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Communion and Liberation

Communion and Liberation is an ecclesial movement whose purpose
is the education to Christian maturity of its adherents and collaboration
in the mission of the Church in all the spheres of contemporary life.
It began in Italy in 1954 when Fr Luigi Giussani established
a Christian presence in Berchet high school in Milan with a group
called Gioventù Studentesca (Student Youth), GS for short.
The current name of the movement, Communion and Liberation (CL),
appeared for the first time in 1969. It synthesizes the conviction that
the Christian event, lived in communion, is the foundation of the authentic
liberation of man. Communion and Liberation is today present
in about seventy countries throughout the world.
There is no type of membership card, but only the free participation
of persons. The basic instrument for the formation of adherents
is weekly catechesis, called “School of Community.”
The official magazine of the Movement is the international monthly,
Traces – Litterae Communionis

Each year in Rimini, Italy, the Movement of Communion and Liberation organizes a great cultural event, called The Meeting For Friendship Among Peoples.  Participants come from around the world for the week-long event, discussing culture, religion, politics – and how they interact.  In 2008, the Meeting's Theme was: Either Protagonists or Nobodies. The gathering attracted 4,000 volunteers and 700,000 participants.

 

The essence of the charism given to Communion and Liberation can be signaled by three factors.

• first of all, the announcement that God became man (the wonder, the reasonableness, the enthusiasm for this): “The Word was made flesh and dwells among us.”
• secondly, the affirmation that this man – Jesus of Nazareth dead and risen – is a present event in a “sign” of “communion,” i.e., of unity of a people guided, as a guarantee, by a living person, ultimately the Bishop of Rome;
• thirdly: only in God made man, man, therefore only in His presence and, thus only through – in some way – the experienceable form of His presence (therefore, ultimately only within the life of the Church) can man be truer and mankind be truly more human. St Gregory Nazianzen writes, “If I were not Yours, my Christ, I would feel like a finished creature”. It is thus from His presence that both morality and the passion for the salvation of man (which is mission) spring up.

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What is Communion and Liberation to me?

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The history
The major milestones in a journey
From 1954 to now

Pictures
Moments in the life of the Movement
Photos

CL around the world
Addresses and countries where the Movement is present
List

Documents By Luigi Giussani
Fr Giussani’s letter to John Paul II on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Communion and Liberation. January 26th, 2004
Fr Giussani’s letter to the Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his Pontificate. Panorama, October 30th, 2003
Fr Giussani’s letter to the Fraternity following the annual pilgrimage to Loreto. June 22nd, 2003
Fr Giussani’s letter to the Fraternity for the twentieth anniversary of the Pontifical recognition of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation. February 22nd, 2002
Fr Giussani’s testimony as presented at the Pontifical Council for the Laity’s Seminar, “Ecclesiastical movements and the new communities in the pastoral care of the Bishops”. June 18th, 1998
Recognizing Christ
How a movement is born. 1989

 

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The beginning and end of Christian morality

I've been reading ahead in Is It Possible to Live This Way? and stumbled upon the chapter on freedom. After a long discussion on the true meaning of freedom, Father Giussani writes: "Freedom isn't choice, it's only a possibility to choose because it's imperfect" (p. 76). And then on the next page:

Yet carrying out this correct choice demands a clear awareness of the relationship with Christ, of the relationship with destiny. It's the lived religious sense. Read the gospel...Jesus had made breakfast for everybody -- what care -- and no one dared speak because they all knew it was the Lord. He's near Simon and He says to him, very softly, without the others realizing, He says quietly, 'Simon, do you love me more than these?' This is the culmination of Christian morality: the beginning and the end of Christian morality. He didn't tell him, 'Simon, you betrayed me. Simon, think how many mistakes you made. Simon, how many betrayals! Simon, just think that you can make the same mistake tomorrow and the day after... Think about how fragile you are, what a coward you are in front of me.' No! 'Simon, do you love me more than these?' He went to the depths of everything, to the bottom of everything; so this bottom of everything pulls everything along with it. And Peter, who loved Him, ended up dying like Him... Man finds his dignity in the choice of what he values most in life and from which he expects the greatest satisfaction. (p. 77)

