Cl in the world

An Implicit Question

Portland, Sacramento, and Los Angeles: On the edge of the human desert, the unforeseen and unforeseeable flowering of the Movement, the experience of a positive response to the desires of the heart. A travel journal that reads like the Acts of the Apostles

BY GIORGIO VITTADINI

Portland, the capital of Oregon, is certainly not a hospitable place for Catholicism. A conception of freedom as the absence of ties prevails. Eighty percent of the population officially declare they are atheists; only eight percent are Catholics; and state law permits euthanasia-assisted suicide. Among the Catholics there are ultraconservatives, as well as progressives–who, a few years ago, celebrated Mass with Coca Cola in place of wine and popcorn in place of bread!

It was related to us in a Portland pub that the Movement was born here in an apparently casual but providential way. It all happened after Sergio Villotta, 31, came here to work. The beginning was not easy. At a certain point he received a phone call from a family that lives near Portland. They were in Ireland years before, and they came here with a spirit of adventure. Their son decided to go to college in Montreal. In Montreal, he met CL responsible John Zucchi, and one day he attended a meeting with Fr Paolo Pezzi of the Fraternity of St Charles Borromeo. This was the turning point. He went to Rome, to Fr Massimo’s seminary, but he only told his parents he was going to Rome to study. His parents went to Rome for the Jubilee and decided to see where their son was living. There, Fr Paolo Sottopietra, a priest in the St Charles Fraternity, asked them, “What do you think of your son’s choice?” “What choice?” his parents asked. Thus, they learned that their son was in a seminary connected with a strange Catholic group, but they did not understand much more than that. This is why, when their son told them that Sergio, a member of his Movement, was in Portland, they phoned him to find out more. Sergio went and proposed reading one of Giussani’s books together. This was the beginning of the first School of Community in Salem, Oregon. Little by little, the most disparate sort of people started joining. Today, fifteen people participate regularly in School of Community.

Given this precedent, there were two key events during this trip to Oregon: the meeting with the Archbishop and the presentation of The Risk of Education by Fr Gerry, from Rochester, Minnesota, a friend of the Archbishop (who used to be Bishop of Rochester).

The revolution of Rebecca
The Archbishop listened to us for more than two hours, deeply interested in the CL experience, and then he told us about Portland, somewhat disconsolate. “Here it is like being St Paul in the Areopagus: when you talk about Jesus, everybody tells you to come back some other time.” Therefore, we went to the meeting on education with no illusions, thinking that we could not expect very much from this first public appearance of CL. Present at the meeting were the people who are a part of this first community. They included Rebecca, a girl who was active for years in the American Communist Party. Just as she was thinking that nothing more would be able to respond to her demand for human and social liberation, she met Sergio. CL mysteriously awakened in her the hope for an answer: “I was struck by the human intensity of this group. It cannot but be a symptom of truth.” More and more people arrived at the meeting, 60 of them, from who knows where, all very interested. Within an hour, Fr Gerry covered the basic points of The Risk of Education, giving examples of what they have meant in his experience in Rochester. The results were surprising: more than an hour of questions on experience, reason, education, and what a movement is.

The amazement of the Archbishop
It got late and was time to stop, otherwise it would have gone on late into the night. We went to dinner and we sang together–a simple gesture, but always “new” and touching in these parts, where the dimension of community is usually reduced to the level of sociology, without depth.

Rebecca, seeing Jonathan and Riro play, relived the experience of the island off Portland where she was born, of the brotherly unity among men whom she lived there with many years earlier, so beautiful but so fleeting. In the days afterward, Sergio met again some of the people present at the lecture. All of them were deeply struck. One of them wrote to him: “God has blessed me with many things: one of these is having met you, finding out about CL, and the other is becoming your friend.” The Archbishop himself was amazed at how many people were there and at the intensity of the meeting.

