Come to See

littlest angel

2010-09-05T00:16:00.002-04:00

Memory Anchored in the sign

2010-05-04T16:16:00.003-04:00

from Morality: Memory and Desire, by Luigi Giussani:

The Christian life depends upon the eucharistic sacrament as a spring or a source out of which can be drawn a motivation that is sufficient for real moral commitment (cf. 1 Corinthians 10:14-22). It is from within the context of such an offering that a correct Christian attitude on morality is formed (cf 1 Corinthians 11:17-26).

However, the great sign that is the Eucharist is caught up and enlarged in an even greater sign, the Church, the only truly adequate sign of the Presence of "the fullness of him who fills all in all" (Ephesians 1:23).

This "body, joined and knit together by every joint with which it is supplied, when each part is working properly, grows and upbuilds itself in love" (Ephesians 4:16). This Body is the place where morality arises and is nourished and grows in love.

To awaken the moral conscience of somebody is a reality that belongs totally to the unity in which all Christians live as brothers through baptism (cf Galatians 3:26-27 : "For in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ"). This unity is preserved and developed by authority (cf. Ephesians 2:20 : "built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets") and its purpose is to stimulate a kind of self-expression that is exercised for the good of the whole community. All this is the true basis for a real pedagogy in Christian morality.

The immanence of the mystery of community, to the extent that it is recognized, loved, and participated in, penetrates our being as if by osmosis with new moral standards and new moral sensitivity (pp 172-173)

All the world's a sunny day...

2010-04-28T00:07:00.001-04:00

"A Decadent Christianity and One of Its Own Children"

2010-04-23T11:27:00.007-04:00

Moses and the Burning Bush, by Marc Chagall

from The Priority of Christ, by Fr. Robert Barron (pp 12-16):

There have in recent years been numerous accounts of the etiology of modernity. Jürgen Habermas, Hans Urs von Balthasar, John Milbank, Colin Gunton, and Louis Dupré, among many others, have offered explanations of the transition from the premodern to the modern. I subscribe to the proposal that liberal modernity can best be seen as an energetic reaction to a particular and problematic version of nominalist Christianity. Early modernity saw itself as a salutary response to oppressive and obscurantist strains in Christian culture, but since it was reacting to a corruption of true Christianity, it itself became similarly distorted and exaggerated. As a result, the two systems settled into a centuries-long and terribly unproductive warfare. Even when the two attempted a reconciliation (as in all forms of liberal Christianity in the past two centuries), the results were less than satisfactory, precisely because each party was itself a sort of caricature.

The trouble began with Duns Scotus’s option for a univocal conception of being in contradistinction to Thomas Aquinas’s analogical understanding. For Thomas, God, as the sheer act of to-be itself (ipsum esse subsistens), is that through which all creatures exist. What follows epistemologically from this metaphysical claim is that the meaning of “to-be,” in reference to God and creatures, must be analogical, with God as primary analogue and created things as secondary. In accord with this intuition, Aquinas maintained consistently throughout his career that God is inescapably mysterious to the human intellect, since our frame of reference remains the creaturely mode of existence, which bears only an analogical resemblance to the divine mode of being. We may say that God exists, but we’re not quite sure what we mean when we say it; the “cash value” of the claim that God exists is that there is a finally mysterious source of the to-be of finite things.

In an effort to make the to-be of God more immediately intelligible, Duns Scotus proposed a univocal conception of existence, according to which God and creatures belong to the same basic metaphysical category, the genus of being. Though God is infinite and therefore quantitatively superior to any creature or collectivity of creatures, there is nevertheless no qualitative difference, in the metaphysical sense, between the supreme being, God, and finite beings. Whereas Aquinas insisted that God is categorizable in no genus whatsoever, Scotus held that God and creatures do belong together to a logical category that, in a real sense, transcends and includes them. The implications of this shift are enormous and, to my mind, almost entirely negative. If the analogical conception of being is rejected, creatures are no longer seen as participating in the divine to-be; instead, God and creatures are appreciated as existing side by side, as beings of varying types and degrees of intensity. Furthermore, unanchored from their shared participation in God, no longer grounded in a common source, creatures lose their essential connectedness to one another. Isolated and self-contained individuals (God the supreme being and the many creatures) are now what is most basically real.

Scotus’s intuition was confirmed a generation later by his Franciscan successor William of Occam. Congruent with his nominalism, which denied ontological density to the unifying features of being, Occam held that there is nothing real outside of disconnected individual things illas partes absolutas nulla res est. As for Scotus so for Occam, God and creatures are set side by side, joined only through a convention of logic that assigns them to the category of “beings.” A consequence of this conception is that God and finite things have to be rivals, since their individualities are contrastive and mutually exclusive. Just as a chair is itself precisely in the measure that it is no other creaturely thing, so God is himself only inasmuch as he stands over and against the world he has made, and vice versa. Whereas in Aquinas’s participation metaphysics the created universe is constituted by its rapport with God, on Occam’s reading it must realize itself through disassociation from a competitive supreme being. A further concomitant of this individualistic ontology is voluntarism. Since the metaphysically dense and natural link between God and creatures has been attenuated, any connection between the divine and the nondivine has to be through will. God’s relation with his rational creatures is therefore primarily legalistic and arbitrary. This understanding of divine power influenced Occam’s conception of the human will as well. Finite freedom is, for him, absolute spontaneity, an action prompted by nothing either interior or exterior to the subject. Accordingly, human power is a distant mirror of divine power: both are self-contained, capricious, absolute, and finally irrational. The most obvious practical consequence of this nominalist and voluntarist metaphysics is that divine and human freedom find themselves pitted against one another, God imposing himself arbitrarily on a necessarily reluctant and resentful humanity.

Both Martin Luther and John Calvin were formed according to the principles of late-medieval nominalism, and one does not have to look far to see evidence of that formation in their writings. A distant and majestic God who chooses, apparently in complete arbitrariness, that some be saved and others be damned is on clear display in Calvin’s Institutes, and a God whose power effectively trumps the freedom and integrity of the human will is readily apparent in Luther’s On the Bondage of the Will. Was the Reformation, at least to some degree, a radical ratification of the breakdown of an analogical conception of being?

From at least the time of Étienne Gilson, a number of scholars have acknowledged the important relationship between early modernity and medieval culture. I follow Colin Gunton and John Milbank’s suggestion that the modern can be viewed as a sharp reaction to precisely the elements in late-medieval Christianity that I have been highlighting. Many of the early modern philosophers called for a Heraclitean revolt of the many individuals against the Parmenidean imposition of divine demands, especially as those were made concrete in the church and in traditional culture. Martha Nussbaum, one of the most articulate contemporary defenders of the liberal/modern perspective, says that liberalism is essentially the valorization of the prerogatives of the individual subject, more precisely, an affirmation of that subject’s right to choose, even the meaning of his or her own life. What is the enemy of this freedom? For many of the fathers of modernity, it is nothing other than those traditional institutions (supported by the voluntarist conception of God) that bind the will and quash individual initiative and imagination.

We can see this paradigmatically in Descartes’s affirmation of the epistemological primordiality and meaning-creating capacity of the cogito. Dupré has remarked that subjectivism as such is not a distinctive quality of the modern, for no one was more subjective than Plato, Plotinus, or Augustine. Rather, it is the claim that the subject is itself the ground and measure of meaning and value. This is what we find in René Descartes’s insistence that all sense experience, all received ideas and traditions, and the very existence of God be brought before the bar of subjectivity for adjudication and evaluation. And we can see it, too, in Immanuel Kant’s claim that the moral life is grounded neither in the objectivity of nature nor in any hetereonomous law, but rather in the self-legislation of the categorical imperative. It is furthermore apparent in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conviction that the only legitimate form of government is a democracy so pure that obedience to law is coincident with obedience to self. It comes to perhaps clearest expression in Friedrich Nietzsche’s uncompromising elevation of the prerogatives of the will (a perfect mirror of the voluntarist divine will in Occam) and the concomitant need of that heroic will to put the competitive God to death.

Lest all of this seem too abstractly philosophical, the modern preference for the freedom of the individual is no more baldly and forcibly defended than in the U.S.Supreme Court’s judgment in the case of Casey v. Planned Parenthood : “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, of the mystery of human life.” This judicial formulation is an almost perfect exemplification of Jean-Paul Sartre’s archetypically modern dictum that existence (concrete freedom) precedes essence (meaning and value).

In all of this modern assertiveness, we see the reaction of the many against the one, of individuals against the tyranny of institutions and of that threatening Other lurking, acknowledged explicitly or not, behind them. In my judgment, this tension is the finally unproductive warfare between the grandmother and the Misfit [in Flannery O'Connors short story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find"], between a not very convincing form of Christianity and the opponent to whom it naturally gave rise. Modernity and decadent Christianity are enemies in one sense, but in another sense, they are deeply connected to one another and mirror one another. In most of the disputes between Christianity and modernity, we have advocates of the prerogatives of the voluntarist God facing down advocates of the voluntarist self. A central argument of this book amounts to “a plague on both your houses,” for I am convinced that both need to be saved, precisely by that person who throws everything off, including and especially the competitive understanding of God and the world that produced the conflict between them in the first place.

Неопалимая Купина. Nizhny Novgorod, The Virgin of the Burning Bush.

St. Peregrine Laziosi, patron of cancer patients, pray for us!

2010-04-13T09:42:00.005-04:00

Peregrine was born in Forli, Italy, around 1265. At that time, Forli was governed by the Pope as part of the Papal States, and Peregrine grew up in a family that was actively involved in the opposition, or anti-papal party. Because of anti-papal activity, the city was under the church penalty of interdict, meaning that Mass and the Sacraments could not be celebrated there. St. Philip Benizi, Prior General of the Servants of Mary, went to Forli to preach reconciliation. Young Peregrine, very intense in his political fervor, not only heckled Philip during his preaching, but, in fact, struck him. Philip, instead of responding with anger and violence to the attack, turned and forgave Peregrine.

This encounter with Philip is said to have dramatically changed Peregrine. He began channeling his energy into good works and eventually joined the Servants of Mary in Siena, Italy. He returned to Forli, where he spent the rest of his life, dedicating himself to the sick, the poor, and those on the fringes of society. He also imposed on himself the penance of standing whenever it was not necessary to sit. This led to varicose veins, which later deteriorated into an open sore on his leg, and was eventually diagnosed as cancer.

Peregrine's leg wound became so serious that the local surgeon decided to amputate the leg. The night before the surgery, Peregrine prayed before the image of the crucified Christ, and when he awoke, the wound was healed and his leg saved. He lived another 20 years, dying on May 1, 1345, and the age of about 80. Peregrine was canonized on December 27, 1726, and has been named the Patron Saint of those suffering from cancer.

A Prayer to St. Peregrine for Sick Relatives and Friends

O great St. Peregrine, you have been called "The Mighty", the "The Wonder Worker" because of the numerous miracles which you obtained from God for those who have turned to you in their need. For so many years you bore in your own flesh this cancerous disease that destroys the very fiber of our being. You turned to God when the power of human beings could do no more, and you were favored with the vision of Jesus coming down from His cross to heal your affliction. I now ask God to heal these sick persons whom I entrust to you:

(Here mention their names)

Aided by your powerful intercession, I shall sing with Mary a hymn of gratitude to God for His great goodness and mercy.

Amen.

Ours is the Church of the saints

2010-04-07T12:53:00.003-04:00

from The Heroic Face of Innocence, "Joan, Heretic and Saint," by Georges Bernanos:

"Who does not long for the strength to set out on so glorious an adventure? For sanctity is an adventure; it is indeed the only adventure. Those who have once realized this have found their way to the very heart of the Catholic faith; they have felt in their mortal flesh the shuddering of another terror than the terror of death: the shudder of supernatural hope. Our Church is the Church of the saints. But who worries about the saints? We want them to be old, full of experience and worldly wisdom; and most of them are children. And childhood is alone against everyone. The know-alls shrug their shoulders and smile: what saint ever had much to say for the Churchmen? But what have the Churchmen got to do with it? What contact with the most heroic among mankind has Mr. So-and-so, who is convinced that the Kingdom of Heaven can be won like a seat in the French Academy, by treating everyone tactfully? God did not make the Church for the prosperity of the saints, but that she might hand down their memory; He made her that the world might not lose, with the divine miracle, a torrent of honor and poetry. What saints have the other churches? Ours is the Church of the saints. Whom would you entrust with the charge of this flock of angels? History alone, if left to itself, would have crushed them with its harsh, restricted realism and its summary methods. Our Catholic tradition, without harming them, sweeps them into the full flood of its universal rhythm. They are all there -- St. Benedict with his raven, St. Francis with his lute and his Provençal songs, Joan with her sword, Vincent with his shabby soutane -- and the newcomer, so strange, so hidden, invoked by contractors and simoniacs, and smiling her incomprehensible smile -- Teresa of the Child Jesus. Would one have wished them, during their lifetime, to be kept in glass cases, addressed in rounded periods, knelt to, honored with incense? Such things are all right for Canons. But the saints lived and suffered like us. They bore the full weight of their load, and many of them, without relinquishing it, lay down under it to die. Those of us who dare not yet take to ourselves what was holy and divine in their example, can at least find in it a lesson in heroism and honor. But is there one among us who would not blush to stop short so soon and leave them to follow the endless stretch of road alone? Is there one who could wish to spend his life pondering the problem of evil rather than dashing forward? Who will refuse to liberate the earth? Our Church is the Church of the saints. The whole vast machinery of wisdom, strength, supple discipline, glory and majesty, is of itself nothing unless it is animated by love. Yet the lukewarm turn to it only for a guarantee against the risks of the divine. No matter! The smallest little boy in the catechism class knows that the blessing of all the Churchmen put together can only bring peace to those who are ready to receive it -- the souls of good will. No rite can dispense us from loving. Our Church is the Church of the saints. Nowhere else could one even imagine the adventure -- an adventure so human! -- of a little heroine who one day passed quietly from the stake of the Inquisition to Paradise, under the noses of a hundred and fifty theologians. "If we have reached the point" (wrote Joan's judges to the Pope) "where sorceresses who prophesy falsely in the name of God, like a certain female taken prisoner within the diocese of Beauvais, are better received by the thoughtless populace than are their pastors and doctors, then all is lost: religion will perish, faith will fail, the Church will be trodden underfoot, and the iniquity of Satan will prevail throughout the earth!" ... And behold, rather less than five centuries later, the image of the sorceress was exposed for veneration in St. Peter's in Rome -- painted, it is true, as a warrior, and without tabard or divided skirt! -- while a hundred feet below her, Joan might have seen, lying prostrated, the tiny figure of a man in white, who was the Pope himself. Our Church is the Church of the saints. From the Pope down to the little altar-boy drinking the wine left over from the cruets, everyone knows that there are not many famous preachers in the Calendar -- not many priest-diplomatists. The only people to question this are the respectable believers with stomachs and gold chains, who think that the saints are in far too much of a hurry, and who would like to go to Heaven with decent deliberation, just as they walk up to the church-wardens' pew, with the parish priest for company. Our Church is the Church of the saints. We may respect the Commissariat Service, the Provost Marshal, the staff officers and the cartographers, but our hearts are with the men on ahead; our hearts are with those who get killed. There is not one of us shouldering his burden -- his country, his job, his family -- not one of us with our grief-worn faces and our roughened hands, with the unending boredom of our daily life, of daily bread to be fought for, and the honor of our homes to be defended -- there is not one who will ever have enough theology to become even a Canon. But we have enough to become saints. We can leave it to others to administer the Kingdom of God in peace. We have our hands full already, wresting each hour from the day, one by one, with vast labor -- each hour of the interminable day, until that looked-for hour, that unique hour, when God will deign to breathe upon His exhausted creature. O radiant Death, O true dawn! Let others look to the spiritual side of things, argue about it, legislate about it; it is the temporal that we hold in both our hands: we hold in both hands the temporal Kingdom of God. We hold the temporal heritage of the saints. For there were blessed along with us the corn and the wine, the stone of our thresholds and the roof where the dove build her nest; with us were blessed our poor beds full of dreams and forgetfulness; the highroad down which the country carts go squeaking; the young men with their pitiless laughter, and the maidens weeping at the fountain's brink. And ever since then -- ever since God Himself has visited us -- is there anything in this world which our saints should not have taken back: is there anything at all which they cannot give?"

Greater than Sin

2010-03-30T09:27:00.002-04:00

Traces - Communion and Liberation International Magazine - April 2010, Editorial

POPE LETTER

There would be much to discuss about the events that led Benedict XVI to
write his Letter to the Catholics of Ireland, and we could do this by
starting from the facts, the numbers, and the data that, if looked at
attentively, reveal a reality much less enormous than appears in the
ferocious media campaign. Or, we could start from the contradictions of
those who, in the same newspaper, denounce certain wicked deeds, but
after a few pages justify everything and everybody, especially in matters of
sex. We could do this, and perhaps it would help to understand the context
of a Church really under attack, whatever its errors may be. Only the
Pope’s humble and courageous gesture pointed attention toward the heart
of the question.

Clearly, there is a wound, a very serious one, one of the kind that provoked
Christ (and His vicars, too) to use fiery words (“Whoever causes one of
these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him to
have a great millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the
depths of the sea.”).

There is filth in the Church. Joseph Ratzinger himself said so during the
Way of the Cross at Rome’s Coliseum five years ago, shortly before being
elected Pope and, realistically, he has never stopped recalling the fact
since. Sin is there, grave sin. Evil is there, along with the abyss of pain that
evil carries with it, and everything possible has to be done, and with
firmness, to stem the evil and to make amends for that pain. The Pope is
already doing this, and his letter reiterates it strongly when it asks the
guilty to “answer for it before Almighty God and before properly
constituted tribunals.”

This is precisely why the true heart of the question, the forgotten focus,
lies elsewhere. Alongside all the limitations and within the Church’s
wounded humanity, is there or is there not something greater than sin,
something radically greater than sin? Is there something that can shatter
the inexorable weight of our evil? Is there something that, as the Pope
writes, “has the power to forgive even the greatest of sins, and to bring
forth good even from the most terrible evil”?

“This is the point: God was moved by our nothingness,” Fr. Giussani said
in the phrase quoted on the CL Easter Poster. “Not only that. God was
moved by our betrayal, by our crude, forgetful, and treacherous poverty,
by our pettiness... It’s compassion, pity, passion. He had pity on me.” This
is what the Church brings to the world, and certainly not because of its
members’ merit, goodness, or even less because of their coherence: God’s
compassion for our pettiness, something greater than our limitations, the
only thing infinitely greater than our limitations. If we don’t start from
here, we cannot understand at all; everything goes mad, literally.

We, too, have had moments when we have dodged that compassion, and
run away from it. At times, it is in the Church itself that faith is reduced to
ethics, and morality is reduced to an impossible lonely recourse to laws, as
if the need of that embrace were something to be ashamed of. But if we
forget Christ, if we do away with the wholly different measure that He
introduces into the world now, through the Church, then we no longer
have the terms on which to judge the Church.

Then it becomes easy to mistake attention for the victims and regard for
their history for a conniving silence, and prudence toward the guilty
parties, true or presumed–perhaps accused on the basis of rumors
emerging after decades–for the will to “cover up” (sadly, this has
sometimes been the case). Then, it is almost inevitable to keep arguing
about celibacy without even touching on the real value of virginity. And it
becomes impossible to understand why the Church can be hard and
motherly at the same time with the priests who go wrong. It can punish
them severely and ask them to serve their sentence and make amends for
the evil (it has already done so in the past, and will always do so), but
without snapping, if possible, that thread that binds them, because it is the
only thing that can redeem them. It can ask its children to “be perfect as
your heavenly Father is perfect, not so as to demand of them an impossible
reprehensibility, but so as to remind them of a tension to live the same
mercy with which God embraces us” (“be merciful as your heavenly
Father is merciful”).

This is why the Church can educate, which, in the end, is the real question
being challenged by those who are accusing it (“See, even the priests do
wrong, and badly wrong. How can we trust them with our children?”), as if
the Church’s being a teacher all depended on the behavior of her children,
and not on Christ, on that Presence which–amidst all the errors and horrors
committed–makes possible in the world an embrace like that of Chagall’s
Prodigal Son that appears on the Easter Poster. There, alongside Fr.
Giussani’s phrase, there is another, by Benedict XVI: “Conversion to
Christ ultimately means this: to exit the illusion of self-sufficiency in order
to discover and accept one’s own need–the need of His forgiveness and
His friendship.”