I am so grateful for this text. I have understood for a long time that freedom and morality are tightly bound in Father Giussani's thought. I have also grasped that his denunciation of moralism was never brought on by a disdain for morality. But to have this point so clearly spelled out for us is a gift to everyone in the Movement: "Freedom isn't choice..." There it is, so clear, so transparent! And the heart is not "what I like" or "what I want" -- it's the constant thirst for what I'm made for, my destiny, Christ. I can be seduced to imagine that something I want is my destiny -- if I lose sight of the ever-expanding horizon that calls me with an Infinite love. Moralism's answer, which says we have to suppress our desire, do violence to our desire, is useless, even mortally dangerous, to our souls. It is the solution of a lonely humanity, a humanity that has ceased to listen to the voice that calls each of us by name, a humanity without Christ.

We need to hear Him ask us, "Do you love me?" We need to let that question burn into our hearts every minute of every hour, engage us, draw us through our days. Who will speak this question aloud for us? Because even those who are so blessed to have heard Jesus speak directly to them through metaphysical means, do not hear this question so perfectly and constantly that they can forgo the Eucharist or the people of God, who make up the Church. No, God has willed it that we must turn to one another -- there is no other way -- and remind each other that He asks, He continually asks, "Do you love me?"

If you expect your satisfaction from something that can be dust tomorrow, you'll have dust. But who calls your attention to this? No one can, none of us has the strength to do it for himself: only together can we do it. This is the way that the Church, in the world, calls the world's attention to this... Only in the companionship are you recalled to this fascination with being or this awareness of our own fragility due to something that is a choice -- to be able to choose a good... to adhere to what brings us to destiny and to await destiny every day; to wait, every day, for it to come. (pp 77 and 78)

"Only in the companionship..." It is another unambiguous, completely transparent remark that we cannot sidestep -- we must look it in the face. Who are these people, these fellow Christians, surrounding me? Why has God placed them, and not some others, in my path? How do they reveal my destiny to me? Do I treasure them, as the life blood that connects me to the voice of my Beloved? Do I love them?

 

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The meaning of tenderness

 

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The Risk of Education

I have been reading The Risk of Education, by Father Giussani, with two friends (really, we've just begun it), and I have been thinking a lot about when I first read this book, and about how my understanding of Christianity was so inadequate then. It was a couple of years into my experience with the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, and I remember being very frustrated with Giussani for not giving concrete instructions about how to do his method of education (CGS is SO concrete in its training method). I had the feeling that ten different people could read any one of his books (at the time we did not have The Journey to Truth... or Is it Possible...? in English) and they would all come away with modes of living the "CL thing" so radically different and contradictory to render the original text useless for helping them discover/encounter Christ. In other words, I found "Risk" to be a very abstract book, "in the clouds," and with very few applications to my lived life. Nonetheless, I liked it!

But now I am coming at this book in a completely new way. First of all, no method can be learned without a living guide. One cannot do the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd without seeing it in action, without the human experience of training (so many people are frustrated because they buy Sofia's books, hoping for a "road map" that they can use in place of training -- but no such luck!). The same is true of CL or GS or "Giussani-style education" -- whatever you want to call it. In CL, you can't go for "training," as in CGS, but it is available -- just not in any pre-arranged or packaged form. One can (and ought to) wrestle with the texts, read and reread them until one has deeply absorbed their meaning, but no amount of study can substitute for meeting the charism, spending time with it, and joining it.

