each of us lives the immanence of the one Fraternity. We have always wanted to live the experience of the charism within the function the Church has given us. The charism is the life of the person, whereas these days a priest is more and more reduced to a functionary, but your function is incisive only if you live an experience.

During a meeting with seminarians some years ago, Fr Giussani was asked what he recommended to someone preparing for the priesthood. Fr Giussani replied drily, “Let him be a man.” What do you think he meant?

This stresses the way one has to follow the Movement: if it’s for a role, even the role of a priest, the “I” is never committed, whereas if it’s because the faith is an answer to you, to your elementary needs, then it becomes the driving force of your whole life.

In a homily for Vocations Day, a priest explained that, as things stand, in ten years’ time many parishes will have only one priest, and some none at all. He concluded that this would be providential because at last the laypeople would take up their responsibility. So, are priests not so essential after all?
The priest is irreplaceable because he assures the sacraments that are the source and paradigm of Christian life. Without a priest there would be no Church. The tragedy is that the decadent state of the Church today renders the priest almost useless. And the tendency I see around is not to question oneself about the aridity of experience we are given to live in these times of ours, but to clericalize the laity. An acolyte wrote to me recently, “For a long time I had been asking myself if there were reasons in Christian experience. When I met you I found the answer.” As a layman, he was closed up inside his role, but he had never experienced that faith is reasonable. A clericalized layman is almost worse than a clerical priest.
All our effort in Studium Christi is so as not to slide from the person into the role to be carried out. In our meetings, pastoral problems are not what we deal with in the first place–though we speak of these, too–but the human experience we are living. Otherwise, we would risk turning into a small and useless, if not harmful, “super-curia.” Through our human experience we want to make a contribution to the Church’s life, that’s all.