This is the embrace of Christ, in our wounded and needy humanity, far
greater than the evil we can do. If the Church, with all its limitations, had
not this to offer to the world, especially to the victims of those barbarities,
then we would be lost—because the evil would still be there, but it would
be impossible to overcome it.

How good and how pleasant

2010-03-23T10:57:00.001-04:00

reposting this (it's from August 16, 2008):
Caravaggio

I posted a big block of text yesterday -- a fascinating account of the Assumption of Mary from an apocryphal text attributed to Joseph of Arimathaea. What strikes me the most in this text is the way that Thomas receives a pretty harsh rebuke from St. Peter: "And seeing and kissing each other, the blessed Peter said to him: Truly thou hast always been obdurate and unbelieving, because for thine unbelief it was not pleasing to God that thou shouldst be along with us at the burial of the mother of the Saviour."

Now, if it were me, I think I might have said something like: "Come on, Pete! I repented of that. Get over it already! You wouldn't want me to be constantly reminding you of how you denied our Lord, would you? Besides, you don't know what you're talking about, because I might not have been with the rest of you at that burial, but I witnessed something pretty darn amazing myself..."

But dear Thomas only responds thus: "And he, beating his breast, said: 'I know and firmly believe that I have always been a bad and an unbelieving man; therefore I ask pardon of all of you for my obduracy and unbelief.' And they all prayed for him."

This is how I want to respond, too! It's so much more attractive, so honest, so much saner. And so counter-cultural, I might add!

And then the whole truth comes out, and Thomas is vindicated: "And the apostles seeing the belt which they had put about her, glorifying God, all asked pardon of the blessed Thomas, on account of the benediction which the blessed Mary had given him, and because he had seen the most holy body going up into heaven."

What did Thomas say to this? Did he proclaim, in triumph, "Ah, see! I'm not so bad after all! I'm just as cool as the rest of you... You better never look down on me again, because I rock!"? No, the text says, simply, "And the blessed Thomas gave them his benediction, and said: 'Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!'"

Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!

Dearest St. Thomas, please pray for all of us because if we want to dwell together in unity, so much needs to be sacrificed! Help me to be this in love with destiny, Lord!

Warning signs

2010-03-17T11:54:00.003-04:00

Very useful information: an article by Peter Vere, JCL, "Sifting the Wheat from the Tares: 20 Signs of Trouble in a New Religious Group":

Since the closing of the Second Vatican Council, a number of new groups have arisen within the Church. Whereas many new groups start off on the right foot and maintain solid footing, others fall by the wayside. This may be due to poor doctrine or questionable practices.

Red Flags and Warning Signs

As a canon lawyer, I am often asked what the Church looks for when assessing new groups forming within the Church. While the following is by no means exhaustive, it presents a pretty good list of red flags and warning signs that would give any canonist pause when examining a new association.

Fr. Francis G. Morrisey, OMI is well-known to every student of religious law. As a lifelong member of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, Fr. Morrisey possesses much experience living in religious community. He is also a professor of canon law at Saint Paul University and a former consultor to the Congregation for Religious — the curial dicastery in Rome that oversees various forms of consecrated life within the Church. This has given him much experience examining and assessing numerous religious orders and new groups within the Church.

Several years ago, Fr. Morrisey proposed 15 criteria, or warning signs, when evaluating new associations within the Church. While these warning signs are not law per se — that is, law in the sense of legislation — most canonists accept these criteria as a solid guide when examining and assessing new associations within the Church. For those with access to a good ecclesiastical library, Fr. Morrisey presents and explains these fifteen criteria in his article “Canonical Associations...” published in Informationes, vol. 26, (2000), pp 88-109.

For those without access to an ecclesiastical library, or for those looking for an explanation more accessible to the average layperson, here are Fr. Morrisey’s 15 criteria along with my personal explanation of what they mean:

Fr. Morrisey’s 15 Warning Signs

1. “Total” obedience to the pope

Many will find this first warning sign surprising. As Catholics, are we not all called to obey the Holy Father? Indeed, we are. When a new association sincerely seeks to obey and follow the teachings of the Holy Father, canonists are for the most part satisfied the group is doing what Catholic groups ought to do.

Nevertheless, some new associations abuse Catholic sensibility in this regard. These groups cite “total obedience to the Holy Father” when what they really mean is partial obedience to selected teachings of the Holy Father, without embracing the entire papal message. Additionally, when challenged over their partial obedience, these groups will appeal to their “total” reliance upon the Holy Father in an attempt to bypass the authority of the diocesan bishop. This brings us to Fr. Morrisey’s second warning sign.

2. No sense of belonging to the local church

As Catholics, we belong to the universal Church. Yet we also belong to the local church community, meaning a local parish and a local diocese. Even the Holy Father is not exempt in this regard; he is, after all, the Bishop of Rome and thus belongs to local Roman Church. Thus the ministry and apostolate of any association should focus on the local church. If a new association or religious order has no sense of belonging to the local church, then this becomes cause for concern.

3. Lack of true cooperation with diocesan authorities

To belong to the local church, one must cooperate with local diocesan authorities. After all, Christ instituted His Church as a hierarchy. Within this hierarchy, our Lord instituted the office of bishop to oversee a portion of Christ’s faithful. Thus the local bishop, and not a particular religious group or association, bears ultimate responsibility for the care of souls within a particular geographical location. If a new association refuses or impedes cooperation between itself and the local diocesan authorities, then its fidelity to the Church is questionable.

4. Making use of lies and falsehoods to obtain approval

As Catholics, we concern ourselves with speaking the truth. After all, our Lord denounces Satan as the “Father of Lies.” So any new association should be truthful in how it presents itself to its members, Church authorities, and the outside world. This is not just a matter of basic honesty; any group or association that resorts to falsehoods to gain approval is likely concealing a deeper problem.

The Church understands that every association, particularly when the association is new, makes mistakes when engaging in ministry or apostolate. When an association is honest, however, these problems are easily identified and quickly corrected. This in turn increases the likelihood of the new association succeeding within the Church.

5. Too soon an insistence on placing all goods in common

While the Church has a history of associations and religious orders in which members place all their goods in common, the decision to do so should come after a reasonable period of careful discernment. Placing one’s goods in common in not for everyone, and the consequences of such a decision are lifelong. Additionally, the potential for abuse by those who administer the common goods is great. Therefore, canonists frown upon any insistence by an association that its new or potential members place their goods in common.

Due to the fact that modern times see less stability in common life, with members sometimes opting to leave after a number of years, the most prudent handling of goods in common is to place them in trust until a member dies. That way, if the member leaves, the goods are available to meet his or her needs outside of the community.

6. Claiming special revelations or messages leading to the founding of the group

Although this represents a warning sign, it is not absolute. The Church recognizes the presence of many legitimate apparitions and private revelations throughout her history. Yet not all alleged apparitions or special revelations turn out to be true. Therefore, the Church must further investigate any claims of special revelations or messages — particularly when they become the catalyst for founding a new association. If, however, a new association refuses to divulge or submit its alleged revelations or special messages to the Church, then this immediately calls into question the authenticity of both the association and the alleged apparition.

7. Special status of the founder, or foundress

Of course, the founder or foundress will always enjoy a special role in the founding of a new association or community. Nevertheless, in all other respects he or she should be a member just like everyone else. This means that he or she is similarly bound to the customs, disciplines and constitutions of the community. If the founder or foundress demands special meals, special living quarters, special dispensations from the rules imposed upon other members of the community, or any other special treatment, then this is a clear warning sign. It is of special concern if the founder or foundress claims exemption from the requirements of Christian morality due to his or her status (see point 15 below).

8. Special and severe penances imposed

As St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, virtue is found in the middle, between two extremes. Therefore, any penances imposed upon members of the community should be both moderate and reasonable. Special and severe penances are not signs of virtue — rather, they are signs of extremism.

9. Multiplicity of devotions, without any doctrinal unity among them

The purpose of sacramentals and other devotions is to bring us closer to Christ and the sacraments. Hence sacramentals are not superstitions. A new association or community should insure that any special devotions or sacramentals unite its members to Christ, the sacraments and the mission of the association. For example, praying three Hail Marys in front of the statue of St. Joseph while the Blessed Sacrament is exposed does not offer such unity. Eucharistic Adoration, Marian devotion and devotion to St. Joseph are all good in themselves, however, they should be offered either individually or collectively as devotion to the Holy Family. They should not be offered simultaneously.

10. Promotion of “fringe” elements in the life of the Church

As previously mentioned, every association or organization within the Church should exist to serve the needs of Christ’s faithful. Therefore, canonists view any association that exists solely to serve fringe elements — whether these elements be special apparitions, private revelations, or extreme social or political agendas, etc. — with suspicion.

This is not to deny that extraordinary events may sometimes become the catalyst for a new association or religious order. For example, St. Francis of Assisi founded the Franciscans after receiving a locution from our Lord to “Rebuild My Church.” Nevertheless, St. Francis did not found the Franciscans with the intention of promoting his internal locution. Rather, the internal locution inspired St. Francis to found an order that would serve the Church.

Within the Church, one finds the three traditional vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Additional or special vows present numerous problems. Often, special vows are reduced to means through which superiors unduly control members of the community or association. The danger is particularly pointed where a special vow cannot be externally verified. Take “joy” for example; one can usually appeal to objective evidence that someone is not living a life of poverty, chastity and/or obedience, but as a feeling, “joy” is too subjective to be judged in an objective manner.

12. Absolute secrecy imposed on members

While some discretion and privacy is necessary within any Church community or association, secrecy should never be absolute unless one is a confessor preserving the seal of confession. Therefore, any association or organization that imposes absolute secrecy upon its members should be approached with the utmost caution. Members should always be free to approach diocesan officials and the Holy See if certain problems arise within the community that are not dealt with in an adequate fashion. Similarly, since these associations exist to serve the Church, all members should be allowed to converse freely and honestly with members of the Church hierarchy when requested.

13. Control over the choice of confessors and spiritual directors

Confession and spiritual direction concern the internal forum — that is, those things that are private to a person’s conscience. Within reasonable limits, a person should be free to choose his or her confessor and spiritual director. On the other hand, obedience to one’s superiors in carrying out an association’s apostolate or ministry concerns the external forum. In other words, the latter are public actions that can be externally verified.

The roles of confessor and spiritual director should never be confused with the role of superior. Nor should there even be the appearance of confusion. Of particular concern to canonists is when a superior imposes himself as confessor and/or spiritual director of a member under his charge. After all, a superior will have to make decisions about a member’s future — and in so doing there exists a strong temptation to make use of information gathered under the seal of confession.

14. Serious discontent with the previous institute of which certain members were part

Like some of the other red flags presented, this warning sign is not absolute. Sometimes, a very good reason exists for a member’s discontent with his or her previous institute. Nevertheless, serious discontent with a previous institute should be carefully examined. In most cases, such discontent points to some deeper problems with the individual, particularly if he or she has a history of “conflict of personalities.”

15. Any form of sexual misconduct as a basis

This warning sign is fairly self-explanatory. The Church’s teaching is clear when it comes to sexual morality. If sexual immorality is the basis for a new group or association, then the association ought to be avoided. Additionally, one should immediately report this to the competent Church authority.

Five Additional Warning Signs from the International Cultic Studies Association

In addition to the fifteen warning signs presented by Fr. Morrisey, Dr. Michael Langone has assembled a list of thirteen criteria by which many cult experts judge a group to be a cult. Dr. Langone is a counseling psychologist and the Executive Director of the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA). He has spent nearly 30 years researching and writing about cults, and for 20 years has been the editor of the Cultic Studies Journal. The following five criteria have been adapted from Dr. Langone’s thirteen criteria and applied to the context of Catholic associations. Some canon lawyers find them useful when evaluating the legitimacy of a new association within the Church.

1. The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members

Of course every new association, if it wishes to grow, will seek to increase its membership. Such growth, however, should come because potential members identify with the mission or apostolate of the association. Additionally, members should only join after a reasonable period of discernment. Thus any association whose main focus is to bring in new members, to the exclusion of other acts of apostolate or ministry, should be carefully examined.

2. The group is preoccupied with making money

Like the previous criterion, there is nothing wrong per se with raising money for one’s association or apostolate. After all, even Christ and the Apostles used money. Nevertheless, money should be a means of carrying out legitimate ministry and apostolic work. Raising money should never be an end in itself. Additionally, the means employed in raising money should be honest and transparent.

3. Elitism

The Catholic Church recognizes that by virtue of their baptism, a certain equality exists among Christ’s faithful, regardless of whether one belongs to the lay, religious or clerical state. Additionally, among religious orders and newer forms of consecrated life, the Church recognizes different types of charisms. Some are active, in that they tend heavily toward active ministry and apostolic work. Others are contemplative, in that they tend more toward prayer and contemplation. Of course, you find everything in between. Therefore, any Church association that only recognizes vocations to its association is not thinking with the mind of the Church. Nor are those associations with a polarized mentality that divide their vocations from those of the rest of the Church.

4. The leadership induces feeling of guilt in members to control them

One’s vocation within the Church should be freely chosen. Similarly, obedience is something a superior should inspire among those under his or her charge. While it sometimes happens that a superior must impose his or her will upon a particular member, obedience should never be coerced through illicit or improper means. Additionally, if a superior must constantly impose his will upon the majority of the membership through coercive means, then this proves problematical to the long-term health of the specific association or religious group.

5. The group completely severs its members from the outside world

Granted, one must be careful here. After all, the Church has a long and honored tradition of cloistered and contemplative orders that sever themselves from the day-to-day activities of the outside world. Nevertheless, even those orders of the most strict observance encourage some forms of outside communication with friends, family and the world. Therefore, it is cause for concern when an association, particularly if the association is lay-based, encourages its members to completely sever ties with friends, family, and the outside world. Additionally, one should beware those associations that encourage or require their members to live and/or socialize only with other members of the same group or association. One should also beware if association or friendships with people outside of the group are encouraged only when they are used to further the goals of the group.

Concluding Thoughts

Each new association within the Church has its own unique charism. Nevertheless, the goal of every new association should be to fulfill a particular need within the Church. An association becomes dangerous if allowed to place its own interests, or those of its founder and/or leader, before the common good of the Church — both local and universal.

If more than a couple of the above warning signs are found to be present while assessing a particular association, then Catholics ought to be wary about becoming involved with the group in question. Such an association is likely to encounter several difficulties with legitimate Church authorities and possibly even degenerate into a cult — a destructive group that does psychological harm and poses a spiritual danger to its members.

© Copyright 2005 Catholic Exchange

reprinted from freerepublic.com

Easter poster 2010

2010-03-05T23:11:00.003-05:00

The Prodigal Son, by Marc Chagall

The above image is the one used on the 2010 Communion and Liberation Easter Poster. The two quotations printed on the poster this year are:

"The Christian Good News responds positively to man’s thirst for justice. What then is the justice of Christ? Above all, it is the justice that comes from grace, where it is not man who makes amends, heals himself and others. Conversion to Christ ultimately means this: to exit the illusion of self-sufficiency in order to discover and accept one’s own need – the need of others and God, the need of His forgiveness and His friendship" (Benedict XVI, from his 2010 message for Lent, on the theme of justice).

And the second quote comes from Is It Possible to Live This Way: An Unusual Approach to Christianity, Volume 3: Charity, by Monsignor Luigi Giussani:

"This is the point: God was moved by our nothingness. Not only that. God was moved by our betrayal, by our crude, forgetful, and treacherous poverty, by our pettiness. Like a father and mother who cry with emotion, a cry that is totally determined by the desire for the child's good, the child's destiny. It's compassion, pity, passion. He had pity on me."

The charism of Communion and Liberation

2010-02-25T12:39:00.005-05:00

“A charism,” Fr Giussani has written, “is an ultimate terminal of the Incarnation, that is, it is a particular way in which the Fact of Jesus Christ Man and God reaches me, and through me can reach others.”

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. (from the CL website)

This photo, and the one above, were taken on Saturday, March 24, 2007, during an audience with the Pope on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the pontifical recognition of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation. More photos of this event may be found here.

Christian Experience

2010-02-25T07:56:00.003-05:00

The Christian experience and that of the Church are one, single, vital act, in which a triple factor is at work, as follows:

a) An encounter with an objective fact which has an origin independent of the person having the experience. The existential reality of this fact or event is a community that can be documented, like every reality which is fully human. This community has an authority expressed through a human voice in judgments and directives, constituting criteria and meaning.

All forms of Christian experience, even those lived in the innermost recesses of the soul, refer in some way to an encounter with the community and to its authority.

b) The ability to properly perceive the meaning of that encounter. The value of the fact which we encounter transcends our power to understand so much so that an act of God is required for an adequate understanding. The same gesture by which God makes His presence known to humanity in the Christian event also enhances a person's potential for knowledge, raising him up to the exceptional reality to which God attracts him. We call this the grace of faith.

c) An awareness of the correspondence between the meaning of the fact that we encounter and the meaning of our own existence, between the reality of Christ and the Church and the reality of our own person, between the encounter and our own destiny. It is the awareness of this correspondence that brings about the growth of the self, an essential component of experience.

Above all, in the Christian experience one sees clearly that in an authentic experience, human self-consciousness and capacity for criticism are engaged, and that this is very different from a mere impression or a sentimental echo.

It is within this verification of Christian experience that the mystery of the divine initiative exalts human reason. Freedom is at work in this verification. We cannot register or recognize the glorious correspondence between the presence of the mystery and our dynamism as human beings unless we have first accepted and are fully aware of our own radical dependence, of the fact that we are "made." This awareness constitutes our simplicity, purity of heart, the poverty of spirit.
The drama of our freedom is entirely contained in this poverty of spirit, a drama so deep that when it happens, it is nearly hidden. (from Chapter 3, pp. 98–102, of The Risk of Education by Monsignor Luigi Giussani)

Don Luigi Giussani 1922-2005

2010-02-23T08:56:00.004-05:00

Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit. (John 12:24)

Five years ago, when I had heard that Monsignor Luigi Giussani had died, my first thought was, "Oh, good; now I can meet him."

I hope that this confession doesn't cause pain to those who knew him and loved him. I felt guilty about thinking it. Why should the death of any other person be "good"? But this thought was insistent, and I immediately began to address my thoughts to Don Gius, and to welcome him into my daily life. This fact may surprise many people, particularly those who know that in 2005, I had very mixed feelings about Communion and Liberation, the lay ecclesial movement that he founded. How could I claim him as a friend when I steadfastly refused to join the local community that sincerely followed his charism?

On the day of Fr. Giussani's funeral, I was in my office at work. The funeral was to be live broadcast over the internet, but I wasn't internet savvy enough to know how to pull it up. I went into the office next door, and asked my friend and colleague, Paul Zalonski, to help me. Then I invited him to watch it with me, saying, "It's not every day that you get to see the funeral of a saint." We watched the funeral together, and Paul was able to explain some of the Italian, as well as interesting liturgical details to me. It's so funny for me to think about my own ambivalence at the time and also Paul's lack of familiarity with CL because now we are both in the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation.

Even then, I recognized that there were many things about Communion and Liberation that I could not account for. Though the local community did not look like my preconception of a Christian community (at all!), there were troubling details that I couldn't account for: a radical change that took place in the lives of a couple of the members, the faithfulness and simplicity with which many accepted invitations, a striking passion for culture, an unusually familiar (I mean, they seemed very familiar with Christ when they addressed him) approach to prayer, a certain something that happened when we sang together...

I am also a reader, and I had met Giussani, first of all, in his writings and second, in the stories that were told about him. Everything about the man was tremendously attractive to me. His intensity for life, the love with which he embraced all of reality, his passionate attention to whomever was in front of him, but most of all I was deeply attracted to the way in which he entered into the Gospels when he read them. His was no intellectual engagement with themes and theologies. His genius lay in the natural way he saw, in front of his eyes, the events of Christ's life. He lived "inside the skin" of Peter, John, and Andrew -- Scripture was, for him, the history of his own dialogue with Christ. When he spoke about Peter, on the shore eating the breakfast that Christ had cooked for him, Fr. Giussani's listeners could taste the roasted fish. He invited us all into his own participation, so that we, too, could feel Christ's eyes on us as he asks each one of us, "Do you love me?"

The effect he has had on those who follow his charism is too profound and various to characterize well; however one exceptional fact seems necessary to mention: Fr. Giussani's unique passion led others to a fascination with Christ. In a Church where it is commonplace for our teachers and leaders to exhort us to adore Christ, to learn from Christ, to worship Christ, to imitate Christ, or to embrace Christ, it is rare, perhaps even completely new, to find Christian teachers who inspire fascination for Christ.

