ecumenism The Orthodox-Catholic View He met the Movement twenty years ago, clandestinely, because in those times in Russia it was dangerous to be with Christians. Viktor Popkov, an Orthodox who had spent a year and a half in a lager, for some time now has been the editor of the Russian editions of Fr Giussani’s books. “One notices something if it is what he is looking for…. I said to myself, ‘Here are other people who are trying to live their Christianity’” by Giovanna Parravicini We saw each other for the first time twenty years ago, at one of the clandestine seminars organized now and then between Italians and Russians, after the fortuitous meeting between one of the first Christian communities (a group of young people scattered throughout Moscow, Leningrad, and Smolensk) that spontaneously sprang up in the USSR and some students from CL. There were about fifteen of us, crammed into a friend’s house in a low-income apartment building on the squalid periphery of Leningrad. I remember, among the others, a young face, a little intimidated, with bright blue eyes and a serious and curious gaze. Viktor Popkov came from Smolensk, having spent the night on a train to meet “the Italians,” and had already spent a year and a half in a lager, condemned in 1980 for having joined a group of Christians. Viktor has been working with us in Moscow for ten years now, at the Library of the Spirit, and we share with him each day’s events, from the most banal things to the choices we have to make about work, about relationships with colleagues, about concerns ranging from family problems to judgments on politics. But the most stimulating thing is the possibility of helping each other daily to take a step toward the ideal in the concreteness of the work we have in our hands, witnessing to each other and helping each other to witness to those we meet about the beauty of life lived in the faith–we, Catholics and he, Orthodox. What I was looking for So, Viktor has seen and participated close up in the entire trajectory lived by the Movement here in Russia, from the time of those first encounters to today, as editor of Giussani’s trilogy of books (Viktor oversees the publication process). “ What struck you? What did you see in the charism when you encountered it?” I ask him, point blank, from one desk to the other, since we work in the same room. “One notices something if it is what he is looking for, and then he becomes very attentive, even to the smallest details,” he responds, almost as if talking to himself. “And this is what happened to me, encountering the Movement. At that time here, no type of religious life existed. It was a kind of desert; the Church had been devastated. Only every now and then you’d meet some individual who practiced an entirely interior, individual religiosity, made up of practices of piety and ascesis, but that had no possibility of impacting on life. Naturally, when I began to ask myself about the problem of the meaning of life, of the social realities surrounding me, and of the nexus everything had with Christianity, I couldn’t find around me any responses capable of helping me overcome the dualism in which we were immersed. My question was, ‘What is the meaning of life, what does it mean to realize yourself as a person, living as a Christian but remaining in the world, in fact, trying to mold reality according to the truth you’ve encountered?’” An ideal confirmation Viktor found a first response reading Dostoevskij and Christian thinkers such as Solov’ëv, Bulgakov, Shmemann, Meyendorf, and others, but it was always a theory, a confirmation on the purely ideal level. “I was already happy, because I said to myself, ‘Well then, I’m not the only one who thinks this way.’ And then upon my first encounter with you in Leningrad, I said to myself, ‘Here are other people who are trying to live their Christianity.’ It’s true, however, that at the time your story seemed to me a bit exotic, curious, happening so far away.” I interject, “At the time, in the USSR, we felt completely isolated; we felt a bit like Martians.” Popkov continues, “But to realize yourself truly as a person you need to encounter someone, to begin a journey with him, and it was precisely this life that I was missing. This was exactly what I was able to see when I came to Italy for the first time and I met your communities.” “ That is?” “Well, I saw communities made up of persons who were all different from each other, each engaged in something, with their own responsibilities and interests, diverse, but also profoundly united. Together with you, I understood more that we live in a world in which we have responsibility, that we cannot erect barriers and defend ourselves from it, limiting ourselves to thinking about our personal salvation. I have always thought that each of us has received his own talent and must bear fruit where he is called, according to the vocation he has received. The encounter with the people of the Movement, through the various communities I met in Italy, opened me to recognizing this possibility in everything.” Viktor is eager to underline that he encountered the answer through a life, a friendship that goes from work, to hikes in the mountains, and to soccer games (initially his profession was that of a sports coach, and soccer is his passion). Christianity is a life “ So, I came to understand that the questions I had inside me, in effect, many, many people had, and they were already responding seriously, translating into acts some attempts at responding. For me, it was the confirmation that Christianity as such, as life, is possible; up to that time, I had remaining doubts about this. It’s one thing when you hear theologians talk and you agree with what they say, but it’s quite another when normal, common people live a Christian life, incarnating it in their own existence, each differently according to his talents, his characteristics, his professional choices. And another thing that struck me in this sense was the name, Communion and Liberation. I was struck by the idea behind it because I remembered the sayings of the Fathers of the Church on freedom, not understood as the choice between various alternatives, but as a newness of life made possible by a lived communion. So, it was impossible to forget the Movement, once having encountered it, because it was precisely what I was missing.” The work at the Library of the Spirit And this life, then, has been decanted, so to speak, in Russia as well, through the work of the Library of the Spirit. “In the sphere of work,” Viktor resumes, “the encounter with the Movement has demonstrated that Christian life can be real; you can realize yourself and you can share the Christian life with the other, no matter how different he may be from you. A possibility of communion, of companionship is created, which each person has the possibility of enriching through his own original contribution. And this creates a possibility of encounter, a unity unthought of until now. It’s what most fascinates me about our work, when we find in the heart of the people a correspondence to what we propose, and we become an instrument so that each person can realize himself according to his own vocation.” “ Working with the books of Fr Giussani, what is the aspect that has most struck you?” “For me, Fr Giussani had become familiar through what you told me. Then, the first translations arrived, and I hardly understood anything. His language was very poetic, dense with images and metaphors, and in the first works I struggled to decipher it. The first book I began to understand (perhaps because in the meantime the translations had improved) was The Religious Sense. And I felt at home, because I had found again the idea, familiar to me, of man’s responsibility before God for reality, in each fragment, in virtue of the vocation that was given him.” The breath of man and the entire cosmos Christianity and politics is a dual concept that is not easy in today’s Russia, but Viktor links this concept closely to what he has said up to this point about responsibility, in which the thought of Fr Giussani closely joins that of the Russian religious philosophers. In this regard, he quotes Florenskii, “Even one breath of man is of value for the entire cosmos.” Then he quotes Fr Giussani, “My wish for you is that you never be tranquil,” never hide in the face of the challenge constituted by every instant of reality, saying, “It’s got nothing to do with me.” “ CL is a movement started in Italy by a Catholic priest. What can it give to you, an Orthodox?” “Formally, certainly, it is a great movement born in the West, with its own history and tradition, different from those of the Orthodox Church, but its interior impulse, its method, is the way of Christianity, in which one can recognize anyone, be he Roman Catholic or Orthodox, because it is a life striving to transfigure the surrounding world. It is the way of Christianity, and you can’t say that it is a purely Catholic way (evidently there are Catholic elements, because it was born in a Catholic environment, and is composed mainly of Catholics), but it is truly universal; it concerns everyone, it is the position of the Christian man as such, because it has to do with the annunciation of Christ to the world and the witness to His human Glory. And I believe that each of us can and must realize this testimony, remaining what he is, in the Church in which he was baptized and educated, and where he has traveled a certain journey.”