Introduction to The Journey to Truth is an Experience

The birth of an experience

This volume assembles the writings that gave an initial, organically expressed form to what was being lived at the beginnings of the movement Communion and liberation, then called Gioventù Studentesca or GS.

To re-propose them today is to re-discover the birth of an experience. These writings often originated as notes from Sunday-morning lessons given at 5, via San Antonio in Milan, Italy, the headquarters of Catholic Action in that city. They are really a “reflection on an experience”, and it is not coincidental that this is the title of the first basic booklet presented here. One of the early texts passed around was Jean Guitton’s Nouvel Art de Penser (The New Art of Thinking), where the Author astutely observes that “a reasonable person is one who submits reason to experience.” At that time, as today, it was clear that even a methodological reflection is born within a personal experience, an experience of belonging to the Christian event, which is deeply conscious, to the point of affective commitment. We felt then, exactly as we do now, that this experience was given to us to allow us to live in an existentially new way, because the way to pursue what we had seen in Scripture, in the teaching and the witness of some great teachers, appeared as something new. It was not a matter of inventing but of discovering how the tradition found new life in an experience present and appropriate to youth, from that first tiny group to so many others today – young and not so young – who have spread through fifty-nine countries, living what has affirmed itself as a method, a way, to know and love Jesus.

The discoveries and the educational concerns of these early writings, going back forty years, have developed coherently in all their successive expressions, particularly more recent ones.

Halfway through the 1950s, as I have mentioned elsewhere, the common opinion was that the Church was still a solid and deeply rooted presence in Italian society, but this opinion was founded on a strength of the past, and expressed itself on one hand through mass participation in Catholic worship, and on the other – paradoxically – through a strictly political power, very much exploited from an ecclesial point of view; so much so that a large part of both ecclesial and political organisms – often the latter was the flip side of the former – showed that they were not aware of the importance of the problem of education and therefore of cultural creativity.

In those years I was a lecturer at the Seminary of Venegono, teaching Dogmatic Theology in the seminary courses and Eastern-Rite theology in the faculty. I would not have foreseen any changes but for a small episode that was to change my life and work. During a train journey to the Adriatic coast, I fell into conversation with a group of students. I found them shockingly ignorant of the nature and aim of Christian life and the Church. I then thought of dedicating myself to re-establishing a Christian witness in the school environment, where there seemed to be no Christian presence and where the anti-Catholic battle of teachers and groups with secular or laicist ideas and values was clearly advancing. I will leave to another time the historical reconstruction of what happened shortly afterwards, and what the beginning of our experience meant at the level of relationships within the ecclesial and civic communities.

As I climbed for the first time the three steps at the entrance to the Liceo Berchet, where I had been sent to teach religion, it was clear to me, although I was aware of my limitations, that this was a matter of re-launching the announcement of Christianity as a present event of human interest and suitable for anyone who does not want to renounce the fulfilment of his or her hopes and expectations, as well as the use, without diminishment, of the gift of reason. All that was to follow, with both the élan and the imperfections inherent in every human effort, depended, and still depends, only on that first intuition.

These booklets document the reasons and the consequent methodological notations that accompanied the formation of the early student communities. The “raggio” (ray), the weekly meeting to which the community in each institute would invite all their companions, was the first cell of the organism. Père Maurice Cocagnac, then director of the authoritative “Vie Spirituelle”, on passing through Milan, said that he had seen nothing like it in all of Europe as far as the novelty of the organization and its educative effectiveness were concerned. The fundamental characteristic of the raggio was the comparison the youngsters were asked to draw between the theme proposed by the agenda (which would be taken from events at school, or something reported in the newspapers, or existentially important writings appropriate for their age) and their own lived experience. Thus the problems were tackled not on the basis of a theoretical or abstract dialectic but by bringing to the fore criteria and ideals already validated in experience. In this way any sentimental escape or identification of the religiosity of life with a discourse could be corrected. All this was going on while most discussions over faith, then as today, seemed to be concerned with questions “way above the clouds” (to use an expression that a Marxist teacher used to label the address of one of the greatest Catholic intellectuals of the time who was invited to one of our conventions).

Naturally, there was no lack of difficulties and misunderstandings, if not open hostility, especially on the part of those (and in those years, this meant almost the entire Catholic intelligentsia) who, doggedly maintaining the principle of the substantial separation of the religious and temporal spheres, helped to relegate faith to an ambit of abstraction, depriving it of any influence on the plane of cultural judgment and of any interest on the existential plane by reducing it to something regarding only the spiritual realm. Thus the youngsters, large numbers of whom still took part in the official events of Catholic associations, failed to find a proposal in the environments where they spent most of their day (school, factory, or office) that could show how Christian faith and life were able to answer the theoretical and existential problems that surface most dramatically in the teenage years. So participation in these associations and in the parishes tended to become more and more formal until it fell off with a speed that surprised nobody except those who did not want to see the writing on the wall. It was in those early difficult years that the fatherhood of the Church emerged in the magnanimity of people like Cardinal Montini who, while admitting difficulty in understanding our methods, invited us to keep going upon seeing the first fruits.