Yet, fascination and wonder characterized those first persons in the Gospels who were introduced to Christ. Everyone who met Christ wanted to know, "Who is this man?" They kept coming back to be near him because they didn't know what he would do next, but they were along for the ride.

Don Gius challenged us to take this same ride, and I am forever grateful to him.

Shouting and other expressions of love

2010-02-20T11:36:00.002-05:00

Fr. Rich, a friend of mine and the author of some of the most beautiful songs (Nazareth Morning, The Things That I See, New Creation, You, My Father Sings To Me, etc.) that have been born out of the charism of Communion and Liberation, once told a story about his first conversation with Don Giussani, when he went to visit him in Italy. Somehow the conversation turned to the work that Fr. Rich was doing with the teens in GS. He was collaborating closely with another friend, Chris. He told Fr. Giussani that he was constantly on the verge of quitting his work with GS because Chris was always shouting at him, and he couldn't stand to be shouted at.

Fr. Giussani asked Fr. Rich why Chris shouted.

"He only shouts at people he loves," said Fr. Rich.

"Well, then?" said Don Gius, with a shrug.

finally, some words!

2010-01-22T09:19:00.002-05:00

My Experience at The New York Encounter:

Times Square in New York must be one of the strangest places on earth. The buildings on every side of the square loom so high that they are all one can see, and on every surface, electronic billboards display video advertisements that flash and jitter to capture the ephemeral attention of the crowds that jostle everywhere. During our two-block walk from the subway station to the Marriot hotel where the first New York Encounter (a two-day cultural festival organized by members of the lay ecclesial movement, Communion and Liberation) was held, I am approached four times by people offering to sell me tee shirts, tours of the area, noisy toys, or tickets to a Broadway play. Passing into the Marriot hotel lobby, and up the escalators to the sixth floor, one enters an entirely new world. At the New York Encounter, no one seizes me by the coat to sell me anything. The only noise is of animated conversations – the sounds of friendship. Welcomed at the desk, the volunteer there, a woman I’ve never met before, pours me a cup of water from her personal bottle when she overhears me say that I am thirsty.

The exhibits consist of foam board posters propped on easels. Each one is the result of a long work of collaboration among friends. For the Los Angeles Habilitation House (LAHH), a non-profit organization whose aim is to train and find employment for adults with disabilities, the posters display photos of its founders and the people who receive their services. The faces in these photos have a strange quality: not merely happiness but the knowledge of belonging and of being happy together. Much information about the history of the organization and its daily operations is available, also, but the overall impact of the exhibit is that it documents a friendship.

Other booths, representing groups that have sprung from the life of Communion and Liberation, line the walls in two separate rooms: the annual Med Conference and Ed Conference, AVSI USA, the Meeting at Rimini, CLU, Traces Magazine, and GS among them. Each of these is striking, not for its design or organization (some even use hand-lettered signs), but for the people sitting at each table. Though the faces are different, the expressions resemble those in the photos at the LAHH exhibit. Though it is immediately evident that everyone loves the particular works that they represent, there is something more interesting to them. They want to know who I am, what brings me there, what I think, what I want. When I show interest in a book at the AVSI booth, the man there gives me copies of all three of the books there, without asking for a nickel in return. At the GS booth, I spoke with Monica Ciantia, who told me that a teenage boy had just been there. After asking his name and where he was from, she realized that he wasn’t involved in GS, so she asked him how he came to be there. He told her that he’d been bored, saw the sign for “New York Encounter” and came to see what it was about. Monica said to me, “Can you imagine? In the middle of Times Square, he was bored?! Isn’t it amazing?” What is more amazing is that this boy, who he is and that he was bored, are what captivate Monica.

On the first night of the festival, the keynote speaker is John Sexton, the President of New York University. He spoke about great teachers he’d had throughout his education. These great teachers all shared a particular quality; they were able to bring disparate elements together in order to account for the whole of reality. He concluded with the observation that “In this moment when the inscrutable other is in our lives, how are we going to react? [With a ] clash of civilizations or an embrace? Can we create a community of communities?”

Such a community already exists, and it is called the Church. This fact became more and more evident as each of the next four speakers spoke about their experience at the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples in Rimini, Italy. First, Emilia Guarnieri, one of the original founders and organizers of the Rimini Meeting, spoke about the history of the Meeting and the ongoing work of mounting such a large cultural festival each year. Animated by a desire to know and learn more about the constructive work being done in all areas of culture, the friends who organize the Meeting have been accompanied, from the beginning, first by Monsignor Luigi Giussani and now by Father Julián Carrón. She said, “We would have never had the presumption to love the others [whom we invite to present or participate in the Meeting], except that we were loved ourselves, first.” The other speakers, Brad Gregory (history professor from Notre Dame University), Daniel Sulmasy (Franciscan friar and medical ethics professor at the University of Chicago), and Joseph Weiler (law professor at New York University) each spoke of their impressions of the Meeting in Rimini. From these accounts, two factors stood out for all who spoke: 1) the depth and diversity of the exhibits and speakers, which include science, art, music, history, literature, sports, and religion (representing many faiths, not simply Catholicism), and 2) the volunteerism evident at the Meeting in the 30,000 volunteers, annually, who pay their own way in order to provide basic services at the Meeting.

On day two of the New York Encounter, we returned to the Marriot Hotel in Times Square to attend a presentation on the book, Is It Possible to Live This Way: An Unusual Approach to Christianity, Volume 3: Charity, by Monsignor Luigi Giussani. The presenters were Stanley Hauerwas and Father Julián Carrón, with Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete moderating.

Professor Hauerwas began by providing a general overview of the text, with particular attention to its content and style. What impressed him was the way in which each thought is expressed in such a way that it invites further thought in the reader, and he remarked, “grammar makes all the difference,” using Giussani’s phrase, “the truth of life lies in affirming Being,” as an example. The genius of this insight, Hauerwas explained, lies in “how we are taught to see that things didn’t have to exist. They are gift.” It is in “concentrated attention to the particular,” an attitude that Giussani’s book invites, that one can achieve a non-violent apprehension of the other. One conclusion that Hauerwas drew from the book is that, “the great enemy of charity is the abstract [... which is a] willful attempt to live lives of distraction;” the alternative to abstraction is tenderness. Hauerwas asserted that Giussani’s approach “threatens our desire to control.” Another key point that Hauerwas underscored was that the “great enemy of love in our culture is sentimentality.” He affirmed that Giussani’s great contribution is his recognition that “Love is Jesus, [and] the first object of man’s charity is Jesus Christ.” Far from being a “generalized humanism,” Love is a person of flesh and blood, who died for us. The sacrifice that Christ made demonstrates that “to do what is true, a sacrifice is needed.” Giussani does not spare us this truth but rather insists on it: “[Giussani] tells us the truth, even when we don’t want to hear it.” Hauerwas concluded his presentation by reading a moving sermon he had written; his purpose was to illustrate the way in which Giussani’s book at influenced his thought and work.

Then Julián Carrón spoke, introducing the book with these words: “Fr. Giussani introduces [us into] a dialogue on the nature of religious experience within the dynamic of daily life – not superimposed on life but [as a phenomenon] to do with the structure of the ‘I’. These words carry within them the claim that they answer to life.” Carrón explained that the words we use often come freighted with meanings borrowed from the surrounding culture or the prevailing mentality. The word ‘Love,’ in particular, is often reduced to a sentimental or moralistic definition, which leads to the question of whether loving, can be a real interest in an other or is it simply egotism? The antidote to this misuse of words is to have a true experience. Carrón insisted that “God’s love is fundamental,” and that in front of His gratuitous love, all our interpretations crumble. While demonstrating that man’s nature is needy and wanting, Carron explained “we try to fill this emptiness by trying to possess people or things, [which is] violent and pretentious.” As a result, we “sink into skepticism.” The only way out is to meet something unforeseen. Carron connected the experience of the early Church with that of Christians today: “We find it difficult to identify with the novelty that Christianity introduced to the ancient world,” a place of many cultures and religions, “amazing in its profusion,” much like ours today. Carrón asked, “What did Christianity have that was so new and attractive?” Ancient peoples imagined that their gods were, like them, beset by desires, which implies that something was missing in them. When the gods loved, it was as an expression of this lack, and it was characterized by ‘Eros.’ When “Christianity burst forth,” an entirely new love was introduced into this world. Love was now “a gift of Being,” and an answer to the heart of man. This new Love was characterized by ‘agape.’ “In Christ, God makes a gift of Himself [...] The New Testament affirms the absolute precedence of the Love of God. [...] We love, then, because He loved us first.” Carrón explained that this is why Christianity was so attractive in the ancient world: it “corresponds to man’s wanting nature. [...] Christianity is the surprise and fascination provoked by this attractiveness. [...] It is this affection for Christ, and surprise, that generates a subject capable of being interested in the destiny of every man, not in an ideological way, but as a moved gift of himself which is a testimony to the original precedence [of Christ’s love].” Carrón concluded his talk by affirming, “God’s love comes before and is not connected to our goodness. It is totally gratuitous. He takes us just the way we are. God’s preference is the starting point for every one of our initiatives. [This fact] also identifies our method: gratuity. [...] Remaining amazed at Christ’s pity on our nothingness [...] is what overcomes every sense of powerlessness [...] so we can accept every sacrifice [...] even giving one’s life so another can live. This is exactly what Jesus did for each one of us and what a Christian mother would do for her child.”

After the book presentation, I visited the two larger exhibits, one on the novel, Life and Fate, by Vasilij Grossman (1905-1964), and the other mounted by Euresis, entitled, “The Earth, A Human Habitat: The Exceptional Features of Our Small Planet.”

In “Life and Fate,” the organizers write, “The main theme of this novel is the absolute, indomitable nature of man in the face of any form of power-- a nature witnessed to by the great questions about the meaning of existence, well describing the heart and reason of man, even in the most dramatic circumstances of human life.” In a series of panels, the exhibit provides historical background and documents the difficulties in bringing the book to print; the novel was banned in Russia and the manuscript, all notebooks, and even Grossman’s typewriter ribbons, were burned. Ten years after the author’s death, in 1974, his friends were able to smuggle microfilm photos of the manuscript pages to the west where the book was first published in 1980. It was not published in Russia until 1988, and some think it is the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century.

As I approached the exhibit, “The Earth, A Human Habitat,” there was a large group following one of the guides. I met two guides, Giorgio Ambrosio, a physicist who works on developing highly sensitive and powerful magnets with the Fermilab, a proton-antiproton collider in Batavia, Illinois and Massimo Robberto, who works on the Hubble space telescope at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. These two specialists in their respective fields described panels in the exhibit with evident enthusiasm, despite the fact that the science content of most of the panels was drawn from various disciplines, including biology, chemistry, geology, and physics. The original exhibit was first presented at the Meeting in Rimini, but to create this English language traveling exhibit, the scientists collaborating on the translation had to edit it down to about half the size. The discussions became a moment of collaboration and collegiality that deepened friendships among the scientists. What made it worth the work to put together such a great exhibit? Ambrosio said, “The exhibit starts from wonder. We asked one question, “How does the earth support human life?” From this point, scientific inquiry can remain open, and after all the research, we discover many more questions! It is something that is even more wonderful!”

In the evening, the New York Encounter screened the classic silent film, “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer and starring Renée Jeanne Falconetti. I had already watched this film twice. On both occasions, the silence became a palpable aspect of the film. In the silence, there is nothing to mediate between the viewer and Joan’s suffering and death, and one experiences her acute solitude to the point of discomfort. Several composers have created scores for the film, including an oratorio, “Voices of Light,” written in 1988 by Jewish composer, Richard Einhorn. For the New York Encounter presentation of this film, the festival organizers invited the Metro Chamber Orchestra, directed by Phil Nuzzo and the Communion and Liberation Choir, directed by Christopher Vath. Together they gave a live performance of Einhorn’s “Voices of Light” during the film. This music dramatically changed the experience of viewing this film. Rather than dwelling most on Joan’s solitude in her suffering, the music suggested that Joan was indeed accompanied by Another, by the God in whom she never lost certainty. Her martyrdom was a victory and a deliverance, facts that are expressed in the film without accompaniment; however, the music gave this victory a dimension, so that it took flesh.

The final presentation of the New York Encounter, “Words and the ‘I’: How Literature Helps Us to Judge Our Experience” took place the following morning. The presenters were Paul Elie, Senior Editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, John Waters, journalist and playwright, and Greg Wolfe, publisher and editor of Image Journal. During this panel discussion, the presenters discussed the question of literature’s role in lived experience.

Meanwhile, the electronic billboards continued to flash at passersby on the street below. Times Square continued, as though the Beauty taking place in the Marriott Hotel were a million miles away. And yet, we were there, in the heart of the confusion and promises of partial fulfillment. We were there, offering to Times Square, and to the world, this new gaze on reality, the source of the world’s hope!

every day

2010-01-11T08:58:00.005-05:00

George De La Tour, St. Joseph the Carpenter

My local fraternity group says the following prayer everyday as part of our rule:

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

preserve in me the heart of a child,

pure and clean like spring water;

a simple heart

that does not remain absorbed

in its own sadness;

a loving heart

that freely gives with compassion;

a faithful and generous heart

that neither forgets good

nor feels bitterness for any evil.

Give me a sweet and humble heart

that loves without asking

to be loved in return,

happy to lose itself

in the heart of others,

sacrificing itself in front

of your Divine Son;

a great and unconquerable heart

which no ingratitude can close

and no indifference can tire;

a heart tormented by the glory of Christ,

pierced by His love

with a wound that will not heal

until heaven.

- Fr. Leonce de Grandmaison

The prayer also appears in the sidebar of this blog. The San Carlo priests pray this every day.

George De La Tour, The Education of the Virgin

Charism and belonging

2010-01-06T09:26:00.005-05:00

... and dwells among us

...the free conscience of the individual who believes in required not to envelop itself in automatic gestures, in repetitive suffocating cycles but to discover a reality. Moreover, we would add, this conscience's calling is to enter, with all the resources of its humanity, into profound contact with this reality (Luigi Giussani, Why the Church? page 193).

I've been wondering a lot about this "profound contact" with a discovered reality. For a while now, I have chosen to include a quote as part of my email signature. The purpose of the quote is to serve as a reminder to me; whenever I go to write an email, I reread it, and it informs how I approach my correspondence, not just in the particular email but with reality as a whole. I would regularly change this quote, depending on my own need for deeper conversion, but recently I've found one that has remained longer than the rest:

May it become [...] habitual to perceive in all things -- in everything, from the boughs of the tree to the hairs of the person you like -- the presence of the Mystery that became a man in flesh and blood... Getting used to seeing this in everything is a history that God allowed you to begin.

It's from Fr. Giussani, but now I've forgotten where I found it. It was the part about perceiving the presence of the Mystery of Christ incarnate that fueled the choice. I wanted it to become a habit for me to see Him in flesh and blood and to see him everywhere, in each smallest detail. For me, the problem of faith has become one of perception. He is present. I've had no doubt about it.

But even in this knowledge and certainty, I have spent days and months of my life facing reality as if he were not the constitutive factor of everything, as if the reality that presents itself to me were a lie or a mistake: if only I were somewhere else; if only I were with other people; if only I were different; if only I had the right music to listen to; if only person X would see the truth; if only, if only... Or I would understand facts according to the way a common mentality understood them: certain acts or people are good; certain outcomes are necessary; certain events mean I should work harder, turn my back, keep a distance, make an effort, have an answer, or make a contribution; etc. And all this despite the fact that I seem to have been given knowledge of the truth along with the gift of wonder and awe!

For me it has not been enough to know, with utter certainty, that he is present in boughs and hairs, and it has not been enough to have the capacity to wonder at this fact.

So, I've been begging and pleading with Christ to show me his face in everything, while holding in my thoughts those aspects of my life in which I have particular difficulty seeing him. I'd like to say that I've made progress, but if I have, then this progress has only served to make me acutely aware of countless more instances in which he is present and I fall short of habitually recognizing him, with the end result that I feel even more inadequate and wanting than before.

But there is something new, something very difficult to describe.

The best I can do is to call it a pause. Sometimes it is no longer than an intake of breath, during which I simply apprehend what is in front of me. It is a moment in time that is rich and overflowing and intensely alive, and it acts as a lens of sorts. Within this pause is the fullness of peace. It embraces what it beholds, without interpreting or categorizing, though it constitutes a kind of judgment: that what is in front of me has infinite value, a value that I don't give to it. It is not so much an experience of wonder as it is a moment of compassion. This pause is the charism of Communion and Liberation, manifested in my life. It has no other source.

Where is gold found?

2010-01-03T12:30:00.002-05:00

We often hear it said: "If only all Christians were like him," or: "If only all priests were like that." Such comments ... are symptomatic of an attitude which impoverishes the person who adopts it. For it is an illusion to think that we would automatically react differently to a truth if we had met it through another type of person. This conclusion is illusory because it means endowing a simple and often understandable reaction of like or dislike in regard to a given person with the dignity of a judgment. A gold prospector would never have been daunted by the mud of the river bed where he hoped to find nuggets. Rather, he would have been motivated by the probability of finding gold, not by the conditions he might have to face in order to come across it. It is terrible then to think how easily, in contrast, man can be detached from the problem of his destiny, to the extent of renouncing the gold because of the mud that comes with it. But as we were saying, the problem is one of judgment: a man, daunted by the mud of their rivers, has not taken into account the fact that it is the gold of life which is at stake (Luigi Giussani, Why the Church, page 131).

What is this "truth" that we meet through other persons? Someone once said, "I am the Way the Truth and the Life." To meet truth is to meet Him.

This, therefore, is the dramatic implication of the method God has always used: everything depends on freedom. In no other sphere, either of thought or of achievement in history, does freedom play such an important tole as in the vision Christianity proposes of man, of society, and of history. However, if, as we have seen, the divine message the Church proposes to us must pass through human reality -- through a limitation, something finite -- it is for this very reason that we know for certain that human freedom will never be able to realize this ideal to its fullest extent: the human vehicle in the Church will always seem inadequate in comparison with all that it presumes to bring to the world. But the point we are making is precisely this: God has bound himself to this, the individual's highly personal application of freedom, to the specific way in which every single man responds to the capacity for the infinite which is in him, to the requests of God. This is why any of us may well encounter generous Christians and not so generous ones ... The divine passes definitively through the channel of person freedom in its communication of self. It is interesting to observe the Christian way of life from the point of view of freedom. If, in fact, a man says something that is right and does not put it into practice himself, we who notice it have our backs to the wall in the face of our ultimate responsibility (Luigi Giussani, Why the Church, page 134).

Human freedom is imperfect and always will be, but God chooses it as his vehicle to communicate himself to us.

When Jesus said: "Blessed is he who will not be shocked by me" (Luke 7:2) he meant, do not be shocked by what I might say and do, however paradoxical that might appear. In the same way, we can say: blessed is the man who does not reject a value because of an imperfection in its bearer ... Even today, if we are intent on finding fault with those who proclaim Christianity, or if we are waiting to be shocked, this is only an excuse for never adhering, for never having the need to change. For, in any case, there will always be faults, and to opt to fix one's gaze on them only means to make the fatal choice not to scan our horizons searching for what is worthwhile. Jesus again stigmatizes this excuse, when he replied to a new objection raised by the Pharisees that his disciples did not observe the tradition of washing their hands before meals: "How ingeniously you get round the commandment of God in order to preserve your own tradition" (Mark 7:9) -- and this is the unhappy attitude of which we can still become prisoners today.
However, the Church was saved throughout the centuries by all those who, in their pursuit of the truth and reality, in their love of value and the ideal, were not shocked by the limitations, by the grip of circumstance, by the apparent incomprehensibility of human affairs, and who set out resolutely in the search for the object of their love, to find the treasure hidden in the mud. In this way, they showed the world and history that their eyes and their hearts were trained on the treasure and not the mud (Luigi Giussani, Why the Church, page 137-138).

This is the challenge of the Church today (perhaps it has always been our challenge, from the moment Thomas was shocked by his companions and would not believe they had seen the risen Christ?). If I have a New Year's resolution (and I don't believe in them, actually), it is to notice each time I am shocked or scandalized and then thrust my whole self into the mud so that I can bring up gold.

fragile and ambiguous

2010-01-02T14:21:00.002-05:00

The total fulfillment of our desire for the Infinite -- the One who gives us each breath and even our desire to breathe, the Lord who is the consistency of everything, the secret principle of the world, the meaning of every detail -- became flesh and dwells among us.

