CL

A Regenerating Encounter
Excerpts from the homily by Cardinal Adrianus Simonis, Primate of Holland

This international gathering means, for me, a regenerating encounter, from which I am asked to draw inspiration for the whole year. My gratitude was renewed in the face of today’s liturgy, in front of St Bernard. Bernard urges us along the road to holiness opened to us by the charism as intelligence of ourselves immersed in time and the circumstances we are given to live. Yes, because the saint, “the true man,” as Msgr Giussani tells us again, coincides with a human personality that is protagonist.
I would like to indicate briefly three notes about the life of St Bernard that can be considered crucial to his person and his work, also because they seem to me to be very close to the consciousness that the charism of CL has of itself in the life of the Church and of the world.
1) The gaze of St Bernard–who soon revealed himself to be a talented writer–is manifested as always trained on Christ, a real presence in our life. Salvation is an existential, or rather, we might say experiential event. In fact, the Christian is the person called to make salvation his own, to appropriate it by living it in awareness.
Christ is not only pro nobis, for us, but also in us. He was truly one of us, a Man with us and like us, who like us lived, suffered, and died. There is no doubt about the fact that the emphasis–indeed, the centrality–is placed on the mystery of the Incarnation, just as I was able to perceive being proposed again here in the Movement…
2) Bernard made a mark on his time, which was burdened with deep lacerations, because he did not conceive of the Church as an organization whose “good functioning” could be sufficient to save the world. He lived her as the sacrament of the unity of his person in Jesus Christ. “In Christianity, what decides absolutely everything–thought, action, being–is if the reality of Christ is felt, if He is in one’s existence as the Real, as the ultimate need, the true Only One. All the rest is determined by this, thus either it is alive or it is only thought, even more, spoken” (R. Guardini).
We are living in times when only a truly catholic education is able to make us up to the task. Precisely man’s “I” is lost, and only the Grace of an encounter and then a constancy to it that is not activist or sentimental, a participation in a concrete Christian friendship, can edify it. Today, reform of the Church coincides with the question of the education of the younger generations. In this undertaking, a generic Christian commitment, either sacred in the clerical sense or social in the political sense, is not enough. Is not this annual international gathering perhaps situated in this great channel of renewal, on this historic ridge that urges a Church reform that can at the same time help create a new civilization?
Our coming together from every part of the earth is valuable precisely because it reproposes faith as the inexhaustible educational journey to the construction of the “I,” which, in itself, coincides with the dawn of a different human coexistence, a friendship that manifests itself as the womb generating new forms of life…
3) The last–very brief–note that leads me to juxtapose Bernard to the Movement, which breathes in harmony with the great tradition of the Church in her Fathers, is tied to the fact that another title given to Bernard is that of “Marian doctor”…
“ Whoever you are in this tide that is the world, you who rather than treading solid ground feel yourself to be tossed about down here… Following her, you will not lose your way” (St Bernard).
How better can we express the fact that “Our Lady is the method we need for familiarity with Christ”? But Fr Giussani’s latest letter to the Fraternity, which occupies these days in La Thuile, certainly does not need any comment from me. It is enough for me to point out the Catholic fullness of his words, in his treatment of Mary as the pulsating heart of redemption, that is to say, of the human drama.