Saturday, October 18, 2008

Our own (human)kind: relationship with the Mystery

Giorgio Vittadini, President of the Foundation for Subsidiarity, speaking to the Italian newspaper Avvenire, which interview is reprinted in the current issue of Traces, about the internationalization of The Meeting and of Communion and Liberation, building on Paul's timely posting of Giussani's interview about Pope Paul VI, says:
"I think that the Meeting's heritage is this ethnic entity sui generis, as Paul VI defined it, made up of men and women who are different because they show that one can live in the world today without separating reason from experience, faith from life, or interest from desire, whereas the world tries to teach them the opposite."
Giorgio says of the Meeting what is true of CL in general: "We don't believe that all good things are in the Meeting and that outside is only secularism and relativism. We hold that our example and, even more, that of 'protagonists,' is contagious." Indeed, to hold such a view that outside CL, outside the church, there is only secularism and relativism would be a betrayal of the charism we share, the one given to Luigi Giussani and now entrusted to us. What we are about, when viewed from a false perspective, Giorgio continues, "can seem like a drop in the ocean". Vittadini looks back to the tumultuous year of 1968 and says that Giussani "answered those who made fun of him for wasting time with us-while the revolution was promising to change the world- [Giussani was] saying that what changes the world is what changes man's heart. We are trying to change hearts, along with othes, in dialogue, looking at each other, offering our encounter with Christ". In short, even today, we are either protagonists or nobodies. We are free. Therefore, we must choose, but we choose realizing that it does not depend on us alone, that we cannot do it alone. We need companions. CL is a companionship. What is a companion, but one who also begs for bread?


I have written more on this over on Is It Possible? in a post entitled Recognizing reality. I also urge you to go the Communion and Liberation website, select english and watch, you'll be moved.

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