This man, who began his life as a man in the same way we all do -- as a baby -- was born in history. As we all do, he has a name: Jesus of Nazareth. During the brief span of thirty-three years he accompanied a small number of ordinary and fallible persons. He ate with them, walked with them, questioned them, shook them up, shared their work, faced their fears, addressed himself to their need.

Then, through a mysterious series of events (as one of the girls in the atrium described it, the "Crucerection," followed by the Ascension) that we continue to dwell upon, he returned to the right hand of the Father. Is he gone, now? Have we now returned to the time before he came, when communion with the invisible God happens in privacy and interiority, marked by ambiguity?

Christianity says no; the time of Christ, in the flesh, on this earth, continues now and into the future.

This continuing presence of Christ in this world does not rest on our ability to perceive it, our emotional states, our moral consistency, our intelligence, creativity, talents, aspirations, projects, thoughts or deeds. But it does rest on something exceedingly fragile and ambiguous: our humanity.

What is our humanity, if it isn't our ability to perceive, our emotional states, moral consistency, intelligence, creativity, talents, aspirations, projects, thoughts or deeds?

Our humanity is the truth of who we are: our need. Our humanity is a fact -- the fact that we do not give ourselves life or happiness, the fact that we don't make ourselves grow or change or move. Those other things I listed are a result of our humanity, of how we use our humanity. Because along with this desire, as an integral part of our need, is another element: freedom. Freedom, as Fr. Giussani shows us, is the capacity for the Infinite. Our humanity, then, is vital need married to great capacity.

Our need and our freedom are made of the same substance and they cannot be separated without a mortal wound to our humanity. Just as the mind cannot live without the heart, and the heart would be a useless lump of flesh without the brain's signals and actions, freedom without awareness of need becomes a slave master who cannot rest without subjugating, dominating, and destroying; and need, without freedom, becomes a slave and addict, intent on swallowing or being swallowed.

Christ chose this humanity of ours to be the method through which he continues in the flesh.

How does this happen? It happens in each person according to particular circumstances, when in a courageous acknowledgment of facts, need and freedom are recognized and left open. One cannot live this way for long without discovering an answer which is found only when we meet someone who eats with us, walks with us, questions us, shakes us up, shares our work, faces our fears alongside of us, addresses himself to our need. This someone can engage reality, embrace everything, be glad in everything -- particularly in things that seem empty and meaningless. And this someone invites us to share the path.

This is what each of us awaits. In our fragile and ambiguous humanity, we carry this truth of things, this secret of the world. He is here, in the flesh. Would you like to walk with him? Allons!

Tina, I miss you

2009-12-16T22:44:00.003-05:00

Visionary religious educator, wife, mother and grandmother Valentina Lillig died early Sunday, December 13, 2009, at Loyola University Hospital in Maywood. She was 64.

Ms. Lillig, who was known by all as Tina, had been hospitalized since Friday afternoon after suffering a stroke while working in her office at the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd in Oak Park.

A longtime resident of Oak Park, Ms. Lillig was born Valentina Varias in Hyde Park and grew up in the Galewood neighborhood on Chicago's northwest side. She attended St. William grammar school, where she was class president, and Trinity High School in River Forest, where she was president of the Sodality and Vice President of her class. Ms. Lillig, who was of Italian and Filipino heritage, was fond of telling her sons that she was the first non-Irish girl to serve as a class officer at Trinity, whose students were overwhelmingly Irish at the time.

After graduating from Trinity, Ms. Lillig attended Loyola University, traveling to Rome, Italy to study Loyola's Rome Center Campus. While in Rome, Ms. Lillig learned to speak Italian, which aided her in her later graduate studies and in her professional and personal correspondence with Italian theologians and religious educators. Ms. Lillig would sometimes resort to Italian expressions to counsel her sons or to explain ideas that she felt English could not adequately express.

Ms. Lillig left Loyola in 1965 without finishing her degree to begin teaching in Catholic schools, which was allowed at the time. At the age of nineteen, she taught first grade at Our Lady Help of Christians Grammar School on Chicago’s West Side. Ms. Lillig’s class, which had 52 students, was the start of a lifelong career of teaching and working with children. In 1967, she married John Lillig, a teacher, former seminarian and Help of Christians parishioner whom she had known since she was fifteen. That year, she taught kindergarten at St. Attracta grammar school in Cicero. She later taught at Providence-St. Mel High School and worked as a copy editor for The New World, the newspaper of the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago.

In 1968 the first of Ms. Lillig's three sons, John, was born. He was followed by Matt (1970) and Thomas (1973). As a young mother Ms. Lillig was active in La Leche League. The family lived in Help of Christians parish until 1972, when they moved to Oak Park. Ms. Lillig raised her three sons at home, and Mr. Lillig worked as a Chicago Public Schools teacher. During this time, Ms. Lillig contemplated returning to finish her college degree and perhaps eventually working as a librarian.

In 1976 Ms. Lillig entered her three-year-old son Thomas in a local Montessori-based religious education program called the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, part of a program founded by the Italian educators Gianna Gobbi and Sofia Cavelletti, the niece of Pope Pius XII. This simple act would change Ms. Lillig's life. Thomas was enthralled with the rituals and songs presented to him at catechesis, repeating songs and prayers at home in the family dining room. Ms. Lillig was profoundly affected by her young son's behavior, which validated her longtime belief that even very young children enjoy an active spiritual life, and it inspired her to register for a training course to become a teacher, or catechist, of the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. She was able to take the course only because it fell within a three-week period during which her husband, a CTA bus driver in the summer, worked an all-night shift and could stay at home with the children during the day.

Ms. Lillig devoted the rest of her life to the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, eventually becoming its national director and teaching courses to train other teachers throughout the country and in Europe. She worked as a catechist at St. Giles Family Mass Community, St. Giles Parish, and Grace Episcopal Church in Oak Park. Under her visionary leadership, the Catechesis grew into an expansive worldwide organization, with a curriculum used in thousands of Catholic and Episcopal parishes worldwide. In 1998, she published a book, The Catechesis of the Good Shepherd in a Parish Setting, to guide religious educators who wished to implement a Catechesis program in their own parishes. Over the years, she served as an editor and advisors to many other religious educators who sought her editorial guidance in publishing their own work.

In 1980, Ms. Lillig returned to Loyola to complete her undergraduate degree in Theology, commuting several nights a week to Loyola's Lewis Towers campus. She went on to earn a Masters Degree in Pastoral Studies from Catholic Theological Union in Hyde Park.

In October, 1999, Ms. Lillig was preparing to lead a Catechesis training course in Rome, Italy when she slipped on a marble floor getting out of bed, breaking her hip. Taken to a local Italian public hospital, Ms. Lillig lay unattended and without anesthetic or water for several hours before a friend from the training course discovered her. The friend was able to arrange for a transfer to a private hospital which served American diplomats, where Ms. Lillig stayed for a few days until her husband came to Italy and flew her home, immobilized, to undergo hip replacement surgery in Chicago.

In 2002 Ms. Lillig became a grandmother for the first time. The first grandchild would be followed by five more within a three-year period. Ms. Lillig delighted in her grandchildren, especially enjoying reading to them and taking them to her bedroom to show them the small crucifixes, candles, and religious statues that she kept carefully tucked away in her drawers. Ms. Lillig's love for her grandchildren allowed her respite from a variety of painful conditions which she began to experience in her last few years. While she was often in significant pain, almost no one around her except her husband realized it because she never complained or expressed any resentment about her pain, and it failed to slow her tireless work at the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd or any other aspect of her active life. While painful, her conditions were unrelated to her fatal stroke, which came suddenly and without warning.

When she died, Ms. Lillig was in the midst of an ambitious new project, developing a comprehensive website for the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd that would provide, online, the numerous books and teaching materials that she and other catechists had written or helped publish throughout her career.

Ms. Lillig leaves her beloved husband, John Lillig, three sons, John (Anna Lee), Matt (Laura Salvarini) and Tom (Cindy Ivanac-Lillig), her six grandchildren, Eun Hae, Tae Won, Juan, Mariana, Meche, and Coleman, her brother Angelo (Denise Fedewa) Varias, and her mother Frances Fiscella Varias. She was preceded in death by her father, Gonzalo Varias and her sister Graziella Figi.

Visitation will be on Friday, December 18 from 3:00 to 9:00 p.m. at:
Drechsler-Brown Funeral Home
203 S. Marion Street
Oak Park, IL 60304
(708) 383-3191

The Funeral Mass will be on Saturday, December 19 at 10:00 a.m. at:
Ascension Church
808 S. East Avenue
Oak Park, IL 60304
(708) 848-2703

Interment will follow the Funeral Mass at:
Maryhill Cemetery
8600 N. Milwaukee Avenue
Niles, IL 60714
(847) 823-0982

In lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be made to:
The National Association of the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd
P.O. Box 1084
Oak Park, IL 60304

This tribute was originally published here.

How a Train Whistle Brought a Search for God

2009-12-12T11:45:00.002-05:00

By Carmen Elena Villa, from Zenit

ROME, DEC. 11, 2009.- Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi has a powerful memory, such that thinking about the discovery of his vocation leads him to a recollection from age four.

ZENIT spoke with the president of the Pontifical Council for Culture for this week's installation of "God's Men." Asked how he discovered his call to the priesthood, the 67-year-old prelate recounted an incident from right after World War II had ended.

Four-year-old Gianfranco saw how the sun was dropping behind a hill and heard a train whistle as it passed by.

"That sound is something melancholic: It makes one think of the idea of departure," he said. "And I remember with extreme mental clarity the experience of a profound sense of the fragility of things. It was something that made me understand the meaning of death, or in any case the fact of not having definitive security here. I believe that element was important in the search for God."

Discerning his vocation during his seminary years, Ravasi recalled how he began to understand his nostalgia for the infinite, which he had always taken as a call to participate in eternity, and as a priest, to bring others to do the same.

"Then, by this time, I felt the choice for God as the choice for the ultimate meaning of life," he explained.

Faith through culture

Ravasi inherited from his mother his passion for reading. From his earliest youth he read Plato, St. Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky: "One sees a fundamental line of those who exalt intuition, illumination more than acquisition," he observed.

The archbishop is also a great music lover, particularly Bach and Mozart, but also Baroque and contemporary styles.

He contends that there is a strong connection between art and spirituality, "because they have the ultimate purpose of discovering through finite instruments -- the word, images, sounds -- and representing the infinite."

So, he noted, "If I wish to understand Christ's passion better, with Bach's 'Passion According to Matthew,' I enter profoundly into a spiritual dimension."

The prelate also confessed his admiration for visual arts, though his inability to create them. "I have so much respect and admiration for the genius that I cannot, I do not want to imitate it because it would be a clumsy thing," he said.

Penning his thoughts

Archbishop Ravasi said he has lost count of the books he has written, but believes in all, they number about 150.

He explained that he likes to write at night: "I don't sleep much -- four hours are enough and it is as if I had rested for eight."

And, the prelate continued, he writes by hand, not with a computer. He confessed that he does not know much about technology (though on Facebook there is a group of his admirers). He is a great researcher but he never uses Google.

Here, too, his memory comes in handy. He admits he can remember the page on which to find something he's read 10 years ago.

"People search on Google for something on hope," the prelate noted, by way of example "and find 58,000 possibilities. What do they do [with those]? Instead, I have perhaps only 300 possibilities, but I know which ones to choose and where."

Called by God

The president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, ordained a priest in the Diocese of Milan in 1966, says he has lived his priestly vocation in three stages: his youth, during which he taught theology for 20 years; the period in which he was prefect of the Ambrosian Library of Milan; and finally the position he now holds in the Roman Curia.

Archbishop Ravasi confessed his current appointment to the Pontifical Council for Culture was a great joy. "It was a new prospect, no longer of Italy but of the universal Church."

When asked what elements cannot be lacking in the life of a priest, the archbishop suggested symbolic places.

The first is a kneeler, he said, because "invocation, prayer, the primacy of grace is essential." Then there is "the work table," where the first book must always be the Bible. Only with these elements can the priest "go out to the square."

Archbishop Ravasi said he considers his temperament to be pessimistic and acknowledged that he tends to dissatisfaction with human fragility, but he affirmed that serving Christ through culture is a mission that fulfills him entirely, and an excellent instrument to dialogue with the secular world.

Because of this, he describes his priesthood as "very serene, very joyful, despite the difficulties."

Et incarnatus est

2009-12-09T12:42:00.000-05:00

Et incarnatus est is one of the two pieces of music that Fr. Pietro played for us during the Advent Retreat on Sunday. It is an aria taken from Mozart's Great Mass in C Minor, from the Credo, and refers to the moment in the Creed when we pray, "And became man." Here is information on the recording and an excerpt from Fr. Giussani's reflection on the piece:

Spirto Gentil music series founded by Fr Luigi Giussani - n. 24

Grand Mass in C Minor K427
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Deutsche Grammophon
Herbert von Karajan
Berliner Philarmoniker

The Divine Incarnate

This spectacular work by Mozart, which culminates in the song Et incarnatus est (And was made flesh), is the most powerful and convincing, the simplest and greatest expression of a man who recognizes Christ. Salvation is a Presence: this is the wellspring of the joy and the wellspring of the affectivity of Mozart’s Catholic heart, of his heart that loved Christ.
Et incarnatus est is singing at its purest, when all man’s straining melts in the original clarity, the absolute purity of the gaze that sees and recognizes. Et incarnatus est is contemplation and entreaty at the same time, a stream of peace and joy welling up from the heart’s wonder at being placed before the arrival of what it has been waiting for, the miracle of the fulfillment of its quest.
There came a Man, a young Man, who entered the world in a certain town, a certain place in the world that can be identified on a map, Nazareth. When one goes to the Holy Land, to that little town, and enters the shadowy hut where there is an inscription on the wall that reads Verbum hic caro factum est (the Mystery of God, here, was made flesh), he is overcome by shivers. This is the Man Jesus of Nazareth, chosen to be the humanity of the Word, the humanity of God, God who is the answer to the heart of man whom He created, the complete, superabundant answer to the cry of the heart He created; the cry that reverberates in the mystery of the Trinity through the presence brought about by the spirit of a Jewish Man, born of a 17-year-old woman.

(Excerpt from the introduction by Luigi Giussani to the booklet enclosed in the CD)

Why I Garden

2009-12-09T07:35:00.000-05:00

death and the art of digging beneath the surface

I used to hate gardening. I hated measured, ordered flowers. I saw something so militaristic and tacky and even unjust about imposing artificial geometry on something that already has an intricate, hidden order. Base fear seemed at the heart of the antiseptic impulse to remove what Nature so abundantly bestows on the earth -- I took the gardener's imperative to weed as a personal affront. I happen to be a scrappy survivor type with blunt fingers, an iron stomach, and large feet. So, if I were a plant, I'd probably be a weed. How like the worst impulse in humanity to kill one thing to encourage some artificial and biased standard of botanical beauty. Why rake? Why remove stones and briars? Let the earth go natural! Why tamper with God's green earth? That was my philosophy.

But on some level, I knew it was a philosophy of convenience. Because beyond any philosophical revulsion, I particularly hated the feeling of dried dirt on my hands. Dust on my skin sends shivers through me the way that the sound of squeaking chalk on a blackboard does. And the way it gets beneath your fingernails and drives a wedge between the nail and the skin makes me feel almost sick. I hated the posture I had to assume to weed: squatting or kneeling in the awful dirt, with the sun beating down on you. My attitude was inconsistent: occasionally I would color my hair or impose curls on what nature had made straight. Colors that God had never designed for the human face would sometimes appear on my lips and eyes. Perhaps a barely felt awareness of my inconsistency made me resentful.

Also, my experience had educated me to believe that I had a dispositional lack of patience; thus, I took this poverty of virtue for a component of my soul, and after the habit of all good narcissists, I promoted it as a valid state of being. I call myself a narcissist, because in those years, "I" was the only point of reference I could safely describe and feel certain about. If I was to view my self, that is to say, my starting point and end point, as "good," then anything that requires patience must be "bad" -- at least from the subjective (the only "valid") perspective.

None of this is very pretty, and it isn't the root of my distaste for gardening, either. What I have thus far described is more the soil in which the root was buried. The root itself received water and a kind of negative nutrition from this noxious humus and also released toxins that could support other growths that bore unsavory and poisonous fruit.

I used to hate gardening because I feared death.

When I was fourteen and living in Hong Kong, I was the proud mama of two African violets. It required all my attention and dexterity to water them in such a way that no drop of moisture fell on the velvet surface of their leaves. I observed their color and the tension in each hidden stem from day to day. When a leaf began to rely too heavily on the edge of the pot for support, or when its color faded even a shade, I would gently work it loose from the plant, for the good of the whole. Each new bud that started as a dark knot in the secret, leafy heart was greeted with my own quivers of joy, and the days during which it slowly arose from its bed of foliage, swelled and lifted its chin from its chest, and opened its glistening violet soul wide to the cosmos were altered in their very substance. Every moment of my experience was washed with the subtle glaze of anticipation, which transformed even the quality of sunlight and the intensity of its reflection on everything it yanks into life.

Life, indeed all substance, in this phenomenal world is temporary and provisional. Only the light is eternal, but I didn't understand that then. All I understood is that my family would be moving across an ocean and a continent, to someplace called "home" that contained more unknown variables than any ordinary tomorrow. The wash of color vanished and sunlight dimmed. Exercising dexterity, which was essentially powerless to prevent the rot of anxiety from eating my own insides, reminded me too much of its limitations and quickly came to nauseate me. Even brushing my teeth brought on the kind of existential nausea that Jean-Paul Sartre described with so much morbid precision.

So, the violets died, and with them, any trust I had in a world of shifting shades of green. I experienced this as a profound guilt. I had betrayed something, "some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing," that had depended on me.

Well, is it any wonder that I began to sneer at small minds that conceived of tidy garden beds decorated with uniformly spaced hothouse flowers marching in orderly columns, took up the banner of "going natural" in order to trumpet the survival of clumsy, impatient weeds like myself, and crowned the whole ugly mess by complaining of the discomforts of handling dirt?

What overcomes fears, lets us tell ourselves the truth, gives us strength to promote life? What allows us to breathe?

* * *

discovered, while digging

In the basement, in boxes:

1) A man's platinum wedding band
2) A pair of high magnification reading glasses
3) Black and white photo of a high school senior named "Michael" from Wilson High School's 1954 graduating class
4) A CIA bronze medal awarded for "meritorious service"
5) Several letters of condolence addressed to "Wally" with carbon copies of response letters, signed by "Wally" attached with rusty paper clips
6) A map of Arlington Cemetery with a red X marked in Section D.
7) Death certificate for a man who died of a crushed skull

In literature:

1) The Fat Lady, in Franny and Zooey, for whom one can sing
2) The end of all our exploring, in Four Quartets
3) A daughter who is mother of her son, in I Synge of a Mayden
4) Myrrh and how dead wood blooms, in Trilogy
5) How to stain the water clear, in Songs of Innocence and Experience
6) An onion, in The Brothers Karamazov
7) A baby's sneeze, in Anna Karenina
8) Fresh woods and pastures new, in Lycidas
9) the godless , in proud of his scientific attitude
10) Gold to airy thinness beat, in Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
11) What happens to prophets no one believes, in Elektra
12) The one who anticipates desires, in Paradiso
13) A bed, in The Odyssey
14) A burning boy, in Casabianca
15) Dying frogs, in Water and Land Animals
16) Rooms within rooms, in In the Western Night
17) Palimpsests

In my mother's address book:

1) Contact information for Fred, who was Mike's college roommate

In a photo album:

1) A picture of myself, sitting in the front pew, at my parents' wedding
2) A set of four images that together tell the story of how I once fell off a swing

In the woods of Virginia and Pennsylvania:

1) A night filled with as many fireflies as there are sequins on a cocktail dress
2) Trees with limbs that twist and writhe black against a slate sky
4) A crayfish I mistook for a baby lobster
5) An allergy to mold

While walking through a door on a Tuesday morning:

1) My future husband

In an ugly church in the suburbs of Philadelphia:

1) The skin on Jesus' feet
2) A white handkerchief
3) A reason for tears

In my friend's refrigerator:

1) Six bottles of cheap beer
2) A reason to stop counting

In Paris:

1) Chanterelles
2) A copy of Playboy magazine that mentioned Mike and Wally
3) The Bagatelle
4) Ten cousins I never knew
5) A taste for coffee
6) Giverny
7) Nine varieties of potato
8) The Medieval castle under the Louvre museum

In children:

1) Love

In parables:

1) A light by which light may be seen
2) A drop of water that spreads to the edges of the Infinite
3) The bean that sprouts beyond the clouds
4) A pearl with which I could buy back my life
5) How to wait

* * *

living things and the art of digging for them

I dug two holes, one on either side of the steps leading to my front porch. With one gloved hand, I had taken hold of a young rose bush, gripping it at the thickest part of the stem, right where it met the surface of the dirt. With the other hand, I gently nudged at its plastic pot, working the cylinder of soil loose from its container. Just then my neighbor, who is a philosopher by trade, called from across the street, "Planting flowers?"