In this context, for many the encounter with a schoolmate offering a leaflet with the agenda for the raggio, or inviting you to recite an hour of the office of the Liturgy, or to enjoy a holiday in the mountains, or to partake in the cultural and civic battles for freedom in education meant the rediscovery of the human value of faith; it meant a passion for verifying a Christian position regarding all of reality that was not conceived of as opposing the use of reason but as exalting it by clarifying the real structure and dynamics of openness to reality that is the ultimate nature of reason. What has every single thing (from holidays to mathematics, from falling in love to social commitment) to do with Christ? This was the question that moved us: the rediscovery, in terms of experience, of the meaning of the word “catholic”.

As I have already said, the methodological development, whose early and definitive documents appear in this volume, derives from the initial decisiveness. It is not by chance that the first chapter of the first text is dedicated to “a decisive gesture”; and the decision that drove me to climb those steps was to commit myself in a no-nonsense announcement of the Christian fact, peeling away all that seemed secondary so as to reveal its essential form. I would say to the first group of youngsters: ”Let us aim above all at announcing Christ, the all-embracing event in man’s life and centre of history”, as John Paul II’s first encyclical, Redemptor hominis, would clearly reaffirm. It was the essence of the Christian fact as proposal of life. In fact we began just like that, speaking of Christ.

All this was happening at a time when the traditional meeting-places of young Catholics (parishes, youth clubs, etc.) were spending vast sums on entertainment equipment that they hoped would persuade youth to stay in touch.

Our decision to emphasize the essential led to the small and great cultural battles into which the youth of GS threw themselves generously and courageously – all this without any plans but for an immediate development of culture and affective energy. The first step dealt with freedom of education. It occurred in an ideological and ecclesial context that was insensitive, when not actually hostile, to every opposition of that type of contorted freedom of conscience, and therefore of education and cultural expression, whose grave consequences and most underhanded applications we see today. These initiatives were accompanied by the charitable activities (“caritativa”), through which youngsters learned the meaning of gratuitousness as the law of existence, and missionary zeal as the superabundance of passion for the encounter they had experienced. At the same time, the desire sprang up in some of them to live a form of total dedication to Christ in the world, sowing the first seeds of what is today the Memores Domini association. A movement was born.

We had grasped very clearly from the start, albeit implicitly, that the Christian’s only true and specific contribution to the human effort to improve one’s condition in society is to bear witness to the religious position as the most completely human stance for tackling the moral, social and political problems that one meets within social co-existence. We make this contribution above all by re-establishing ourselves as a lived Christian reality, in which the unity of the community is the first miracle pointing to Christ as the catalyst of human values and as a sure beginning of a moral journey, otherwise unthinkable with regard to purity and to the infinite capacity to pick up again. An intelligence that is stirred spurs us on to repeat Peter’s “Yes” to Christ’s question, “Do you love me?” That “yes” generates the energy for witness and for a new morality that can be faced, like a new dawn, no matter what in the circumstances; a “yes” born of sharing life with the presence of Christ, a presence gazed upon and imitated increasingly as being the only thing that corresponds to the fundamental needs of human nature, of the heart, which is the term used in the Bible to mean all of man, in his intelligence and affection. For, as time goes by, Christ’s presence reveals its ultimate and fundamental dimension: the manifestation of the Father’s merciful mystery, through obedience, which is the supreme virtue in which Saint Paul sums up every aspect of human experience in Christ.

Then, as today, one of the aspects that most struck the youngsters who shared our experience was its unity. We would often use the term “community” to mean the phenomenon with which Christ carries on his presence in history. Particular communities are like the gesture with which the great community of the Church reaches a person’s environment. The terms “community” and “communion”, understood as the animating principle, and “people,” understood as the organic development of the community in all the wealth of the original contribution that the Christians give to the life of the world (that “ethnic reality sui generis”, as Paul VI called it), were not yet conceptually distinct, but their value was apparent in the gathering of those first groups in Milan and shortly afterwards throughout Italy and abroad.

The rich and lively history of forty years of the movement leaves the methodological value of these short writings unaltered. Their synthesis was derived from the need of every experience to set down the judgements and initiatives that it engenders. Their original nature derives from the fact they are not the fruit of an analysis of the social or ecclesial climate, but were formed from within the experience as it developed.

As I re-read these pages, I feel a moving gratitude at seeing a work that is being achieved, despite our limitations and our weaknesses, through the countless examples of generosity, sacrifice, and purity that many of our travelling companions have contributed, and still do, to the glory of Christ in this world; and gratitude to the Church that has decided authoritatively to welcome and confirm this experience in its journey through history.

19 October 1995

ENDNOTES

“Student Youth” in English.

Luigi Giussani, Le Mouvement Communion et Liberation: entretien avec Robi Ronza. Paris: Fayard 1988, 11-13.

The seminary of the Archdiocese of Milan, in the town of Venegono in the city’s hinterland.

The Liceo Berchet is a high-school or lycée in the centre of Milan. Giussani began teachin religion in this school in 1954.

Père Maurice Cocagnac, a French Dominican friar, theologian, and composer of religious music, was born in 1924.

Giovanni Battista Montini (1897-1978) was Archbishop of Milan from 1954 until his election as Pope Paul VI in 1963.

As the following chapters will clearly show, the term “caritativa” has a much more pregnant meaning than “charitable activity.” It refers to the dedication of one’s free time to sharing with others, perhaps less fortunate than oneself, the experience of the Christian life encountered. As the text explains, the usefulness of this activity is tied to its educational value for those involved, rather than to its effectiveness in helping those in need.

Here Giussani refers to “purità” and not “purezza”, that is, purity in the profound moral sense of authenticity.