March 11, 1993 - Luigi Giussani laiškai

March 11, 1993

After the Pilgrimage to Lourdes and the Tangentopoli issue (a political scandal due to corruption in Italy in the 1990’s)

Most Dear Friend,

The pilgrimage to Lourdes is the experience of grace that, through the five thousand pilgrims, has most touched the heart of the Movement in these months. In the days of Lent it is useful to make our conscience start from the words of the Homily of Bishop Angelo Scola: "Dear friends, we of the Fraternity of C.L. belong to a generation, a people, who fears Him, that is to say who wants to follow Him humbly."

These words define the faith that moves us and the spirit with which we live it.

Bishop Scola continued recalling, "This is why we are here today: to participate in Mary's exultation which also vivifies our flesh". This is the heart of our charism: all this happened already as Event which is present and is proposed in every relationship generated by our freedom with persons and things.

The restarting is present and permanent.

It is found in the Church where she is lived, where she becomes companionship of those who are gathered in the name of Jesus Christ, obedient to the Magisterium of Rome, begging for the sacramental presence of Christ and of his grace for her own sorrowful weakness - an inexorable trace of original sin. A companionship outstretched to the knowledge of the mystery of Christ, full of desire for mutual help in order to live that gratuitousness which is the realized similarity with the living God, eager to value the positiveness of a human encounter and to share in human need organically and with passion.

In front of the total disarray of Italy we cannot but be moved to a judgment: an action which in order to punish the guilty destroys a nation, both as unitary consciousness and as welfare attained, has something unjust about it, at least in the way in which it is carried out.

Precisely all this unease, in which we intensively share, becomes for us a serious, perhaps extreme, call of Jesus Christ to an authentic sonship to the Father, in which all of us, in various ways, have failed.

"If we say we are without sin we deceive ourselves and truth does not dwell in us" (1 John 1:8).

In the Spiritual retreats we were always reminded that we cannot establish a true relationship either with others, with ourselves, or with things, without starting from the awareness of being sinners: in this consists the call to humility.

The memory, which is the synthetic expression of the faith we live, leaves us neither forgetful nor passive in such humility. Therefore in the sorrow of not having sufficiently recognized Jesus Christ and his mystery in the interests of life; in the hope of his mercy stronger than our sin; in the forgiveness lived among us so that our communion may be the instrument of the Holy Spirit not to give respite either to our neglect or to the ambiguity of our presumption - let us pray Mary that our heart may be ready to start afresh daily.
Through Her may our invocation of Christ's grace be more determined and powerful than our own criteria, our yielding to our own calculations, and submission to our instincts.

We wish each other that every day of this Lent may be in the morning the sign of Christ's Resurrection and in the evening the sign of tenderness in entrusting ourselves to His pity for our destiny. So that each one of us may repeat the words of Dionisius the Areopagite - printed in one of the earliest booklets in the history of the Movement, "Who will ever be able to speak of Christ's peculiar love for man, overflowing with peace?".


With brotherly love,

don Luigi Giussani
Fr. Luigi Giussani


Milan, March 11, 1993