If he was surprised by what I was doing, it was nothing compared to my own amazement. "Yes!" I answered, "Roses!"

Giving my project a critical once-over, he asked, "Is that how you do it? Just dig a hole and stick it in?"

"I guess so," I said. I mean, what did I know about gardening? Those two rose bushes were my first plantings. Two days later my husband had to dig them up and replant them because I hadn't put them deep enough in the soil.

So then I fell madly in love with gardening, and the roses and I lived happily ever after.

No: I just had to write out that particular sentence, to finally get the lying thought out of my head and keep it instead, where I can see it. In actual point of fact, I did not begin to love gardening for at least another year. For many months I was pleased with myself for having bought the roses and stuck them into the ground (albeit, ineptly), and then I was amazed to see them come back again in the Spring. During the following summer, each time I looked at their frilly, pink blooms I experienced an emotion that can only be described with the words, "Will you look at that?"

Taking all my courage into my hands, I planted more flowering perennials. I didn't do it out of love or because the roses were a "success" that I wanted to repeat, but rather because I felt something was missing in the garden. I was new to the house when I planted the roses and had inherited with it a few unusual and beautiful plants, as well as scores of horrid hostas. A friend was kind enough to dig many of them up for me and relocate them to a place where they could be enjoyed, but now the flower beds were pitted with craters, which I attempted to fill, one by one, with plants that wouldn't require any effort or care after I did them the small service of covering their roots with dirt.

But performing even one small service to aid some helpless and innocent life form can change the way we look at it. Or cause us to look at it at all. The first thing that I began to love about the garden was the way it invited me to look at it. And the act of looking, looking with love, seemed to vivify the plants. Before I went away for a three week vacation, I asked a friend to water my garden for me. She asked if there were any special instructions, and when I told her the most important thing was to look at the plants, she thought I was crazy (so she told me later). But I still maintain that there is something holy about looking at a thing: "He has looked on the lowliness of his servant" (Luke 1:48). And soon after Mary's prayer, Zechariah uses this strange idea of being looked on by God, too: "He has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them" (Luke 1: 68) -- elsewhere in the Bible, the Greek word for "look" is translated as "visited," "has broken" (as in "the dawn from on high will break upon us"), "to select or to choose" (from Acts 6:3), and "to care for" (see James 1:27). Well, I know what happens when the sun from on high "breaks" on my flowers: they are fed on light and they thrive.

This house is my twenty-third residence. I have lived in it for a little over two years, and still we have many unpacked boxes in the basement, the attic, and my bedroom. With each move, it seems to take longer for me to unpack the boxes. There are some boxes I have never unpacked, through the past several moves. They stay sealed, get loaded onto a truck, and then come to rest in a new basement. What is in those boxes? Old letters, the bulk of my postcard collection, certain items of clothing, family photos...yes, and what else? It seems to be a function of my psyche that I don't want to have a mental catalog of what lurks in all my literal corners.

The interior corners are a different matter, though, and so are the exterior ones. In fact, my gardening seems to gravitate to corners. On the northeast corner of the property, at the foot of the retaining wall that makes a nice sharp angle to echo the street corner beyond it, I have planted three blood red poppies that pop from their green fuzzy pods, and toss their petals, like the skirts of Spanish dancers. Above them, just inside the wall itself, I planted two rows of lavender -- different varieties -- that send sprays of stiff, narrow bloom stalks up over formless mounds of greenery. The effect, from a distance, is to soften the sharp lines of the stone wall with a continuous bluish, pinkish, whitish and purplish cloud of perfume. Then, tucked into the elbow of these two lines of lavender, a cluster of peonies rise to offer up an embarrassment of pink froth, so heavy that their showy heads bow down to earth when they are wet. As the eye moves diagonally back from the corner, there is a young dogwood that bears a whole constellation of white stars. Further in and further up, at the corner of the front flower bed, a baby lilac bush stands erect while yarrow, blue daisies, and violet verbena dance in a circle around it. Behind the lilac, a venerable old syringa, dotted with tiny pale green leaves, hides the corner of the tiled porch. Within the wrought iron railing, two flower boxes, filled with geraniums, peachy snapdragons, and pinwheeling zinnias, crowd the porch corner with color. Finally, on the windowsill at the same corner of the house, lantana and dahlias tap at the glass, asking the inner world to acknowledge the unexpected. The other corners of my garden are equally dizzy with tiers of color that work their way in imprecise diagonals toward and away from the house.

I did not plan this pattern, nor any of the others one might discern with a critical eye. Friends have praised my "English" garden, but I did not set out to create a special type of garden. From my perspective, the over-all effect is a messy, riotous metaphor for something that was never determined in advance.

I am still preoccupied with the question of how I went from hating gardening to passing so many timeless hours stooped and kneeling with the sun beating down on me. How did I come to like the smell of dirt? Why do I not mind when the mud cakes and dries on my skin, ruins my shoes and pants, even sometimes gets into my nose and eyes?

1) Breaking the seal on one cardboard box led me to a cemetery where human bodies were planted in geometrical, "militaristic" rows, and where I found questions, red as blood, then

2) Combinations of words yielded clouds of meaning, radiating like halos of cloud around figures of speech, until

3) A single unexpected address began a process of discovery that turned death into someone with a name, a face, and a history as rich and complex and full of hope as blooms that are crushed in a storm, so that

4) Staring fixedly at family photos until they yielded up their secrets helped me locate the mystery in others who danced a circle round the figure of myself in a pew or on a swing, then

5) Paths through woods and along creeks showed me sequins in the air that could birth mythical shapes in the stellar universe, then

6) Peering through doors brought me face-to-face with fatherhood, in all its dimensions, such that it could generate me in every instant of my existence, until

7) Anointed feet brought me an invitation to look up into eyes that were new and great with life, so that

8) In refrigerators, I found my own littleness and dependence, then

9) Mushrooms and potatoes and all the colors contained in the petal of a white water lily revealed to me all the multitudinous contradictions hidden in the heart, until

10) Love led me to the Infinite, who tapped at my glass until I looked upon his garment sewn with seeds and pearls.

Because I am earnest to a fault, I must admit that I made all that up, on the spot, which doesn't mean that any of it is untrue. Just that my flowers could tell you another story, or another. And that is why I garden.

This post is in three parts. The first two parts ("death and the art of digging beneath the surface" and "discovered, while digging") first appeared as stand-alone posts. The entire essay was first published 12/5/07.

Why I Cook

2009-12-06T08:29:00.000-05:00

Cooking begins with hunger...

I typed the above words three days ago, and then I minimized this window. Every time I came to the computer, I looked at those words and then minimized the window again. Too busy cooking to write about it.

But so, cooking begins with hunger, but it doesn't end there. I began to cook seriously as a result of a huge shift in my self-understanding when I was pregnant with my first child. This shift was dramatic and multi-layered, but at first I only experienced the drama. I found that I could not eat the same food twice. Once I'd had a meal, the thought of that particular flavor combination made me sick. By the end of two weeks of this, I had exhausted my repertoire of recipes, and I began to order carry out. This solution was a stop-gap measure, at best. The budget wasn't bottomless, and neither were the menus of our local restaurants. Soon all our paper take-out menus were annotated in my handwriting with comments beside different items that read, "yuck," "superyuck," "abominably yucky." It was time to hit the cookbooks. What I sought most were recipes that used ingredients that I'd never tried before. In those months, I tried mustard greens, broccoli rabe, radicchio, arugula, celery root, Belgian and curly endive, white peaches, and fresh fennel for the first time. It wasn't that I couldn't eat celery root twice, but if I had it once in a gratin with new potatoes and gruyere, then the next time I would have to prepare it with tomatoes and garlic. But new factors entered into this particular drama that could not be explained by the problem of nausea. For instance, it seemed that I enjoyed making fresh pasta, and this enjoyment had nothing to do with the experience of eating it when it was done. I simply received great pleasure in the give and take of the dough, the dust of flour on my fingers, the golden color that the egg yolk imparted to the flour and water mixture, the fruity smell of the olive oil. What I loved most were the various new ways in which my hands were learning to move. First pressing into the elastic mass with the heels of my hands, then gathering the edges up in my fingertips and pulling them to incorporate them back into the ball, sliding the strips of dough between the rollers of the pasta machine, turning the crank, and pulling out the long, smooth tongue of soft pasta, using the pads of my fingers so as not to create dents. Being able to detect changes in temperature in the steam that rose to my face, or feeling a sauce thicken through the handle of a wooden spoon, or discovering exactly how to hold the knife in order to take the yellow off the peel of a lemon and leave the bitter white pith behind -- these all gave a particular sensation of happiness that surprised me. Then one day, when I had seven pounds of peaches to peel and slice, I could not ignore the complete astonishment I felt as I picked up the first peach, feeling its warm, soft weight in my palm, slipped the tip of my paring knife under the fuzzy layer of skin, and began slowly working the blade in a spiral around the fruit. Thick, pale orange juice oozed between my palm and the fruit, and I stood with my hands over the sink, smelling the warm peach that sat wet and slippery in my fist, and I almost blushed, the pleasure was so acute. How many times had I peeled peaches in the past? It was always a chore to complete, a job for the lowly kitchen helper, but here I was, discovering for the first time in my life, a secret that no one had tried to hide from me. Peeling and slicing peaches was one of the sweetest pleasures given to humanity. From this new insight, I began to be able to see the pleasure in less intuitively positive kitchen experiences -- handling raw meat, the scent of crushed garlic in the pores of my skin, or stripping the tiny leaves from a sprig of thyme.
It took some deep pondering for me to understand finally that my hands enjoyed working just as much as my mind did, and I began to be conscious of all the various ways that my hands keep themselves occupied throughout the day.
After my daughter was born, my hands were pretty content just to be touching her, patting her, fiddling with tiny buttons, rearranging wisps of hair, rubbing the soles of her feet with my thumbs, and the pleasures of food took a back seat to these new found delights.
During my second pregnancy, though, my love for food was reawakened. This time, however, it manifested in a new way that I can only characterize as a passion for excellence. I bought an oven thermometer and would shift it to different positions within my oven so that I could know the precise temperature in every particular corner of it. Not content to measure dry ingredients precisely by the dip-level-pour method, I began to use a kitchen scale to weigh everything and standardize my recipes. I would make the same recipe several times in a row, altering quantities or techniques each time, in order to find the perfect combination. It was during this period that I came up with a recipe for the perfect chocolate cake. This new passion also required that I make new friends who would receive the many cakes that flew from my kitchen. I began to think in advance of who would receive the cake I was about to make, and then all the pleasures, both sensual and mathematical, would be dedicated to the person who would be receiving the final product.
I also began to plan meals and menus particularly suited to the persons I had invited to enjoy them. I would collect details, likes and dislikes, combinations of flavors, favorite restaurants and cuisines, about each of my friends, so that when I served them, the meal would perhaps tell them a story about themselves -- or even better, about us. I even began to acquire enough skill in the kitchen to be able to tell subtle jokes with the food, communicate ideas, and even bring about reconciliations that had been impossible with mere verbal methods. Cooking was like a prayer, or a simple piece of music, or one of the best conversations.
During my third pregnancy, my grandmother died. All the cousins paid a visit to her house to choose an object that had special meaning for them. I wanted to take her huge gas stove, but I had no room for it in my suitcase, so I chose the white milk glass salt and pepper shakers. They were each still half full. When I got back home, I filled both to the top and then resolved never to let either empty completely. That way, there would always be a trace of Grandma's salt in what I ate.
I had a recipe for Italian Anise bread I'd been making for a little over a year, and it produces a nut colored, braided loaf studded with golden raisins with a faint scent of licorice. That Christmas, I decided to make enough loaves to give one to each of my friends. However, by loaves eleven and twelve I was very discouraged. Like numbers one through ten, they were destined never to be eaten. For some reason, my dough would not rise, and I produced, instead of bread, small, braided nut colored bricks. I began to plan construction of a garden wall by Easter, by which point I thought I'd have all the bricks I'd need.
I tinkered with every aspect of the recipe, measuring the temperature of the liquid with a thermometer, adding ingredients in different order, switching yeast, kneading first by hand and then with the mixer. For all the variation, the loaves came out identical to one another.
Grandma's idea of a recipe was never more precise than, "Well, you take your onions and you cook them in a little oil..." Measurements were in handfuls, fist-sized bunches, little fingers, ladles. She also believed in ghosts.
I didn't want to admit that I thought the bread was haunted. Of course, Grandma would have said it was. And if I could have her here now, telling the story of the year I couldn't make the bread rise to save my soul, she'd have me believing in portents and signs and laughing at the small and large ironies of life until she'd brought enough leavening to raise the roof.
So, if during my first pregnancy I learned to communicate with myself through food, and during the second I learned to communicate with others, during the third pregnancy I learned to use food to communicate, even with the dead.

Originally published 11/24/07

There's the vocation you want, and the vocation you're given

2009-11-23T08:33:00.001-05:00

I'm reprinting this... Originally published here on 6/4/08:

Silly creatures that we are, we think that we can call ourselves. We think that we choose ourselves.

We can be machines for generating interpretations.

We think that when we do wrong, to recognize it would be a curse.

Then we generate more interpretations to cover up the most recent batch of mistakes.

But there is something outside of me -- radically outside of me -- that generates me. The interpretations that originate in me are mere words. If I want the truth, then I must look outside of myself to the Something that generates me. What do I see outside of myself?

Facts.

An interpretation that does not take into account ALL the facts is just my own wish masquerading as a truth.

And how is it possible for a small, ornery human being, trapped in a particular point of view and without access to any other pair of eyes or set of ears, possibly take ALL the facts into consideration?

Yep, you heard it here: it's impossible. Any interpretation that originates with me is false.

I cannot even say, "Well, this is the truth for me."

I do not have a 360º view of myself. I cannot even decide the truth of my own self.

I did not make myself. I was not the one who gave me life. And I am not the one who decides that I may continue to take up space on this planet.

But I am intensely grateful to discover that I have been made, I do have life, and Someone does decide that I, in all my minuscule insignificance, should find a pocket of space just large enough for my body to inhabit, at any and every given moment.

So, I do not decide that I am here and that I am I. I discover it.

Life is a quest and an adventure, not a series of interpretations.

Wherever do we find the nerve to pronounce, to define, to put forward the products of our thought? How do we ever dare to presume to have an answer??

I have been given this body, these eyes, this particular space from which to view the world, these hands, this mouth, this heart; and they have all been given for only one reason: to help me seek.

Let's stop wasting our lives -- our mysteriously beautiful existence here -- in the fantasy of making up our lives, generating millions of false little answers. The only rational way to live is in asking and listening, asking and listening...and then following.

Reality, fiction, and being Catholic...

2009-11-17T09:36:00.003-05:00

"The very term 'Catholic novel' is, of course, suspect, and people who are conscious of its complications don't use it except in quotation marks. If I had to say what a 'Catholic novel' is, I could only say that it is one that represents reality adequately as we see it manifested in this world of things and human relationships. Only in and by these sense experiences does the fiction writer approach a contemplative knowledge of the mystery they embody." -- Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners).

The anger and irritation were extraneous distractions.

2009-11-16T12:02:00.004-05:00

Speaker: During the past holidays of All Saints and All Souls, I thought of my sister who died three
years ago and the fact that I haven’t visited the cemetery in three years. A friend who
knows about this called me and said: “I went to the cemetery to visit my mother-in-law,
which I had never done before, and you have to go too”. Just the fact that someone was
telling me “you have to” started to irritate me, I felt it was an imposition. Furthermore
this makes me particularly angry because … the idea that I might miss my sister…….She
got on my nerves and I put the phone down saying: “You mind your problems and I will
mind mine!”. Instead, mysteriously, this incident worked on me, and while I was going
through the day I realized that I wanted to understand why this friend spoke to me like
that. I started to desire to follow the journey to the end, that journey that lets me look at
my sister saying: “It is my sister!”, and recall her in my memory as mine. This struck me
deeply, because I couldn’t even think of her any more as my sister, as a person,
something belonging to me, with her own face but deeply connected to me. Then
something that was said at the last School of Community came to my mind, that judgment
and so affection are not detached from reason, the fact that when this moves you, it is not
a judgment tacked on. I started to desire. Maybe also the love of this friend for me [that
she expressed in what she said to me] mysteriously worked. At the end I did not go to the
cemetery [I went only to Mass] because it’s still hard for me. But it is really mysterious
how the love she witnessed to me generated this desire I did not have, and this anger
slowly became desire to follow the journey to the end, without fear of asking myself the
question. And it is so true that my younger son, since I had been sad for a few days,
noticed the difference and said: ”Mom, today you look happy”. This erased any doubt
about the truth of my experience, there was no possibility for ambiguity.

Fr Julián Carrón: What is your judgment of this?

Speaker: My unexpected change, unthinkable for me, that from this anger a new desire could be
born……

Fr Julián Carrón: From this anger a desire was born? I want to understand this: the desire was born from
your anger?

Speaker: No, it was born from the fact that I listened to a person.

Fr Julián Carrón: What was it born from? Because, this is the important point. You used the word “love”.

Speaker: Yes.

Fr Julián Carrón: Love, a good, which means a grace, which means a Presence that was not scared in front
of the cemetery. You can see what this Presence is because of what it moved in you.
What does it mean? If you start from this desire that was re-awakened, from this
happiness that even your son recognized, what does emerge? Which Presence is able to
do this? We do not realize it even when it happens! You see how many times we think of
the two things as separate, grace on one side and freedom on the other [or, the presence
of Christ on one side, and then my move on the other]. But where do you see the power
of what happened in what you recounted? That something moved inside you, it shows
that it is exceptional because it moves you, it grabs and exalts your “I”. Only Christ’s
contemporaneousness can move to the point of being able to face death. But how did this
happen? How does it happen? It happens exactly because of what is described in point 5
in the La Thuile Booklet, “The Triple Factor of Christian Experience”.
- from the transcript/notes of the School of Community in Milan, November 4, 2009

"Today my face has changed."

2009-11-13T23:09:00.005-05:00

Speaker: I work at a school [I am a secretary], and this month a young woman has come to work
with me to help organizing the archives. During this time we got along very well and we
became friends. The other day she found out that her job with us was ending, and we
went home feeling pretty sad. The next morning I got to the office and she told me: ”You
know, I decided to go to Mass in Trivolzio” [note: Church of Trivolzio near Milan, where
the body of S. Riccardo Pampuri is buried and venerated]. She is not a religious person
and she has nothing to do with us, but after hearing me talking about Trivolzio at school,
she had felt the desire to check the Trivolzio internet site and she read everything. She
had looked at the entire Trivolzio site and the entire CL site! After a moment of silence
she added - these are her exact words-:”It is too beautiful. Actually, if you look at me you
see that my face is different”. I was deeply moved because the day before she had been
fired and nevertheless, the things she had heard, often not even addressed directly to her,
corresponded so much to her desire, that this beauty prevailed even over the loss of her
job. In front of this my heart truly jumped, and to be honest, for the first time my thought,
not tacked on, not invented, was: ”It is Him, it is Jesus!” It could not be anybody but
Him, so attractive that my friend could meet Him even through my limited person, and He
could be far more fascinating to her than the seemingly more important desire for her
job. From that moment when I get up in the morning to go to work my first thought is for
Him: it is this enormous curiosity to see where and how, again, today, He will make
Himself known to me. I understand that this is possibly the beginning of experience
because it identifies a step from which one cannot go back any longer.

Fr Julián Carrón: That is, judgment is the least artificial thing that exists.

Speaker: Yes, because it is a recognition, it is like saying: ”Wow, it is really Him!”

Fr Julián Carrón: “Today my face has changed”: if you do not arrive to this point you miss the best of experience, because the sign that one has recognized something when circumstances do
not change - as in this case, it’s not that she found a job – is the change that happens in
the person. Then she will have to discover slowly all that is inside that first jolt. This
research she has done is already something, she has intuited something, but she will have
to look more deeply into what has already happened, the nature of what happened,
become aware of all of this. Thank you.

- from the transcript/notes of the School of Community in Milan, November 4, 2009

Now that Fr Carrón has decided to publish translations of the notes/transcripts of his School of Community on the CL website for the US, we have such a precious gift! To think of how technology has advanced our access to so much richness! Now there is document after fascinating document available to anyone with an internet connection.