It used to bug me so much when people would ask, "So, when/how did you meet the Movement?" I didn't like the way they used the word "meet." It seemed like a made up use of the word in order to make some "important" point -- it felt artificial to me. In ordinary English we would say, "How did you discover the Movement?" or "When did you first hear about it?" But now I understand why it bugged me -- not so much because something artificial was happening (now I have "met" the Movement, and that's the only word to describe coming face to face with a living Presence) -- but because it was a presumptuous question -- simply being exposed, hearing about, even going to SoC do not constitute "meeting." I met the Movement when I met Father Vincent. Before that, I had been able to glimpse it (as from a distance) when I heard Riro speak, or Father Rich, or Monsignor Albacete -- but my own heart was not sufficiently open for these moments to constitute true "meetings." I even had friends who revealed the charism at work: Giorgio, Sabrina, Terese, and Tiziana come to mind -- but in meeting them, I still hadn't "met" the movement because in becoming amazed at certain things or almost everything about them, I was still making myself the final judge about them -- I thought I had already figured out the wisdom, or joie de vivre, or sanctity they possessed -- I didn't try to follow it to its source -- I didn't try to follow it at all. It was like a sign pointing down a road that I refused to travel because I thought I already knew it and had already been on it.

What was different about Father Vincent? It may have had little to do with him. When the foreign thought entered my mind that day: "This is for me!", perhaps it was just that having moved to a new town so recently, I was less sure of myself, less comfortable with all the answers I was carrying around inside of me. Perhaps, in all my experiences of CL, I had finally reached the "tipping point." Or perhaps, distracted as I was that day, I could still intuit that the Presence of Christ in Father Vincent was strange, new, and yet familiar -- and tremendously attractive -- and it was a face of Christ I hadn't yet made my own (I guess you could say that I had been following one parable exclusively, without taking another, equally rich parable into account) -- and most important, it was a face I wanted to follow, join, make my own.

And now, having met Father Vincent, having met his life, it has been like a "proposal" or "provocation" or "hypothesis" for me to live all of life, in every dimension -- he, or rather the charism that has seized him, is what Father Giussani refers to as an "authority" or a true "educator." Through Father Vincent, I have received an approach to tradition. What is so weird is that I've spent very little time with this priest, and he's kind of spotty about reading and responding to his emails. But my education can continue because I have met the same thing I met in Father Vincent in Father Roberto (but what a wildly different manifestation!), in my friend Patty, in Chris Bacich, in a young guy named Giuseppe who lived in Pittsburgh for a few months this past fall...

But the even more important point is that it (the charism) doesn't depend on these particular individuals. I experience it in my daily life, mostly as a result of the profound and moving experience of School of Community this year, but most importantly in the new fraternity group that Marie and I have formed. A great and rich newness has entered my life since Father Vincent's visit two years ago.

And this richness -- something that is behind and between every word in "The Risk of Education," but cannot be explicitly communicated by any text, save maybe the Bible -- is the approach to tradition, the way of looking at reality (Father Giussani sometimes calls it a "gaze," full of love) that is the treasure of Christianity.

What is the biggest difference between how I lived my Christianity back in the early, rapturous days of discovering the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd and who I am today? I think that back then I clung to a kind of dualism -- I wanted to separate my life in Christ from other aspects of my life -- certainly I wanted Christ to help the other aspects of my life, and I brought thoughts of him into every corner of my life -- but still there was a disconnect between these two elements that is hard to explain or describe. I didn't get that every circumstance in my life, every person in front of me, was the Presence of Christ calling to me in a way particular to that circumstance. I thought there were privileged moments in which Christ was present, quite intensely, and there were other moments where he was somewhere in heaven, looking down, connected by the holy telephone line to my brain/heart, but not in front of me, asking something of me in the messy here and now of human interactions. I first found him in scripture, then at Mass, then in the children in the atrium...but CL has managed to educate me to the fact that he is present in "reality in its totality." So now I live immersed in wonder (except when I forget or become distracted!).

 

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If you have any complaints...

