Vatican City, 7 March 2015 (VIS) –
More than seventy thousand people, belonging to the movement
Communion and Liberation (CL) participated in a mass meeting with
Pope Francis in St. Peter's Square this morning, to commemorate the
sixtieth anniversary of the creation of CL and the tenth of the death
of its founder, the priest Luigi Giussani. The movement was
established in Italy in 1954, when Giussani (1922-2005), on the basis
of his experience in the “Berchet” classical lyceum in Milan,
developed the initiative of Christian presence that used the already
existing name of “Gioventu Studentesca” (GS). The current name
Communion and Liberation (CL), which appeared for the first time in
1969, summarises the conviction that the Christian event lived in
communion, is the foundation of authentic human liberation.
After listening to greetings from the
priest Julian Carron, president of the fraternity, the Holy Father
thanked all those present for their warm displays of affection and
gave the various reasons for his gratitude to Don Giussani. “The
first, and most personal, is the good that this man has done for me
and for my priestly life, through reading his books and his articles.
The other reason is that his thought is profoundly human and reaches
the deepest yearning of the person. You are aware of how important
the experience of encounter was for Don Giussani – not with an
idea, but with a person, with Jesus Christ. So, he educated in
freedom, leading to the encounter with Christ, as Christ gives us
true freedom”.
“Everything in our life begins with
an encounter”, he continued. “Let us think of the Gospel of John,
in which he narrates the disciples' first encounter with Jesus.
Andrew, John and Simon felt as if they were seen in depth, known
intimately, and this generated surprise in them, a stupor that
immediately made them feel linked to Him. … This was the decisive
discovery for St. Paul, for St. Augustine, and many others: Jesus
Christ always precedes us; when we arrive, He is already waiting for
us. He is like the flower of the almond tree, the first to bloom and
to herald the spring”.
However, this dynamic of encounter that
arouses stupor and adhesion without mercy, as “only he who has
known the tender caress of mercy truly knows the Lord. The privileged
locus of encounter is the caress of Jesus Christ's mercy towards my
sin. It is for this reason that, at times, you have heard me say that
the privileged locus of encounter with Jesus Christ is sin. It is
thanks to that merciful embrace that the wish to respond and to
change emerges, and from this there springs a different life.
Christian morality is not a titanic and voluntary effort on the part
of those who decide to be coherent and achieve it, a sort of solitary
challenge before the world. No. Christian morality is the answer, it
is the touched response when faced with the surprising mercy,
unpredictable, even 'unjust' according to human criteria, of One who
knows me, Who knows my betrayals and loves me all the same, … who
calls me again, has hope in me. ... Christian morality is not about
never falling, but about always getting up again, thanks to His hand
that reaches out to us”.
“And the way of the Church is also
this: letting God's great mercy be shown”, he exclaimed. “The
road of the Church is that of never condemning anyone eternally; of
effusing God's mercy to all those people who ask for it with a
sincere heart; the road of the Church is precisely that of leaving
behind one's own yard in order to go and seek those in the distant
peripheries of existence; that of fully adopting God's logic. The
Church too must feel the joyful impulse of becoming almond flowers,
like Jesus, for all humanity”.
Returning to the celebration of sixty
years of Communion and Liberation, the Pope emphasised that after
this time the “original charism” has lost neither its freshness
nor its vitality. “But, always remember that there is only one
centre: Jesus Christ. When I put at the centre my spiritual method,
my spiritual path, my way of putting it into practice, I stray from
the road. All the spirituality, all the charisms in the Church must
be decentred: at the centre there is only the Lord!”.
He continued, “Charism cannot be
conserved in a bottle of distilled water! Loyalty to the charism does
not mean 'petrifying' it – it is the devil who petrifies – does
not mean writing it on parchment and framing it. Reference to the
legacy that Don Giussani has left you cannot be reduced to a museum
of memories, of decisions made, of norms of conduct. It certainly
involves faithfulness to tradition, but as Mahler said, this means
'keeping the flame alive and not worshipping the ashes'. Don Giussani
would never forgive you if you lost your freedom and transformed into
museum guides or worshippers of ashes. Keep alive the memory of that
first encounter and be free! In this way, centre in Christ and in the
Gospel, you can be the arms, hands, feet, mind and heart of an
outbound Church. The path of the Church takes us out in search of
those who are far away, in the peripheries, to serve Jesus in every
marginalised and abandoned person, without faith, disappointed in the
Church, prisoner of his or her own self-centredness”.
“Reaching out also means rejecting
self-referentiality, in all its forms; it means knowing how to listen
to those who are not the same as us, learning from all, with sincere
humility. When we are slaves to self-referentiality we end up
cultivating a sort of branded spirituality: 'I am CL'. This becomes
your label. And in this way we fall into the myriad traps set by
self-referential complacency, that gazing at oneself in the mirror
that leads to disorientation and our transformation into mere
impresarios of NGOs”.
The Pope concluded his discourse with
the words of Don Giussani, from one of his first writings, in which
he affirmed that Christianity cannot be realised in history as fixed
position to defend, that relate to the new in terms of pure
antithesis, and from his letter to John Paul II in 2004 on the
occasion of the 50th anniversary of the foundation of Communion and
Liberation: 'I never intended to “found” anything. I believe that
the genius of the movement that I have seen come into being is that
of having grasped the urgency of proclaiming the need to return to
the elementary aspects of Christianity, meaning passion for
Christianity as such, in its original elements, and nothing more'.”
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