The above excerpt provides a simple and compelling example of judgment; it is clear that the speaker has had an experience. "Then she will have to discover slowly all that is inside that first jolt" -- this was Fr. Carrón's observation about the speaker's new friend. And our work -- of discovering slowly what is inside the first jolt for us -- lies in steeping ourselves in these new gifts. Tonight my heart is full of gratitude for all Fr. Giussani has left for us and for the care and tenderness with which he continues to accompany us.

"...does not build, but destroys..."

2009-11-12T10:57:00.000-05:00

Charity projects in the Milanese plain, a large agricultural area on the edge of Milan, involved hundreds of students every Sunday

Monsignor Giussani, with his fearless and unfailing faith, knew that, even in this situation, Christ, the encounter with Him, remains central, because whoever does not give God, gives too little, and whoever does not make people find God in the Fact of Christ, does not build, but destroys, because he gets human activity lost in ideological and false dogmatisms. Fr Giussani kept the centrality of Christ and, exactly in this way, with social works, with necessary service, he helped mankind in this difficult world, where the responsibility of Christians for the poor in the world is enormous and urgent. (Pope Benedict XVI)

h/t Paul Zalonski at Communio

The Pope and political engagement

2009-11-11T18:00:00.000-05:00

I am reprinting this reprint to share with Justine:

My friend Paul just posted this article from America Magazine on his blog, Communio, and I think it is so apt that I want to put it up here, too:

Pope Benedict on Religion and Politics: the influence of Communion & Liberation

By Michael Sean Winters, America Magazine

Pope Benedict XVI greeted a group of pilgrims this past weekend with a short discourse on the Feast of Christ the King that has an obvious application to the political circumstance of the Catholic hierarchy in the United States in the wake of President-elect Obama's decisive win among Catholic voters.

"Dear brothers and sisters," the Pope told the pilgrims, "this is what interests God. The kingship of history is of no importance to him -- he wants to reign in people's hearts, and from these, in the world: He is the king of the entire universe, but the crucial point, the place where his reign is at risk, is our heart, for there God finds himself encountering our freedom." Reign in the heart, then in the world. That is the proper order for political influence by the Christian Churches.

Unfortunately, political power inevitably invites that deadliest of the seven deadly sins, pride, and it is always tempting for those of us whose involvement in politics grows out of our religious motivations to conflate the two, to think that politics is about the Kingdom not the kingdom, to collapse our eschatons into our exit polls. And, this happens on both left and right.

But, Benedict is right. The primary means by which the Church should influence the realm of politics is by converting hearts and generating culture. This insight was the principal reason Don Luigi Guissani founded his movement, Communione e Liberazione and distanced himself from the Christian Democratic Party of his day. And, the Holy Father's reliance on the insights of Don Guissani is well known.

So, as we Americans prepare to celebrate the quintessential American holiday, so soon after a tumultuous election, let us all remember that the kingship of history is less important than breaking bread with our friends. And, for those of us who are Catholic Americans, let us commit ourselves anew to the wonderful adventurous drama of the human heart where, as Pope Benedict said, "God finds himself encountering our freedom."

PRO-LIFE/ Change comes from a long and patient cultural work

2009-11-06T08:13:00.005-05:00

An article I wrote for Il Sussidiario.net:

A recent Gallup poll (May 2009) indicates that significant numbers of people in the United States have changed their minds about abortion, and that now, for the first time since Gallup began asking the question in 1995, more Americans identify themselves as pro-life (51%) than as pro-choice (42%). These results are even more dramatic when compared to those obtained in 2008, when 44% said they were pro-life, while 50% reported that they were pro-choice.

In the United States, the terms pro-life and pro-choice carry emotional, as well as political or philosophical weight. Whether one is pro-life or pro-choice is influenced by multiple factors, including past and present social milieu, the family of origin's attitudes and beliefs, norms among fellow professionals in the workplace, ideas expressed in the media, or religious belief; and it implies membership in a loose group of like-minded people. All these factors exert pressure on the individual to remain either pro-life or pro-choice; therefore any change in the way Americans identify themselves in this regard is significant.

What could account for the change in attitude reflected in the Gallup poll's data? Father Frank Pavone, National Director of Priests for Life, has said, "The days of legal abortion in this country are numbered" because of the number of women who have had abortions and have come forward to describe the devastating effect of abortion on their lives: "The other side wants us to think they are on the side of the women, and we are on the side of the baby.... You can't love one without loving the other. You can't hurt one without hurting the other." Fr. Pavone also credits those who have been working in the abortion industry who have witnessed the devastation first hand and who are now closing their clinics. "They are coming out of the industry by the hundreds," Fr. Pavone said. In addition, Pavone noted that the use of ultrasound technology has helped the pro-life cause by providing the evidence that the fetus is indeed a human life.

Recent dramatic events in Texas support and illustrate Fr. Pavone's assessment. Abby Johnson was the director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Bryan, Texas for two years until she resigned last month, after using ultrasound to view an abortion. Johnson is now volunteering with the Coalition For Life, a pro-life group whose volunteers pray regularly outside of the Planned Parenthood clinic where Johnson once worked. Shawn Carney, director of the coalition, issued a statement that concluded, “Abby believes in the power of prayer and she thanks all of you for your peaceful presence outside of her former workplace all of these years.”

Abby Johnson with Coalition for Life Director Shawn Carney

This episode calls to mind another similar incident documented in Letters section of Traces magazine (April 2003):

Dearest Fr Giussani: For 37 years, I was in charge of the instruments in an operating room in the Obstetrics and Gynecology ward. In my region, Molise, the rate of recourse to voluntary interruption of pregnancy has always been very high compared to the total population. Because of my affection for Jesus, I applied to be an objector, but I did not wash my hands of things just because of this. Quite the contrary. I tried to make Jesus present in those circumstances in every way my creativity could invent. I would talk with the women to open them up to welcoming the little seed that was already inside them; many times I would sterilize the instruments that others should have checked so that the operation would not result in more pain; I would debate with my non-objector coworkers to show them the lack of sense in their choice, and above all I would talk with the doctors who performed abortions. In so many years, the Lord has given me the grace of seeing many babies saved through me. But the greatest gift the Lord gave me came the day the abortion doctor on my ward phoned to tell me that after so many years of my witness, his heart had been touched, and he had decided to apply to be an objector. He had understood that my admonishing him, urging him, was born of a real affection for him, of a real desire for his good. The Lord has used me so that the creature He loved could discover the love of his Creator. Now I have retired, and in the hospital where I worked, as a consequence of this doctor’s objection, abortions are no longer performed. I have learned from this experience that what counts in man is the task each one has in life, but no one is ever alone in this task, because God’s Mercy always makes itself our Companion. Thank you, Fr Giussani, because the Yes that you said one day has made the Lord’s embrace possible for me in a way that responded so fully to my heart. Enza, Termoli

From the above examples, we can make the following conclusion: to change from identifying oneself as pro-choice to seeing oneself as pro-life requires that something new happen to the person. This newness must be unusual and unexpected, and most of all, it must be patient. Despite the sudden change from the 2008 to the 2009 results in the Gallup poll, the cultural work of bringing others to see the value of human life in its earliest stages is slow and hidden. The poll results simply reflect the final step of conversion. May many others have the courage to take the same step!

THE POOR/ With obedience, a way to sanctity

2009-11-03T20:06:00.002-05:00

Something I wrote for Il Sussidiario:

sabato 17 ottobre 2009

On Sunday, October 11, 2009, the Church canonized five new saints. Far and away the most famous is St. Damien, the priest who gave his life to serve leprosy patients quarantined on Molokai in Hawaii. Most reporting did not mention the names of the four others who were canonized with St. Damien, but there was one among them, St. Jeanne Jugan, who has been called " Mother Teresa before Mother Teresa” (Dr. Edward Gatz), and in her poverty and compassion, Eloi Leclerc compared her to St. Francis himself.

Who was this woman that even her fame seems hidden from notice?

"The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, which a person finds and hides again, and out of joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field" (Matthew 13:44 NAB).

Generations of scholars have read these words of Jesus and asked, "Why does he hide the treasure once he's found it?" There have been various answers, but perhaps the life of Jeanne Jugan provides the fullest and most satisfying answer.

Born in 1792, three years after the French Revolution, in Cancale, a small fishing village on the rough and windy coast of Brittany in France, the first "secret" of her life was the illegal catechesis she received from members of a lay order founded by St. John Eudes (she later joined this order). At age 18, she received two marriage proposals, which she turned down, explaining to her mother, "God wants me for himself. He is keeping me for a work, which he has not yet founded." This certainty in the Unknown would form an essential support for the work she would accomplish during the remainder of her life.

By the time Jeanne Jugan had reached age 47, a friendship had formed between herself and two other women, and the three moved into a small apartment together in 1839, so that they could lead a life of prayer and dedication to God. Shortly thereafter, as Jeanne was returning home one winter night, she met an elderly blind widow named Anne Chauvin. Moved with pity, Jeanne lifted Chauvin and carried the older woman over her shoulder and brought her up the stairs to the apartment. That night Chauvin slept in Jeanne's bed while Jeanne went to sleep in the attic. At the time, Jeanne was working as a maid for Monsieur Leroy at Saint-Servan. When Jeanne told him that she wanted to devote the rest of her life to the poor, begging on their behalf from door to door, he asked her who would respond to her requests. "People like you," she replied. He laughed at her but then gave her 3000 francs. Soon other elderly poor had arrived at the apartment, and Jeanne spent days on end begging in order to support the poor in her care. She would go out into the town with a basket over her arm, persistently knocking on doors, and with gentleness and love, she would accept even the smallest donation with gratitude. When she was slapped in the face by a man who refused her, she replied, “Thank you. That was for me. Now please give me something for my poor.”

From these small beginnings, other generous young women joined Jeanne; soon a new and larger house was needed. During these years of difficult and fruitful labor, Jeanne was recognized for her service. In 1845 the French Academy awarded Jeanne the Montyon Prize "for outstanding meritorious activity." And the Freemasons conferred a gold medal on her. She had this gold medal melted down and made into a chalice to be used at Mass.

In the meantime, two of Jeanne's friends had a spiritual adviser, Fr. Auguste le Pailleur, who began to advise the small group of women about various aspects of their life. In 1841, Jeanne Jugan was elected Mother General of the small congregation. But then, in December of 1843, Fr. le Pailleur, on his own authority, annulled a second election that again unanimously named Jeanne Jugan Mother General; soon after, he named himself Father General and gave Jeanne the task of begging. Not content with the possibility that Jeanne should receive any recognition, Fr. le Pailleur then ordered Jeanne to halt all her interactions with donors, assigned her the rank of novice, and sent her to the new Motherhouse at La Tour St. Joseph's in Saint Pern to live with the novices. Jeanne Jugan's biographer, Paul Milcent, wrote, in Humble So As to Love More: “The Abbé le Pailleur’s behavior has something odd about it, pointing to some kind of psychological disturbance. He was determined, even at the cost of falsifying the truth, to concentrate power and fame in his own person.”

After moving to La Tour St. Joseph, Jeanne Jugan lived for 23 years in obscurity, hidden away, her work stolen from her. The novices, among whom Jeanne lived, had no inkling as to her identity or role in the founding of the order they had joined. This period of the saint's life most fascinated the friar and author, Eloi Leclerc. In his spiritual biography of Jeanne Jugan, The Desert and the Rose, he explores the hidden life she led in complete obedience to Fr. Pailleur, despite his injustice. When a novice might ask her about a rumor she'd heard, Jeanne would reply, "They’ll talk to you about me. Don’t pay any attention. Our good Lord knows the whole story." We who thirst for justice are confounded by her attitude. Why didn't she defend herself, fight for the right to a holy work that God himself had begun in her? What we have from her instead is a long silence. Leclerc, having studied accounts given by those who spent these 23 years with her, concludes that she expressed no bitterness but rather accepted that the "unknown" work that God had first given to her had changed to become a hidden work upon her, within her person. Thus she retired willingly , until her death, at age 86 on the feast of St. Augustine. Rather than disturb the pomp and celebration of his feast day, Fr. le Pailleur postponed the announcement of her death; and in a circular letter he set two days later, he made no mention of Jeanne Jugan.

For you, dear friend

2009-11-02T09:25:00.003-05:00

We must welcome our neighbor as a "guest" of our inner self. Hospitality means precisely to allow others to be part of our lives. After the sacrifice of one's life, hospitality is the greatest sacrifice, so much so that we find it difficult to be true hosts, we cannot even welcome our self. A true imitation of Christ consists in making others part of our life, just like Christ made us so much a part of his that we have become the limbs of his very Body. The mystery of the Body of Christ lies also in the fact that he welcomes our lives into his own.
- Don Gius, The Risk of Education, pg 42

A friend asked me for prayers today, and the above passage seems to reflect the new energy and compassion with which she has been facing her desire for the world and for those around her. I cannot think of a better prayer to accompany her through all the challenges that crop up as we attempt to welcome our neighbors as guests of our inner selves...

Amen.

Something new this morning

2009-11-01T09:50:00.002-05:00

For over twenty years, the dominant thought/feeling I have had on waking in the morning is of amazed gratitude: How is it that you have preserved me in life, O Lord? This beauty that I am given to participate in seems completely disproportionate to all my weakness and evil. Please make me worthy to face it and to receive it. It makes me tremble a little to admit to this in public -- it sounds like a boast; but what's to be done -- it's the truth.

But this morning, I had an entirely new feeling, one that expressed itself in these words: Okay God, give it to me! And it's easier to admit to it because it seems so, well, rude and impious and presumptuous of me to speak in such a way to God and to have such an attitude in front of the Almighty! But I trust God understands that these words were accompanied by a great spirit of adventure and curiosity and even submission to God's prerogative to choose precisely what "it" will be during this day. And this sense of adventure and curiosity and desire to follow were not something I chose to attempt. Isn't it great to be alive?!

"The Butterfly Circus," directed by Joshua Weigel

2009-10-30T17:52:00.001-04:00

"You do have an advantage: the greater the struggle the more glorious the triumph."

"Alongside of life, always"

2009-10-26T21:09:00.003-04:00

[After the October 25, 2009 Angelus the Pope greeted the pilgrims in various languages. In Italian he said:]

I offer a special greeting first of all to the thousands of faithful gathered in Milan, in the Piazza del Duomo, where this morning the liturgy of the beatification of the priest Don Carlo Gnocchi was celebrated. He began as a sound educator of boys and young men. In the 2nd World War he became the chaplain of the Alpini (The mountain infantry of the Italian army), with whom he participated in the tragic retreat in Russia. It was then that he dedicated himself completely to a work of charity. Thus, in Milan during reconstruction, Don Gnocchi worked to "restore the human person," gathering orphaned and mutilated boys and offering them help and formation. He gave all of himself to the very end, and dying gave his corneas to two blind boys. His work continued to develop and today the Don Gnocchi Foundation is on the cutting edge in the care of persons of every age who need rehabilitative therapy. As I greet Cardinal Tettamanzi, Archbishop of Milan, and I rejoice with the Ambrosian Church, I make the motto of this beatification my own: "Alongside of life, always."

[Translation by Joseph G. Trabbic]

-- Reported on Catholic.net

...and from what Zenit reported:

Blessed Gnocchi (1902-1956) is remembered as a hero of solidarity with victims of World War II. He was called father for the mutilated and of combatants' orphans, since the center he created offered rehabilitation to those who suffered as a consequence of the war.

"Rather than a political or economic crisis, there is a profound moral crisis, more than that, a metaphysical crisis," he wrote in 1946. "As such, it affects all peoples because it touches man and his existential problem."

Father Rodolfo Cosimo Meoli, the postulator of Father Gnocchi’s cause for canonization, told ZENIT that the priest was particularly characterized by his charity.

"More than virtues, I would speak of ‘the virtue’: charity, on which all the others rested," Father Meoli said. "Also nobility, charity turned into action, tenderness, compassion, hospitality, availability."

The postulator recounted how Father Gnocchi was a volunteer chaplain during World War II.

"Then the tragic experience of the retreat from Russia matured in him the specific plan to offer assistance to orphans of the mountaineers and of many other little innocent victims of the war battles," he continued.

Father Gnocchi created a foundation in 1947 that has evolved into centers that receive patients with various disabilities, as well as patients who are in need of surgical intervention and rehabilitation, elderly people who are not self-sufficient and terminal cancer patients.

The postulator of his cause described the priest as "the modern face of sanctity."

Father Gnocchi saw his vocation "to be light and support, strength and hope for all those he met," Father Meoli said. "His life was consumed in doing good to others. He was an alter Christus, something that every priest, yesterday, today and always, is called to live."

-- reprinted from Zenit

Eleventh hour thoughts on judgment

2009-10-21T20:30:00.005-04:00

My School of Community will meet tomorrow morning, and in light of the text of the talks given at the International Responsibles Meeting in La Thuile, which took place at the end of August, "Experience: The Instrument for a Human Journey," as well as the presentation given by Fr. Julián Carrón for Beginning Day this year, I am feeling some urgency to have these lessons very clear and very simple in my mind. I would welcome any comments or corrections to this attempt.

What we do in School of Community each week is called judgment. We compare our experience with the text that we are reading. Ordinarily in the Movement, we refer to judgment as a comparison of our experience with our elementary human needs (heart): for Truth, Beauty, Love, Satisfaction, Justice, etc. Given, though, that everyone is confused about what precisely constitutes his heart or her needs, we have a tool to help guide us as we learn this method; the tool is the text we read together. How can our weekly texts, which are after all an objective reality, be conflated with our heart, which is so personal and intimate? Though it is true that the heart is personal and intimate, it is also true that the heart is not subjective. The heart, the true heart of a person will argue with him or her; so much so that should I get a thing that I believe my heart desires, my heart will rebel and put me into a dark funk.

The texts we read in School of Community each constitute a view onto the true Source of satisfaction: Christ or life in Christ. Each week we read of another facet, which together with the others allows a glimpse of the whole Jewel, that is: God made man. Let's take a recent example: the text on poverty was a description of life that is lived as though totally aware of the Presence of the Mystery in the flesh. And after reading a piece of it, we compared our lives to this description of Christian poverty in order to have an objective record of that heart within us that is made precisely to want the Infinite companion, Emmanuel. So, judgment isn't something new, a description of a new burden that the Movement wishes to place upon us. Fr. Carrón's passionate insistence on judgment is simply a call for us to live more truly and fully our experience of the Movement.

Now, School of Community meets for an hour per week, and we could theoretically live, only making these sorts of comparisons between our lives and the Mystery of God during that one hour out of 168 in a week. But if we find it beautiful to live this way, to approach our lives as we do during School of Community, the Movement invites us to live with this sort of awareness in every hour of the week (at least during the ones in which we're awake). We can use the pages for any given week, and each day we can compare our lives, the experience that we have, to the objective criterion that is given in the text. In this way, life can be beautiful all the time. In time, one begins to recognize when life has zest and gusto and when it is flat and flavorless. The great adventure of Communion and Liberation -- the risk we in the Movement take and the wager we make -- is based on the proposal that when one lives with this on-going comparison, or judgment, life does indeed have zest and gusto. Thus, to have a zestful life rather than a flavorless one does not depend on what happens, on the circumstances we face, but rather fullness of life comes to us through the circumstances (we neither rely on what happens to make us happy, nor ignore what happens in order to find happiness "elsewhere"). Rather, the key is to face everything that happens while making the comparison between the Church's proposal of life in Christ and life itself.

Semplice!

And how about thoughts on this one?

2009-10-21T12:43:00.003-04:00

Reprinted from Front Porch Republic:

There is no doubt that the Catholic Church supports the idea of a just social order, and has expounded on that order in the great Social Encyclicals. However, and despite more than 100 years of constant Papal teaching on this subject, the average Catholic—indeed, the average Bishop—is confused about it meaning or even unaware of its existence. Most preaching concerns personal sin without ever considering the social implications or connecting sin to a violation of a just social order. And yet, this is strange, since what makes a sin sinful is that it violates what the right order between a person and his neighbor and his God. Without a violation of this order, a thing cannot be sinful. This is expressed [...] read the rest here.

