At 11:30am today, in Saint Peter's Square, Pope Francis met with members of the Communion and Liberation Community who are celebrating the 60th anniversary of the foundation of their movement and the 10th anniversary of the death of their founder, Monsignor Luigi Giussani.
During their encounter, following a word of greeting which was spoken by the President of Communion and Liberation, Father Julián Carrón, Pope Francis shared the following thoughts:
Dear brothers and sisters, good morning!
I welcome all of you and I thank you for the warmth of your affection! I wish to cordially greet the Cardinals and the Bishops. I greet Father Julián Carrón, the President of your Fraternity and I thank him for the words he has spoken in your name; and I thank you also, Father Julián, for that beautiful letter that you wrote to all the members, inviting them to come. Thank you very much!
My first thought is of your Founder, Monsignor Luigi Giussani, remembering the tenth anniversary of his birth in heaven. I am grateful to Father Giussani for various reasons. First, on a more personal note, I am thankful for all the good that this man did for me and for my priesthood, through reading his books and his articles. The other reason is that his thoughts are profoundly human and reach the innermost depths of the human heart. You know how important it was for Father Giussani to meet: not to meet with an idea but to meet with a Person, with Jesus Christ. In this way, he taught others about freedom, guiding them to an encounter with Christ, for Christ is the one who gives us true freedom. Speaking about encounter, the image of The vocation of Matthew comes to mind, the painting by Caravaggio before which I paused and spent a long while in the church of Saint Louis de France, every time I came to Rome. No one else who was there, even Matthew who was always greedy for money, could believe the message that was being spoken, the message contained in those eyes that looked at him with mercy and chose him to be one of his followers. He felt a sense of wonder in that moment of encounter. This is how it is when Christ comes to us and invites us to meet with him.
Everything in our lives, today as it was in the time of Jesus, begins with an encounter. An encounter with this Man, the carpenter from Nazareth, a man like every other man and at the same time different. Let us consider the gospel of John, where he speaks of the first encounter between the disciples and Jesus (cf John 1:35-42). Andrew, John, Simon: felt as though they had been looked upon at the depth of their being, intimately known, and this caused them to be surprised. There was a level of amazement within them that immediately caused them to feel as though they were bound to him ... Or when, after the Resurrection, Jesus asked Peter: Do you love me? (John 21:15), and Peter responded: Yes. That Yes was not the result of a force of will, it did not come only from a decision made by the man Simon: it came first and foremost from grace, the primordial action that can only be the result of grace. Grace was at the heart of the decisive discovery for Saint Paul, for Saint Augustine and for many other saints: Jesus Christ is always first, primordial, he waits, Jesus Christ always precedes us; and when we arrive, He is always there, waiting. He is like the almond flower: the one that is always first to flower, to announce the coming Spring.
It is not possible to understand this dynamic of encounter that arouses amazement and belonging without taking into account the mystery of mercy. Only those who have been cherished by the tenderness of mercy truly know the Lord. The privileged place of encounter is the caress of the mercy of Jesus Christ: his response to my sin. For this reason, on occasion, you have heard me say that the place, the privileged place of encounter with Jesus Christ is my sinfulness. It is thanks to this embrace of mercy that the urge to respond and to change arises, the urge to begin living a different life. Christian morality is not made up of titanic efforts, nor is it a voluntary matter, by which we decide to be consistent and we immediately succeed, a sort of solitary challenge in the world. No. This is not Christian morality, it is something else. Christian morality is the response, the emotional response to the surprising, unpredictable mercy, even an unfair gift according to human logic, the gift of One who knows me, who knows my unfaithfulness and loves me all the same, holds me in high esteem, hugs me, calls me by name, hopes in me, waits for me. Christian morality does not mean never falling, but it does mean always getting up again, thanks to his hand which takes hold of us. The way of the Church is this: allowing the great mercy of God to be made manifest in us. A few days ago, I said to the newly-appointed Cardinals: The way of the Church is the path of not eternally condemning anyone, but to pour out the mercy of God for every person who asks for it with a sincere heart; the path of the Church is precisely that of going outside of the fences in order to go in search of those who have been distanced, even to the 'peripheries' of existence, in order to fully adopt the logic of God, the logic of mercy (Homily, February 15, 2015). Even the Church needs to feel the joyous impulse of becoming an almond blossom, that is to announce a new Springtime like Jesus did, for all of humanity.
Today, you are also celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the beginning of your Movement, born in the Church - as Benedict XVI has said - not from a voluntary hierarchical organization, but originating from a renewed encounter with Christ, and because of this, we can say, with a strength that comes ultimately from the Holy Spirit (Speech for the pilgrimage of Communion and Liberation, March 24, 2007).