New Age, Scientology…
We then flew to Sacramento, the historical settlement of CL in California.
The impression one gets in this state and on the West Coast in general is that there is no longer a civilization, not a Western civilization, not even the strictly Protestant WASP civilization of the East Coast. The Pacific Ocean seems narrower, it seems that the point of reference is no longer Christian and post-Christian Europe, but the Orient with its pantheism or religious nihilism. In this festival of New Age, Scientology, sects, atheism, and Eastern cults, the idea itself of “person” is destroyed, in a way that is very functional for consumerism, which needs individuals with no substance, who are easily manipulated. Thus, people usually get married young, but the marriages rarely last very long. Men and women no longer know how to love each other in the true sense of the word, and as in so many other parts of the world, the family is replaced by temporary unions, instinctive affections, and couplings in order to generate children and raise them as single parents. The Bacichs’ mother now lives in Sacramento, and the Movement was born in California through her. In order not to be engulfed by this destruction of the human, and wanting to remain in the Catholic tradition together with her children, she was looking for something or someone who would help her with a living proposal. From this search and from this encounter, the Movement was born in Sacramento. Their point of reference is Bruno Montesano, an Italian who has been in California for a number of years. His story is “strange,” too. His wife was Protestant when he met her. The journey of their relationship up to marriage is at the same time the story of her conversion and of his opening to the best in the American mentality. Many people have found in their unity a comfort and a spur to keep going forward.

The challenge of education
There is a third “heart” to the community: Holly, a teacher and a Memores Domini, who has recently finished her doctoral dissertation in education, in which she compared the educational line of Fr Giussani with the theses of the leading American pedagogues. Holly brilliantly demonstrated that Fr Giussani’s formulation, much more than that of the laicist pedagogues, can be truly faithful to the desire for freedom at the very origin of the American nation. Her dissertation was so well received that the University of San Francisco published it. However, Holly has decided not to pursue an academic career but to teach in high school, and she is at the origin of the GS experience in California.

She came to Italy with the first Californian GS group a couple of years ago. One would have thought that those kids would not last long, since their family origins were so fragile (their parents, very often separated, were atheists or from sects like Scientology and New Age), and the pressure of an anti-Christian mentality was great. And yet, after many years, scattered far and wide, most of them have remained in the Movement. Holly and the others have kept up with them one by one, without ever abandoning them. In this climate, in Sacramento, the Fraternity of Families promoted the public meeting on The Risk of Education, presented by Msgr Albacete. This fraternity is the sign of stability of adherence to the Movement and of the beginning of a new civilization.

In the city of the angels
The third stop on the journey was Los Angeles, the metropolitan agglomerate that stretches from the desert to the sea. It is not a city; it is a world in which one goes from “a day at the beach” to the gang delinquency that sometimes turns into “civil war;” from the most highly professional occupations to the art of getting by, from the million-dollar homes of Beverly Hills to those built in the desert 60 miles from the coast by “do-it-yourselfers” with materials bought at Home Depot. Catholicism in this city lives as a working-class reality in parishes dominated by the hispanidad of the Mexicans. Here, too, CL grew up around the house of Memores Domini, just like around a medieval convent. It was born through personal encounters, lacking any kind of structure, any point of reference.

Like Francis Xavier
In the meeting to present the Movement, held near one of the Hispanic parishes, we heard the moving story of these new friends. They encountered Damian Bacich and our Memores, people fascinated by the encounter with Christ, by the memory of the faces of their friends, Fr Giussani and all the others. Like St Francis Xavier, the names of the friends carried in their hearts, the Memores have become an energy of affection and reason that embraces their neighbors unconditionally. Thus, we met the journalist who read Traces in Florence, looked up its editor, Alberto Savorana, then presented herself to our friends in Los Angeles, following them as a hope for her troubled life; and we met Henry, who lives in the desert and takes an hour and a half to get to School of Community. There are also Edwin and Claudia, full of tribulation but certain that the path of the Movement is the one that can give them hope; and Jennifer, a convert from Protestantism–where she was alone–to a Christian companionship where she is accepted without being measured. The history of hope for man met by Jesus begins again.