“What Should Shimmer in Our Eyes Every Day”

2009-10-19T20:34:00.000-04:00

Notes fromthe talks by Davide Prosperi and Julián Carrón at the Beginning Day for CL adults and university students. (Milan, Italy, September 26, 2009)

JULIÁN CARRÓN
Aware of our need, let us ask the Spirit to bring to completion, throwing everything open, the desire that brought us to this point.
Come Holy Ghost
We welcome everyone and we greet our friends who are linked up to us from the various regions of Italy and abroad: this is an attempt, like everything we do, an ironic attempt, having this linkup today directly from Milan. But for it to really be a gesture, it’s not enough to be physically present here; each one of us, wherever we are, has to be present with all his own “I” so that what happens can find that openness, that crack, through which the grace that the Lord wants to give us can enter.

DAVIDE PROSPERI
We are beginning our meeting this year from the point where we left off last year, because last year we focused on the witness, on the essential importance of the witness in the path that brings us toward maturity of faith, toward certainty of faith.
As Carrón reminded us in his letter to the Fraternity when he had just come back from the Synod, our principal contribution to the Church and to the world does not consist first of all in a cultural, civic, or political action, because these are fruits that ripen–they can ripen how and when God wills it–but rather it’s precisely in this: the witness of an event that has impacted our life and, by impacting it, has made it and makes it different day by day, more human, more capable of gratuity, of gladness, so capable of gladness that it can end up actually enviable to those who, for a thousand reasons, have often, have always criticized us. And we really saw this at the Meeting [in Rimini]: one of the things that mostly struck those who came for the first time was the passion and the charity of the volunteers who are actually there giving their own time and energy, even paying to be there, to be able to contribute to this gesture that expresses, yes, at the cultural level the heart of our… well, the expressive capacity of our experience, and this is a fact that can’t be explained with the predictable categories that we are used to using to judge everyday things.
Allow me to cite Arditti’s editorial in Il Tempo from a few weeks back. He relates how he went to the Meeting a little skeptical because of an old aversion to CL coming from his student years: “A day spent in Rimini,” he writes, “forced me to radically change my idea. What did the secular world of the end of the twentieth century offer to most young people? What useful response did it know how to build? I don’t find convincing answers to these questions, but those kids at the Meeting (I don’t want to mythologize them, for heaven’s sake) are free and strong. At eleven o’clock at night, I went back to the parking lot to get my car. There was a girl sitting alone on a little plastic chair. She smiled and greeted me and accompanied me to the car: she was a parking lot volunteer (you can imagine what a privilege it must have been for her). She’s standing there with her Meeting t-shirt, happy about what she’s doing and smiling at a person she was meeting for a few seconds. The night before, I was at a supper at the Billionaire [one of the most exclusive summer clubs in Europe]. No one smiled like that girl in the parking lot.”
I’m also talking about those who came to Rimini to measure with great loyalty the proposal that was made to them, giving a really courageous witness of how the Christian event becomes a new cultural judgment, as, for example, Tony Blair and Mary Ann Glendon, just to cite two examples, showed us, and this is because witness is not only a different way of doing things, but it’s really a new way of understanding reality and one’s own relationship with it.
But this year’s experience also brought to the fore the risk of us being superficial, having a reductive–we could say sentimental–understanding of the significance of the witness. We run the risk of reducing the witness to a positive example, someone who makes me feel uplifted, or gives me a precarious comfort, a feeling that then goes away naturally, just as it came, leaving us unsatisfied, feeling like we’re always at the starting point. But really, who is the witness, literally? We’ve asked ourselves this many times this year. The witness, in the narrow sense, is someone who tells me a true fact, a fact he’s sure of because he’s seen it, he’s experienced it. The witness is someone who shows me that the fact of Christ is true; it’s true because he’s experienced it. He’s sure of it because this fact has changed his life; it’s present here, now, always, as the title of the last book of the équipe says (Qui e ora [Here and Now] 1984-1985, Bur, Milan, 2009).
Therefore, the witness is someone who is acquainted with the Truth, and it’s this that makes him a different person–the fact that he leans on what is solid, on the only one who has conquered death. In fact, I was always struck by Father Giussani’s insistence on the fact that in the Bible the idea of truth is expressed at many points through the image of “rock.” The Truth is not a thought, not an intellectual concept, but a Presence on whom I can stay rooted, on whom I can prop my whole “I,” a Presence that keeps me from collapsing. As Psalm 40 says, “You drew me from the mud of the swamp; you have set my feet on rock.” Thus, the witness is someone who lives entirely rooted on this rock, and this is why it sticks with us.
But this is where the first question comes up: if the witness is what we just said, why then is our certainty so often weak, even when we are surrounded by so many witnesses?
This summer, you began to insist that the witness is not enough. So then, what is the step we need to make? Where are we blocked? Because it’s often as if we had stopped–for convenience or, deep down, because of contempt for ourselves–at the feeling of the beauty of the effects of the fact, that is, at the feeling of the beauty of the fruits that belonging to Christ brings in some moments to some people. We stop at the fascination at the humanity of some people without it triggering–how to say it?–an ardor, a desire, and so a work, a path, basically a movement toward the hidden origin of that different humanity.
This summer [at the International Assembly for CL responsibles in La Thuile, Italy (August 18-22, 2009)] some of us saw the film of Giussani’s commentary on Leopardi [at Politecnico University, 1996]. I was personally dumbfounded in front of this, really torn away from that way of feeling, of looking at and feeling what is human, but after two days I became aware that I wasn’t thinking about it anymore. Look, it’s as if there were always the risk of stopping at a sentimental or aesthetic feeling, even in front of the greatest witness, but I understand that the desire I have, and this is the step to what you are tirelessly calling us, is toward a level where something of those eyes, of that way Giussani spoke about what is human would enter into the way we do everything, the way I go to work in the morning, the way I am with my friends, the way I greet my children or my wife when I get back home (what the editorial writer of Il Tempo must have seen, when he got to the parking lot at the Meeting), or else, even being surrounded by a multitude of witnesses I am still sucked into confusion, neither more nor less than anyone who has not had the encounter I have had.
So this is the second question, that in a certain way contains the first one: what is it that conquers confusion?

JULIÁN CARRÓN
1. The victory over confusion
is an experience
What conquers confusion is an experience, and what characterizes experience is judgment, not–as we often see in ourselves–the sentimental feeling that things provoke in me. It is judgment that makes an experience something that is done. This is why Father Giussani constantly invited us, if we don’t want to give in to confusion, “if we wish to become adults without being cheated, alienated, enslaved by others, or exploited,” we have to get used to “comparing everything with this elementary experience,” with that array of needs and evidences that make up our “I.” But Father Giussani was well aware that what he was proposing was “neither easy nor popular. Normally, everything is approached from the perspective of the common mentality which, in turn, is publicized and sustained by whomever holds the reins of power in society. Consequently, [pay attention!] family tradition or the tradition of the broader society in which we have grown up, obscures or hardens over our original needs and is like a large crust that alters the evidences of those primary meanings, of those criteria” (The Religious Sense, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 1997, p.10) that make up these needs. And we have to be aware of this, because what we often call “heart” is nothing but these sediments, expressions of this mentality that everyone has, and so we often find ourselves lost, confused, like everyone else–just look around. So he was well aware, my friends, of what kind of challenge he was launching: “the most audacious challenge to that mentality that dominates us [pay attention!] and touches us at the very point–from our spiritual life to our clothing–is to be accustomed to making a judgment about everything in the light of our primary evidences and not to be at the mercy of our more occasional reactions [that is, of the sentimental feeling of things]” (Ibid, p.11).
So, if we want to really conquer this confusion, we have to decide whether or not to accept this challenge to make judgment habitual. “The use of elementary experience, or of one’s own ‘heart’ is, therefore, not popular especially when one comes face to face with oneself. This ‘heart’ is vulnerable, precisely the origin of that indefinable unease that overtakes the individual, when, for example, he or she is treated as an object of another’s interest or pleasure” (Ibid.). It is unpopular when we look at ourselves; it is easier to repeat what everyone says, to not deal with that indefinable unease that we find ourselves carrying. Judging is the beginning of liberation from confusion. But why is it unpopular? Fr. Giussani answers: “Recovering this existential depth [that depth which lies under all this encrustation], permits this liberation; yet, in doing so, an individual cannot avoid going against the current. We could call this ascetical work, where the word ‘ascesis’ means man’s work–man engaged directly on the path to his own destiny, seeking his own maturity. It is a work, and it does not come naturally [as we often think]. It is simple and yet it is not to be taken for granted. What has been said up to now must be reconquered. And even though in every era man has had to work to reconquer himself, we live in an age in which the need for this reconquest is clearer than ever. In Christian terms, this labor is part of metanoia, or conversion” (Ibid.).
It is so impressive to reread this page of Giussani in the present context we find ourselves in! Nothing better describes what has happened to us. It would be hard for us to find anything more pertinent to this confusion.
But what is the difficulty, my friends? That what he is proposing to us–judgment–is for us something we feel to be tacked on, intellectual, only for people who complicate life. We think that life is something different, experiencing things is something different, judging is only for those who make a mess in their heads, and so we don’t even take it into consideration, we don’t trouble ourselves with accepting the challenge, and we say, “Judging? Please, be serious…”
And so the biggest snag we have, as has been the case for us for years (because it’s been years that we’ve had this before our eyes), the big snag for this proposal is understanding what the problem is, recognizing what the point is. This is why I always quote that saying of Chesterton to you when we get together: “The trouble with our sages is not that they cannot see the answer; it is that they cannot even see the riddle” (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, NuVision Publications, 2007 [1927], p. 27). We understand what it’s about, and so we find ourselves very well described in what he says in The Religious Sense: “Men do not learn when they believe they already know” (p. 94).
So it’s not first of all about a problem of content, but it’s first of all about becoming aware of a difficulty that we carry, a difficulty we suffer the consequences of; it’s as if we weren’t able to understand the origin of this unease, of this confusion we carry with us, of this difficulty of staying in reality, of living in the circumstances, and so on the one hand we repeat certain gestures and on the other hand daily life crushes us.
I’ll read you a letter: “Father Giussani said, and you have often reminded us, that the circumstances that God has us pass through are an essential and not a secondary factor of our vocation, of the mission He calls us to, and this is something,” he writes, “both disruptive and rewarding in our living distracted and hurried. And yet I, after years and years in the Movement, find it hard to live daily life [thank God, I say, because we can make all our castles in the air, but there’s something that doesn’t work out]. Sometimes, there’s something that doesn’t work out: the little things, the simplicity of a normal gesture with my children, enjoying a normal family moment, are always lived by me as a lesser thing, as if the most important thing in that moment were something else (the meeting of the School of Community, the assembly with Tizio and Caio, helping with the Christmas Tents, or being available for the Food Bank project), and I become aware that in doing this I’m living an alternate reality, sort of fleeing the circumstances that are given to me to live every day.” When I hear these things, I feel like crying, because all that we do for the Movement isn’t helping to live daily life… but then what good is the Movement? So we understand how right Father Giussani was when he pushed us “to move from groupthink to a dimension of personal awareness” (Qui e ora 1984-1985, Bur, Milan, 2009, p.320). Because the group–just belonging to the group–is not enough for daily life not to be intolerable, and so he proposed the formula of “moving from doing the Movement to the experience of the Movement” (Certi di alcuni grandi cose [Certain of a Few Great Things]1979-1981, Bur, Milan, p.149).
So what is the problem? It’s a lack of experience, that is, of judgment, but this seems strange, exaggerated to us, because we think we are having experience, we always talk about facts, but we confuse experience with what is not experience; we think we are judging, but more often we stop way before judgment has been completed; we content ourselves with reaction or with prejudice. And the most imposing example of this is what often happens to us with the witness, because the witness doesn’t run away from this way of living the relationship with reality, even the witness, even in front of the greatest witness, as Davide was saying before, we can reduce him to a sentimental feeling and two days later we find ourselves back where we started, because someone else’s experience is not enough. The witness shows us a real, more human possibility for living the circumstances we’re called to live in, but if it doesn’t push us to have our own personal experience of what the witness is showing us, the witness sooner or later will not interest me; I’m fed up with all these witnesses, because it never becomes mine. This is why Father Giussani said, “If I don’t commit myself to verifying what I intuit or find valuable through a witness, sooner or later I will walk away” (Ibid., p.158). That is, if I don’t see it happening in me, with time it doesn’t interest me. And he gave this example: “A sixty-year-old can have tried everything that can be tried, but he is not necessarily an ‘experienced’ person because of this, a person who’s really had an experience, because experience is the capacity to make a comparison with the ideal. Otherwise [pay attention!] there is no experience of anything; there’s just the characteristic attitude of so many people, old people full of emptiness, full of nothing” (Ibid, p.148).
This is our destiny, if we just try, try, try… Without really having an experience, we will become empty old people. This is why he insisted on passing from doing the Movement to the experience of the Movement, what he called “personalization,” and the turning point of this passage is judging, what we consider tacked on, foreign to experience, because it is judging that makes experience something that one has.

2. The reductions of experience
But let’s help one another understand what kind of reductions of experience we usually make. The sad thing, I was saying, is that we get tired of really having an experience, and our confusion proves this. Confusion gives evidence of exactly that reduction that we place on experience, a reduction that is serious, very serious. Why serious? Because it weakens and empties the basic method of human development. Because this is what Giussani considers to be experience: experience is not a word to be used haphazardly. Experience is the path to the person’s development, it is the instrument that we hold in our hands for our development, for our growth. So if we use it wrongly or reduce it, everything that happens in life is useless (as we remembered at the Meeting when we quoted Saint Paul’s Letter to the Galatians), barren, good for nothing, he was saying; it doesn’t grow our “I,” it doesn’t develop our person, and we can become empty old people even having lived so many things because we didn’t really have experience.
And how does this experience get reduced? We often reduce experience simply to the impact that things have on me. We give an account of the facts, but it all stays there and afterwards nothing remains. This happens because we too identify experience only with the impact things have on me, with the impressions we have, which are all real–it’s not that now we use words, just words… No, we give an account of the facts, we start with real things, but they are only impressions. Experience is thus blind, mechanical. What we often call experience is nothing but trying, mere trying, mere sensing, without intelligence, without judgment, or it is subjective, in the worst sense, that is, something sentimental. Father Giussani described it for us with all its features: “This tendency to separate and isolate gives all sorts of typical and inadequate connotations to the word experience [reduced], among which are [take note of the following list, which is an X-ray of all of us here] an immediate reaction to things, multiplication of links through the mere proliferation of initiatives, a sudden attraction or disgust for the new, an insistence on our own designs or plans, insisting on memories of the past that have no value in the present, or even referring to a particular event in order to block aspirations or stunt ideals” (The Risk of Education, Crossroad Publ. Co., New York, 1995, p.100).
And so Father Giussani helps us to understand how we often make this reduction: “Without the capacity for evaluating, man cannot have any experience at all. […] Experience certainly means ‘trying’ something, but primarily it also coincides with a judgment we make about what we try” (The Religious Sense, op. cit., p.6). This is why this past summer I said, “The incomprehension of the word ‘experience’ is evident in the way we usually contrast it with ‘judgment’ or ‘knowledge’–where one exists, the other doesn’t. They’re alternatives. It’s the clearest sign that we’re confused about both terms. For this reason, when we reduce experience to this sort of impact or mechanical shock, then judgment seems to be something intellectual, almost tacked on. Precisely because of this, we often feel the judgment as something forced, like something that we impose upon reality, that we create […] [I]t seems that having to judge beautiful things, intense things, ruins the enchantment of what we’re living; to some degree it takes the poetry out of experience, ruins it. Therefore, when things have been interesting, beautiful, and persuasive, what need is there to judge them? We enjoyed them. Therefore, very often in instigating each other to judge we seem like party-poopers. After all, we’re living something beautiful–why should we have to judge it too? It seems like we’re carrying out an artificial and toilsome operation” (Experience: The Instrument for a Human Journey, International Assembly for Communion and Liberation Responsibles, La Thuile, August 2009, pp.11–12).
“What do we miss?” This tells us how hard it is for us to understand. This is the crucial point: that when we have this experience in this way, enjoying it and not feeling the need to judge it, we don’t miss anything. The really sad thing is that we don’t miss anything. It’s a reduction of humanity in having compassion, where everything becomes formalism, superficiality (as Davide was saying before), conformism. Like the nine lepers that we’ve referred to at other times: they don’t wonder about anything, they don’t miss anything else, they don’t feel the urgency of the other. The fact that we feel judgment to be foreign means that we’re not missing anything, and this tells us how appalling the reduction of humanity is, because not judging is losing the best part, it’s stopping before coming to what interests me, but we don’t feel this lack; it seems like a matter for intellectuals. So it’s striking that the thing that’s most ours, that should be ours, the desire for fullness in front of absolutely everything, would be the thing most foreign to us. What a separation from ourselves! Unpopular to himself, Father Giussani was saying before. But what happens when we wake up from a dream? After the enjoyment goes away, what’s left? Us, alone, with our nothingness, more and more lost, more and more skeptical. Do you see why the confusion grows?
And what a difference, what a difference with what Father Giussani witnessed to us, what Davide was saying before, reading Leopardi. Because it’s impossible for someone to see that humanity and not desire that gaze, not want to share in that way of relating to reality, because what we see there is a man, a witness of how a person can stand in front of reality and read Leopardi in such a way as to uncover, to bear witness to that “eternal mystery of our being” (Giacomo Leopardi, “Sopra il ritratto di uan bella donna” –“In Front of the Portrait of a Beautiful Woman”)–that is, what we are. And what is this mystery? “Human nature, entirely weak and vile as you now are: if you are dust and shadows, you feel like something entirely different” (Ibid.). You, being so fragile, have such great desires. But these desires, as we often say, aren’t there, as if everything had failed. Father Giussani (and it’s striking to hear him brandishing Leopardi) says: not at all, no, this is the dominant thought: “Powerful and most kind, ruler over the hidden depth of my mind” (Giacomo Leopardi, “ Il pensiero dominante”–“The Dominant Thought”). This cry, this urgency for happiness resurfaces from the universal shipwreck, from “the infinite vanity of everything” (Giacomo Leopardi, “A se stesso”– “To Himself”), but all this infinite vanity of everything cannot remove the seed of this dominant thought, of this thirst, of this passion for happiness, and “like a tower in a solitary field, you stand alone, giant, in her midst” (Giacomo Leopardi, “The Dominant Thought”). We can find ourselves in the middle of this universal shipwreck and this total confusion, but the dominant thought implacably resurfaces. You can be as confused as you like, but when someone does you an injustice the whole urgency for justice resurfaces; you can be as tired as you like, but in front of beauty you can’t avoid having all your wonder come out. And what we call heart, this dominant thought, is an irremovable reality. It’s about this that Father Giussani, with Leopardi, is a witness, a witness of this loyalty to experience that he finds a companion in someone like Leopardi. In the midst of the great “ruin” there’s this thing that stands impetuous and grand. If we were to follow this sometime…
The witness is someone who uses reason in this way, who has this loyalty to himself in this way, defined by this dominant thought, and so he cannot enter into relationship with anything without the desire for everything. And this is judgment. We need to compare everything to this humanity; it is this urgency that comes out in the relationship with everything, but we need this loyalty that we see in Giussani and in Leopardi. It’s someone who takes this dominant thought, this urgency seriously, that is in the innards of each of us and that comes out in the relationship with everything and that is not satisfied with anything less than this urgency that everyone can truly understand what experience is.