After seventy years, your original charism has not lost its freshness and vitality. However, remember that your focus is not your charism; there is only one focus, and that is Jesus. Jesus Christ! When I focus on my own spiritual methodology, my own spiritual journey, my own way of doing things, I stray off the path. All spirituality, every charisim in the Church must be decentralized. At the centre of our focus there is only the Lord! This is why when Paul speaks of charisms in the first letter to the Corinthians, when he speaks of such beautiful aspects of the Church, such beautiful aspects of the Mystical Body, he ends by speaking about love, that is about the gifts that come from God, the things that properly belong to God, and the things that allow us to imitate him. Don't ever forget this: the importance of being decentralized!
And then, a charism cannot be kept in a bottle like distilled water! Faithfulness to a charism does not mean petrifying it - the devil is the one who petrifies, don't forget! Faithfulness to a charism does not mean writing it on a parchment and putting it in a picture frame. The reference to the legacy that Don Giussani left you cannot be reduced to a museum of memories, of decisions made, of norms of conduct. It certainly involves fidelity to tradition, but fidelity to tradition - Mahler would say - means keeping the fire alive and not adoring the coals. Don Giussani would never forgive you if you lost your freedom and became instead a group of museum guides or adorers of coals. Keep the flame of the memory of your first meeting alive and be free!
So it is that centred in Christ and on the gospel, you will be able to be arms, hands, feet, minds and hearts of a Church that goes out. The path of the Church leads outward in order to go in search of those who are on the peripheries, to serve Jesus in every marginalized or abandoned person, all those who have been disillusioned by the Church, all those who are prisoners of their own egotism.
To go out also means rejecting self-centeredness in all its forms; it means knowing how to listen to others who are not like us and learning from everyone else, with sincere humility. When we are slaves to self-centredness, we end up cultivating a spirituality of labels: I am CL. This is labeling, and then we fall into a thousand traps which offer self-complacency, the habit of looking in the mirror which leads to disorientation and transforms us into mere impresarios of an NGO.
Dear friends, I want to finish with two very significant citations from Don Giussani: one from the beginning and the other from the end of his life.
The first: Christianism is never realized in history as a fixer of positions to be defended, which will be related to the new in the same way as it was to the antithesis; Christianism is the principle of redemption which assumes the new and saves it (Porta la speranza. First writings, Genoa, 1967, page 119). This was written about 1967.
The second from 2004: Not only did I never intend to 'found' anything, but I think that the genius of the Movement which i saw coming to birth lies in having felt the urgency to proclaim the necessity to return to the elementary aspects of Christianity, that is to say the passion of the Christian facts in their original elements, and that's it (Letter to John Paul II, January 26, 2004, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Communion and Liberation).
May the Lord bless you and may Our Lady protect you. And please, don't forget to pray for me! Thank you.
During their encounter, following a word of greeting which was spoken by the President of Communion and Liberation, Father Julián Carrón, Pope Francis shared the following thoughts:
Address of His Holiness, Pope Francis
to members of Communion and Liberation
Dear brothers and sisters, good morning!
I welcome all of you and I thank you for the warmth of your affection! I wish to cordially greet the Cardinals and the Bishops. I greet Father Julián Carrón, the President of your Fraternity and I thank him for the words he has spoken in your name; and I thank you also, Father Julián, for that beautiful letter that you wrote to all the members, inviting them to come. Thank you very much!
My first thought is of your Founder, Monsignor Luigi Giussani, remembering the tenth anniversary of his birth in heaven. I am grateful to Father Giussani for various reasons. First, on a more personal note, I am thankful for all the good that this man did for me and for my priesthood, through reading his books and his articles. The other reason is that his thoughts are profoundly human and reach the innermost depths of the human heart. You know how important it was for Father Giussani to meet: not to meet with an idea but to meet with a Person, with Jesus Christ. In this way, he taught others about freedom, guiding them to an encounter with Christ, for Christ is the one who gives us true freedom. Speaking about encounter, the image of The vocation of Matthew comes to mind, the painting by Caravaggio before which I paused and spent a long while in the church of Saint Louis de France, every time I came to Rome. No one else who was there, even Matthew who was always greedy for money, could believe the message that was being spoken, the message contained in those eyes that looked at him with mercy and chose him to be one of his followers. He felt a sense of wonder in that moment of encounter. This is how it is when Christ comes to us and invites us to meet with him.
Everything in our lives, today as it was in the time of Jesus, begins with an encounter. An encounter with this Man, the carpenter from Nazareth, a man like every other man and at the same time different. Let us consider the gospel of John, where he speaks of the first encounter between the disciples and Jesus (cf John 1:35-42). Andrew, John, Simon: felt as though they had been looked upon at the depth of their being, intimately known, and this caused them to be surprised. There was a level of amazement within them that immediately caused them to feel as though they were bound to him ... Or when, after the Resurrection, Jesus asked Peter: Do you love me? (John 21:15), and Peter responded: Yes. That Yes was not the result of a force of will, it did not come only from a decision made by the man Simon: it came first and foremost from grace, the primordial action that can only be the result of grace. Grace was at the heart of the decisive discovery for Saint Paul, for Saint Augustine and for many other saints: Jesus Christ is always first, primordial, he waits, Jesus Christ always precedes us; and when we arrive, He is always there, waiting. He is like the almond flower: the one that is always first to flower, to announce the coming Spring.
