April 3, 1990 - Luigi Giussani laiškai

April 3, 1990

On the occasion of the Easter wishes

Dearest friends,

I wish you a Happy Easter.
In other words I want to say, with all the intensity of my faith and my heart, may the Spirit of Christ, through Our Lady's intercession, invest your life with the great emotion of Holy Week.

It is a sorrowful emotion, because it is born of the awareness of our sins; and yet it is a joyous one, dominated as it is by the offer of Christ's mercy - Dives in Misericordia - and by the certainty of his victorious power over our evil. "All human activities … are daily jeopardised by pride and disordered love of self" but "must be purified and made perfect through the cross and resurrection of Christ": for this we are "redeemed by Christ and have become new creatures of the Holy Spirit" (GS No 37).

Belonging to this mystery makes us walk "erect in hope", as St Paul says, whatever the circumstance of life in which Christ implicates us with himself and calls us.

We live at a time when the Christian ideal is exteriorised and degraded to "social values" or "common values", totally at the mercy of our own voluntarism. The object of philanthropy is doing good, that of religions is being good, said Chesterton. In order to be good, to bring about continually the change of our heart, so as always to perceive the Gospel's call "be perfect as your Father in heaven" (Mt 5:48) we know very well that a miracle is needed, the miracle of Christ's goodness towards us, or "Grace". Only through the goodness that wells up from Christ's grace can even the love among us and the social values overcome every equivocation.

We have clearly discovered that the greatest expression of the intelligence and the affection in life is continually to break scepticism and irresolution that tend to close us, and on the contrary to express always, as much as possible our humanity in the entreaty "Come, Lord", come in us, Lord, free us from evil!

In the darkness of the cross or in the brightness of Easter may our heart be totally consoled precisely by the warmth of Christ's promise, "so if you who are bad can give good things to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him" (Lk. 11:13). In the friendship in which Christ has bound our lives, what do we look for, what do we desire if to remind and sustain each other in these things, through the toils and delusions, estrangements, strong aversion, or fondness that lacks the true good?

We are safe on our journey thanks to our attention to the Pope's every word, always heard in the whole context of his teaching, and lived with faithful love to his great figure as Christ's lover, as well as His representative on earth.

As I entrust my soul, too, to the humble offer of yourselves to God, allow me to embrace you in Christ's charity that has made us one,


Fr. Luigi Giussani

P.S. Before Easter you will also receive the printed text of the Spiritual Exercises

Milan, April 3, 1990