"This is the Victory that Conquers the World, Our Faith"

"We come to the Fraternity Exercises in order to revisit the things we always tell each other. Some of them become even more alive in the diversity of our speech. We meet all together because there is nothing, normally, that can help the emotion of the heart or the liveliness of perception of our mind, nothing capable of influence, like a tender, motherly, brotherly, friendly push on our will, more than our coming together." (Fr. Giussani)

The content of the Spiritual Exercises took our book of the School of Community, Is It Possible to Live this Way? as a jumping-off point. I have so many thoughts about the content, but I want to write about them after all my blogging friends have returned from the exercises, so that perhaps we can have a discussion about them. Meanwhile, though, there are three very important things that happened for me at these exercises:

1. Many of our friends from the Chicago community were present at these particular exercises, and being face-to-face with them reminded me of my reasons for keeping myself apart from the movement during the years I lived there. I was particularly struck, thinking about what my life would have been if I had dived right into living the proposals of the movement while I was among these people who first introduced me to them. It surely would have been better! It was surely sin that kept me from fully embracing what these friends wanted to show me. To be specific: it was the sin of pride: I already knew how Christ came to me, I already knew what Christ wanted of me, I already had a history of working out my Christianity on my own and I didn't want anyone to tell me that that history was limited and starved for oxygen because I knew it was beautiful, dammit! To use the CL way of characterizing this attitude, I was reducing the Mystery to my own measure, insisting on making the decisions about how and where and when Christ had something to say to me. What is amazing to me is that I could come to these conclusions based on piety, how I was reading Fr. Giussani, moralism. But I remember one Lent retreat that Father Rich gave us, while we lived in Chicago, in which he spoke about how we had to get over the "scandal of appearances." I thought I knew what he was talking about -- how the Pharisees weren't able to get over the scandal of Jesus' human appearance, how Joseph needed the help of the angel to get over the scandal of appearances when he discovered Mary was pregnant, how for some people the Eucharistic host is a scandal because it seems impossible for the Infinite to confine himself to a little crumb of bread... But what I was hung up on was the scandal of the appearance of the local Church -- that Christ could manifest himself in these particular people, with all their irritating and unpleasant humanity (sorry, my friends), was just too much for me to digest. I concluded that CL was a "nice idea" but I couldn't see the beauty in front of my eyes. What arrogance! Because I couldn't see the beauty, it must not be there! I thought I was using my heart, but what I was doing was making myself the measure. How hard it is to understand this distinction until you've lived through the mistake of confusing them (and the consequences of this mistake -- which are loneliness and bitterness). Being among these people now, I see their beauty -- it is a profound beauty, one that makes me ask, "Who is this man who could cause such a miracle among these particular people?"
2. What a different experience it was for me to go to the exercises with Marie, my fraternity sister! Last year, I went "alone" -- of course, I immediately hooked up with new friends when I went to Minnesota, and I never for a moment felt myself to be alone while I was there, but what I mean was that I did not go with anyone from my local community. During these exercises, Marie and I discussed what we were hearing and witnessing, just as I did with the people I met in Minnesota last year, but I was able to express so much more with her -- the conversations went much deeper and were also much more concrete because we share a history already. There is also a whole new dimension to the content of the exercises for me -- because I know that in our fraternity group I will be wrestling with what Father Carron's lessons mean for Marie, as well as for myself. This brings out facets I never would have considered, and it enriches my life.
   
3. As I tried to formulate a question for the assembly, and then, as I sought answers to my questions, I discovered that my biggest vulnerability or weakness has to do with an urge to organize or even strategize the Mystery. What was particularly striking about this personal insight is that this is not the first time I've recognized this problem in myself and vowed to overcome it. Before joining the Fraternity, I never thought of myself as a control freak -- if anything, I felt "organizationally challenged" and desired a little more control and strategy in my life. But it is not my life that I seem compelled to organize and control, in any case (that's still something I contemplate on the level of "impossible dream") -- it's the way that Christ chooses to show himself to me in my surroundings and in the community he's given me. This topic probably requires its own blog post, so let's just leave it on the level of vague abstraction right now. Anyway, it's something I need to work on a little more.

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Untiring Openness, Most Faithful Unity