It is not possible to understand this dynamic of encounter that arouses amazement and belonging without taking into account the mystery of mercy. Only those who have been cherished by the tenderness of mercy truly know the Lord. The privileged place of encounter is the caress of the mercy of Jesus Christ: his response to my sin. For this reason, on occasion, you have heard me say that the place, the privileged place of encounter with Jesus Christ is my sinfulness. It is thanks to this embrace of mercy that the urge to respond and to change arises, the urge to begin living a different life. Christian morality is not made up of titanic efforts, nor is it a voluntary matter, by which we decide to be consistent and we immediately succeed, a sort of solitary challenge in the world. No. This is not Christian morality, it is something else. Christian morality is the response, the emotional response to the surprising, unpredictable mercy, even an unfair gift according to human logic, the gift of One who knows me, who knows my unfaithfulness and loves me all the same, holds me in high esteem, hugs me, calls me by name, hopes in me, waits for me. Christian morality does not mean never falling, but it does mean always getting up again, thanks to his hand which takes hold of us. The way of the Church is this: allowing the great mercy of God to be made manifest in us. A few days ago, I said to the newly-appointed Cardinals: The way of the Church is the path of not eternally condemning anyone, but to pour out the mercy of God for every person who asks for it with a sincere heart; the path of the Church is precisely that of going outside of the fences in order to go in search of those who have been distanced, even to the 'peripheries' of existence, in order to fully adopt the logic of God, the logic of mercy (Homily, February 15, 2015). Even the Church needs to feel the joyous impulse of becoming an almond blossom, that is to announce a new Springtime like Jesus did, for all of humanity.
Today, you are also celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the beginning of your Movement, born in the Church - as Benedict XVI has said - not from a voluntary hierarchical organization, but originating from a renewed encounter with Christ, and because of this, we can say, with a strength that comes ultimately from the Holy Spirit (Speech for the pilgrimage of Communion and Liberation, March 24, 2007).
After seventy years, your original charism has not lost its freshness and vitality. However, remember that your focus is not your charism; there is only one focus, and that is Jesus. Jesus Christ! When I focus on my own spiritual methodology, my own spiritual journey, my own way of doing things, I stray off the path. All spirituality, every charisim in the Church must be decentralized. At the centre of our focus there is only the Lord! This is why when Paul speaks of charisms in the first letter to the Corinthians, when he speaks of such beautiful aspects of the Church, such beautiful aspects of the Mystical Body, he ends by speaking about love, that is about the gifts that come from God, the things that properly belong to God, and the things that allow us to imitate him. Don't ever forget this: the importance of being decentralized!
And then, a charism cannot be kept in a bottle like distilled water! Faithfulness to a charism does not mean petrifying it - the devil is the one who petrifies, don't forget! Faithfulness to a charism does not mean writing it on a parchment and putting it in a picture frame. The reference to the legacy that Don Giussani left you cannot be reduced to a museum of memories, of decisions made, of norms of conduct. It certainly involves fidelity to tradition, but fidelity to tradition - Mahler would say - means keeping the fire alive and not adoring the coals. Don Giussani would never forgive you if you lost your freedom and became instead a group of museum guides or adorers of coals. Keep the flame of the memory of your first meeting alive and be free!
So it is that centred in Christ and on the gospel, you will be able to be arms, hands, feet, minds and hearts of a Church that goes out. The path of the Church leads outward in order to go in search of those who are on the peripheries, to serve Jesus in every marginalized or abandoned person, all those who have been disillusioned by the Church, all those who are prisoners of their own egotism.
To go out also means rejecting self-centeredness in all its forms; it means knowing how to listen to others who are not like us and learning from everyone else, with sincere humility. When we are slaves to self-centredness, we end up cultivating a spirituality of labels: I am CL. This is labeling, and then we fall into a thousand traps which offer self-complacency, the habit of looking in the mirror which leads to disorientation and transforms us into mere impresarios of an NGO.
Dear friends, I want to finish with two very significant citations from Don Giussani: one from the beginning and the other from the end of his life.
The first: Christianism is never realized in history as a fixer of positions to be defended, which will be related to the new in the same way as it was to the antithesis; Christianism is the principle of redemption which assumes the new and saves it (Porta la speranza. First writings, Genoa, 1967, page 119). This was written about 1967.
The second from 2004: Not only did I never intend to 'found' anything, but I think that the genius of the Movement which i saw coming to birth lies in having felt the urgency to proclaim the necessity to return to the elementary aspects of Christianity, that is to say the passion of the Christian facts in their original elements, and that's it (Letter to John Paul II, January 26, 2004, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Communion and Liberation).
May the Lord bless you and may Our Lady protect you. And please, don't forget to pray for me! Thank you.
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