3. The ultimate implication
of human experience
“What characterizes experience is our understanding something, discovering its meaning. To have an experience means to comprehend the meaning of something” (The Risk of Education, op. cit., pp. 98–99). And when do I understand them? When I can give reasons for all the factors involved in the experience. This is why, when we say that it’s artificial, we’re saying that it’s something that goes against experience. We have to watch this simple experience that we have in front of reality, in front of the mountains, in front of song, to see how there immediately appears, at the same time, the judgment: “They’re beautiful!” When someone says that it’s artificial, we’re the artificial ones who are not truly aware of what happens when we have an experience.
It often happened during hikes, the CLU people were saying, that seeing 800 people climbing in silence, tourists would ask us, “But who are you?” At a certain point a married couple asked, “Who are you?” “We’re university students.” Yes, but who are you? Where are you from?” “From La Thuile.” “Fine, but where are you from?” “Milan,” “Palermo”… “No, no, no, but who are you; where are you from?” “We are Communion and Liberation.” “Ah! It’s wonderful seeing you climb.” Is this artificial, added on, or is it perhaps someone who cares about what strikes him, someone who stops with his humanity in front of the provocation of reality, someone who is loyal to this provocation? So much so that the students were struck by this loyalty: “This question also popped up in us, a question about the ultimate origin of what we had in front of us, and it would have been artificial to block it before coming to an adequate answer.”
Two others write to me about the experience of their vacation: “We wanted to tell you something that happened the last day of our vacation, right when we were packing our suitcases. To start out with: during our stay we were with friends in a residence where each of us had his own studio, but we always ate together at lunch and supper, besides, of course, sharing the whole day together. Next to our apartments there was a couple, husband and wife, Tuscans, about sixty years old, who often saw our coming and going from one studio to another with our child or someone else’s in our arms. Their table at every lunch and supper faced our big table with eight adults and three children in the yard in front of where they were staying. The day we were leaving, the Tuscan gentleman came up to Ciccio, one of our friends, and said, ‘I’m going to ask you a question and you have to give me a clear answer. We watched you a lot these past few days. We saw you eating together, how you pray, how you are with your children, but beyond your friendship (maybe you work together, but it doesn’t seem enough to explain it), what is the common thread that unites you?’ Ciccio answered that we belong to the Movement, that we are Christians and that this is what has united our lives and has made us friends. He answered, ‘I knew it!’ and he explained that in Pistoia where he lives he had met people from the Movement and he is also a Catholic, and then he thanked us for the companionship that we gave him and his wife and he said, ‘You are something to behold!’” There is no experience until there’s understanding. But to understand means not stopping until you find an exhaustive answer to what you see: friends together in such a different way that makes the question arise, “What is the common thread that unites you?” “When Ciccio related this dialogue to us, we were moved with that same emotion that Rose talks about, of seeing the Mystery happen, at work. This man’s use of reason really struck us, that when he watched us, he let himself be baffled and especially that he asked [this is a human trait: it takes a man]; he observed our simple staying together (eating, talking at table, praying) and he saw something different that impressed him, but he didn’t stop at this wonder; he asked the question, ‘Where does this way of being friends come from? What could be the common thread that binds them?’ He tried to find an explanation, and when he realized that none of his attempts to find an answer was enough to fully explain that difference, he came straight to us and asked to have a clear answer.”
It is simple: this is an “I” involved in what he is checking out. Who among us feels this urgency to understand as strange, tacked on to the beauty of experience, ruining its enchantment? Asking to understand is part of the experience I have; otherwise, experience is incomplete, I can’t understand, I can’t put together what I see in front of me. So someone who has this humanity does not feel judgment to be artificial or foreign.
Let’s use an example to dismantle once and for all this idea that judgment is something artificial, with the example that Father Giussani often gave us, elementary in its simplicity: who feels artificial, in front of a bouquet of flowers, asking who sent it? This doesn’t ruin anything at all; it’s a simultaneous part of the reaction to the roses that I find in my house to ask, in the same reaction, “Who on earth could have sent them?” Does anyone feel it to be intellectual to ask this, to wonder about the ultimate origin of the presence of those flowers? Let each one answer for himself. The “who?” is the ultimate implication of those flowers in front of me. It only takes not being a stone; there’s no need to take some weird path; all that’s needed is to acknowledge the reaction, because the whole implication is already in the reaction.
This is why Father Giussani tells us that there is no experience until we recognize “God is the ultimate implication of human experience, and that therefore the religious sense is an inevitable dimension of an authentic, exhaustive experience” (Ibid., p.100). Let’s compare what we call experience to what we are talking about here and realize how much we reduce it.
This is so simple that I’ve chosen as the title of our meeting this line of Leopardi: “Your beauty, O lady, appeared as a divine ray to my thought” (Giacomo Leopardi, “Aspasia”). It is so simple that Leopardi cannot avoid discovering, in his reaction to the beauty of the lady he loves, the divine ray. This is experience in its simplicity, that the lady’s beauty can’t help but make Leopardi recognize the divine ray inside it. This is exactly what we mean when we say that there is no true experience that does not have the Mystery within, that does not imply the Mystery as its exhaustive reason. But is Leopardi saying this because he has to play the intellectual? Leopardi could not live his own experience of his relationship with the lady’s beauty without it referring him to the Mystery, without it causing him to glimpse the divine ray. But you need a man like Leopardi for this! You need a loyalty with that dominant thought that again and again resurfaces in the universal shipwreck, in order not to stop beforehand. We lack this immediacy; we find it hard because, as we explained on other occasions, there is this encrustation over our elementary needs, and only if we put ourselves to work can we get them out. We have seen how hard it is to get to the point of describing experience in its totality (this summer, we had a different experience of this in our common gestures). It’s what Father Giussani always said: that someone who says, “I” with all the awareness, with all his self-awareness, can’t help but imply the You who makes him: “I am you-who-make- me” (The Religious Sense, op. cit., p.105). This is the formula of complete experience. “So I do not consciously say ‘I am,’ in a sense that captures my entire stature as a human being if I do not mean ‘I am made’” (Ibid., p.106). But to understand how far we are from this, we only need to recognize how often we say “I am” without this self-awareness.
So, without the perception and recognition of the Mystery as a factor of reality, there is no experience, of no matter what we’re talking about, and this makes us aware of the handicap we bear, which makes the path of reason to the You arduous, difficult, not to be taken for granted–the path to that implication of human experience, because it’s already found within; there’s no need to add Him on. As Father Giussani taught us with that image of the mountain climbers: “We are like the climbers of a century ago who [in order to reach the mountain top] first had to face a long march to the rock face” (Why the Church?, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 2001, p.28). We can do it if we feel that urgency for totality, for a total explanation, pressing inside us, which only the Mystery can fulfill.

4. The test of experience:
realizing we are growing
But after many years in the Movement, we can still feel the struggle we have, and we often see it. For example, I saw it in a simple example at the CLU Assembly this summer, when we were trying to really understand fully what experience was, on at least three occasions during the assembly they answered correctly, but I asked them to repeat it: “Repeat what you just said”–I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t get them to repeat what they had just said as they said it by chance. This is why–and this is decisive for us, because we say these things a lot, but the sad thing is that we’re not aware of it–Father Giussani says, “experience connotes the fact of becoming aware of one’s growth” (The Risk of Education, op. cit., p. 142). If we are not aware of this, even if we say it a lot, we, as Davide was saying before, are starting all over again. We see that we’re not having an experience because experience is not making us grow; it’s not making self-awareness grow, and so we go back to being confused.
It amazes me how clearly, with such evidence, he had already identified all the factors of experience, so he can accompany us now. This is why we often tell ourselves, “Well, yes, I know it.” Things seem to already be known, since we’ve heard these things so often or have repeated the words ourselves. I really understand it, because that’s what happened to me, that I thought I knew certain things, and so the biggest decision in my life was when I had to agree to begin to understand what I thought I knew, to learn what I thought I knew. I’m not scolding anyone about anything, because I really know it well through my own experience, but I know what the problem is, I really know it: I was repeating all the right words, but then, in reality, I wasn’t there. But what got me to follow a path is exactly that I agreed to start all over. And Father Giussani had this clear. I’m amazed when I reread what he says about the first hour of classes: “From my very first day as a teacher, I’ve always offered these words of warning to my class: ‘I am not here so that you can take my ideas as your own; I’m here to teach you a true method that you can use to judge the things I will tell you. And what I have to tell you is the result of a long experience, of a past that is two thousand years old’” (Ibid., p.11). That is, he knew that he could not help if he didn’t put the “I” of those people in motion, that what he was saying wasn’t enough; not only witness was enough. He was aware that he could only help by offering a method so that they could judge everything he was saying. That is, from the beginning, Father Giussani challenged the heart of those he had in front of him. This is the exaltation of the person, saying: you are capable of judging because there is this “dominant thought,” this “tower” in the middle of the “universal shipwreck” that allows you to judge, to follow a path to get out of the confusion. And he adds, “From the beginning, our educational efforts have always stood by this method, clearly pointed out that it was intended to show how faith could be relevant to life’s needs [that is, the desire for happiness]. As a result of the education I received at home, my seminary training, and my reflections later in life, I came to believe deeply that only faith arising from life experience [of everyone] and confirmed by it (and therefore, relevant to life’s needs) could be sufficiently strong to survive in a world where everything pointed in the opposite direction” (Ibid., p.11). The first hour of class!

5. Christian experience
What he describes about experience in general happens in the same way and more easily in Christian experience. Why? Why more easily in Christian experience? He always told us: because the more exceptional the presence that I encounter, the easier it is to recognize it. The more beautiful the mountains, the easier it is for us to recognize Him; the more beautiful the woman that I find, the easier it is to recognize Him; we see how this urgency comes out more easily. It takes hold of you more, it grabs you more; it is so imposing that we get overwhelmed in front of exceptional facts. We can be distracted, but in front of certain things it’s impossible for us not to jump for joy, not to ask ourselves what makes it possible. This is so universal and I had a foretaste of it when I went to Brazil, when I heard a Methodist girl, Natalia, saying this in the assembly: “This month the question that was given to us was meeting something that corresponds to your own heart. I truly met something that corresponded to my heart. It’s these people from the Association of Cleuza and Marcus because, as incredible as it seems, we live in an age where if you say that you are Catholic, the Evangelicals walk out, they go away; if I say that I’m Evangelical, it’s the Catholics who walk out. I came here and I said what religion I belong to. Then, back home, I thought, ‘Do I realize what I said? Do I realize what it will provoke in my life?’ But what happened is the opposite of what I thought, because when I came here everyone smiled at me; people asked me if everything was fine. I didn’t understand, but I answered, ‘Everything’s fine.’ And then someone else came up and said, ‘Are you okay? How are you?’ And I began to understand what God is, what faith in God is: nowhere else have I ever felt so accepted, so loved as I feel here. I have never felt so respected in all my years of life.” This experience is so extraordinary that, in order to explain being so respected, so loved, Natalia has to imply the divine.
Only if we accept this ultimate implication in every experience, that we really realize what is implied in every experience, can we conquer confusion. The contribution that Father Giussani gives us when he witnesses that God is the ultimate implication of experience is the most adequate answer to the question. But often when we see exceptional facts, we stay stuck in confusion because we block that urgency that comes out, the inevitable question of who makes all this beauty possible. Just look how he describes it, how he witnesses to it: “The encounter–from which starts the persuasive image of Christ, for which we understand that Christ is something pertinent to life, that interests life–is with a companionship, or even with a single person, not insofar as you understand that Christ is inside it, but insofar as it makes you say, ‘How on earth are these people here like this?!’ So, you begin this path by finding a companion, a companionship, or by seeing a group that has something interesting, and you follow them and hear these people saying that what they have that’s interesting is there because of the Lord, and you follow them, a little bit intrigued, but without being defined by that thing, and at a certain point this attraction gets bigger and you are struck more by that idea, by that word, and you are struck by the fact that the people tell you, ‘We are together because of That One, the Lord.’ This is a qualitative jump as compared to the first impression. So you start to take That One seriously, and the more you keep following this unfolding, the more Jesus becomes more important than all the faces put together [this is the kernel of the question, that Jesus–Jesus!–becomes more important than all the faces put together]. And He becomes so important that you understand that without That One [Jesus] the faces would disappear and you would be bored. This is the destiny of a great many people who come through our companionship and then go away. As in Pascoli’s ‘Focolare,’ they go away as their destiny, because they haven’t taken into adequate consideration, they have not been serious with what the companionship that attracted them was saying about its own motive. The companionship says, ‘We are together because of This One here.’ Someone doesn’t take this seriously and is satisfied with the companionship, he likes the companionship, not looking at this motivation, and after a little while he swears that he’s leaving the companionship too [this is the consequence if we don’t come to judgment, because a reality without adequate motive vanishes]! The adequate motive for our companionship is Something other, but this is what has to shimmer in our eyes every day” («Tu» (o dell’amicizia) [“You” (or, On Friendship)], Bur, Milan, 1997, pp. 175-177).
That is, the sign that we are walking a path, he tells us, is that Jesus becomes more important than all the faces put together, not because I forget the faces put together, but because they don’t exhaust all the urgency for fulfillment that I have inside, and if I don’t get there I get bored and I go away. This is why, if we don’t get there and if we keep saying that this is artificial (because what matters is what I touch, what I see, and that all the rest is rubbish), we’ll go away sooner or later, because whether we like it or not it will never correspond to the urgency we have inside, to that dominant thought that remains, like a “tower in a solitary field” in the middle of the “universal shipwreck.”
So how can we not be moved by this witness of Giussani? “Jesus is what should shimmer in our eyes every day” (Ibid., p.177).
Without this experience of Christ there is only formal discourse about Christ, but we are lost and confused like everyone else, victims of that restless guest of our time which is nihilism, which Cardinal Bagnasco spoke about. Without a real experience of Christ, we look at reality in the same way everyone else does. To understand that this is not at all to be discounted, each of us just has to see how he’s been moved in the circumstances that are shaking Italy, which is, as Cardinal Bagnasco said, cyclically traversed by a malaise as tenacious as it is mysterious. How have we judged it? With what criteria? So much noise seems to have only one purpose: to avoid asking the only truly exhaustive question, the question that corresponds to the heart, the one asked by Ibsen in Brand: “Answer me, O God, in the hour when death is swallowing me: is all a man’s will not then enough for him to achieve just a part of salvation? [Can man make a single act true?]” Everything else is an attempt to hide all our inability to have an answer for our evil and the evil of others.
It’s an experience, then, that makes a gesture like the Meeting [in Rimini] possible, where everyone feels at home and, paradoxically, not hiding what we are, but focusing on what we are, what we hold most dear, which is what makes us interesting to everyone. Without this real experience of Christ there is no education because no one is capable of challenging the heart.
This is why it is still striking how Father Giussani at a meeting with CL teachers in 1980 said, after having read the witness of a person in the Russian Samizdat, thankful to be condemned for his faith to imprisonment in a lager (and during the verdict his friends were singing the Easter hymn of the Risen Christ): “And we, in an age when there is this faith, are living our communities! So what is your community? And what is our group of youngsters? You’re then one in front of the world, at school, with the teacher; you’re in front of the books, in front of the ideas going around. You’re the one, not your friends, not your community, not CLE [educators], not CL. This is the only way to make CLE and CL rise again: your faith, period. This is the issue, faith lived in the first person [as a real experience]. The issue is not your temperament, the circumstances around you, the friends you have, your incapacity in front of your friends, the class where you’re doing well and the class where you’re not doing well at all. If you were all alone and even your dog had left you, it would be the same, sadder, but with less illusion and purer. I swear to you that sooner or later others will come. The issue, then, is the faith lived in the first person, and I will never tire, when I use the word faith, of recalling what it means, because you don’t know what it means even if you define it theologically: faith is the amazed, grateful, awestruck, and simultaneously uplifting recognition of a Presence, because God has come and is among us. And the beautiful and present thing is the content of the faith, and I know nothing other than this. ‘I came among you and I knew nothing but Christ and Christ crucified, historical, God made man.’ How can there be a witness if not for this faith, and not coming from our mental capabilities or special cunning or the possibility of certain days?” (CL archive)
This is why, at the beginning of this year, each of us is called to decide whether to follow the whole path as Father Giussani proposes it, being loyal to his experience, or to keep on blocking it. It is only if we have an experience in this way that we can see the human fittingness of the faith. And this is not to be taken for granted, because we often confuse the intention of following with real following, that is, with that close comparison with the method that he is proposing to us; we have to decide if we really want to become sons, because it is in this way that he can always be more a father, generating us with that humanity that we saw in him, [that is represented in Henri Matisse’s Icarus, which we are using as the image for our meeting] the feeling of ourselves as defined by the awareness of the presence of the Father, in such a way that our every expression may be ever more fulfilled as the relationship with that great plan, for our good and the good of our fellow men. This is the challenge and the choice that each one has to take up and that we want to accompany you with throughout this year.

sheeekenne with artichoke bean sauce

2009-10-14T18:38:00.006-04:00

If I were a food stylist, I would not tolerate the tomato juice puddle moving south along the plate...

I invented and cooked this delicious and easy dish this evening.

First, pick your 16 year-old daughter (following the blood type A diet) up from her piano lesson at 5 (knowing you must bring her to play practice at 5:30). Frantically dive through the kitchen door, open a can of Great Northern beans, dump them into a Pyrex measuring cup, and microwave for 2 minutes. Meanwhile, peel two cloves of garlic and throw them into the food processor. Drizzle about 2 or 3 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil over that and process until chopped (but not necessarily smooth). Get a large jar of artichoke hearts out of the pantry, drain and rinse them, dump them into the food processor and process again until it's a greenish lumpy mash. Dump the hot beans on top, whiz the whole mixture a couple of times and drizzle more extra virgin olive oil, if you are so inclined. Sea salt (of course) and a grind of pepper should do it. Then pour about half of it into a dish, thrust the dish and a plastic spoon into your daughter's hand as she's flying back out the door, and toss a rice cake into her other hand. Drop her at play practice and come back to the kitchen.

Now get out a large skillet, pour in more extra virgin olive oil (I don't care what they say about not sauteing with it -- the food tastes better if you do it my way), slice another clove of garlic into the oil and slice one onion into the pan. Saute until soft and clear but not brown. Add two packages of boneless, skinless chicken breast that is cut into stir fry pieces (or bone, skin, and butcher it yourself, if you must). Stir until the chicken begins to brown on all sides. Add the remaining artichoke/bean mixture, warm it all up, and keep the pan on low while you boil pasta or steam rice. Heat some fire-roasted tomatoes (Muir Glen is my brand of choice for these) to serve on the side. Sprinkle powdered thyme over the chicken and stir it again. Then take some basil leaves and rip them into ribbons over the chicken. One last stir and you're ready to eat. Pretty darn yummy.

US bishops say...

2009-10-12T22:34:00.002-04:00

US Bishops Congratulate Obama

WASHINGTON, D.C., OCT. 12, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Cardinal Francis George, the archbishop of Chicago and president of the U.S. episcopal conference, issued a statement today to congratulate President Barack Obama on being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

"In the name of the Catholic Bishops of the United States," the cardinal stated, "I would like to offer congratulations to President Barack Obama on his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize."

The Nobel Committee announced Obama's win Friday.

Cardinal George continued: "As he has graciously said, much of the work of realizing a more peaceful and just world for all persons and nations remains to be done; but the prize was given because as President of the United States he has already changed the international conversation.

"In our own country, the remarkable and historic achievement of his election has changed the relationships between men and women of all races. The rich diversity of United States society is now more surely anchored in a national unity that is better able to foster the peace we all are challenged to pursue. Our prayer is that almighty God will bless the president and his family."

-- From Zenit

How to ask...

2009-10-11T17:14:00.003-04:00

This is the way you should be working on our lessons: grasp the meaning of the lesson in its entirety, not in an analytical sense, but as a complete world; understand the reasoning behind the individual passages; understand it sentence by sentence; then look back and say, "Wonderful! Nobody says these things like this."

Instead, if you sit there, alone or in a group, reading the text line by line until you come across something objectionable and you raise your hand, you run the risk of splitting the lesson up rather than unifying it. Instead of envisioning a world, of being awestruck by a new world, you create many fragments that are difficult to piece together, like a puzzle. Whereas the world embraces many things and is one voice.

* from Is It Possible to Live This Way? Volume 3: Charity Luigi Giussani

The Meeting!

2009-10-05T22:10:00.000-04:00

From clonline.org

LETTER / Rose from Uganda: Africa needs the “madness of God"

2009-10-05T22:04:00.003-04:00

Rose Busingye is the Director of Meeting Point International (MPI), an NGO located in a suburb of Kampala where HIV infected people and their families are given care and support. Rose wrote a letter ilsussidiario.net is very happy to publish.

The title of the African Synod is "The Church in Africa in the service of reconciliation, justice and peace." The fulfillment of this program depends on the whole heart of Africans and their education.

Christ came, the question is to see that this changes everything: it changes the way I treat myself and how I behave with others and with things. The issue is that of belonging to Him. Belonging means to be preferred, it means that someone has wanted me. This supersedes all the differences that we have, whether of tribes, politics or other vested interests.

Truly peace for Africa depends on the encounter between the human heart and Christ. This is because belonging to Christ more than belonging to the tribal group puts the latter in the right place, with the proper value. But this happens only if the faith penetrates the deepest layers of humanity, where the criteria for the perception of things are formed. Then this belonging becomes the strength of an “I”, and the person becomes free and a protagonist.

For this to happen, education is fundamental. The African has a very strong religious sense and a strong sense of belonging, but these must be educated. One must be educated to understand that the fulfilment is already with us, the answer is already present, and not a magic spell or a sentimental way of believing that makes it happen.

The African has an exalted religious sense; there is not an African who is not aware of depending on something higher, who does not have this sense of dependence on something. He calls it "Spirit" or some other name, looks for it in magic, but cannot live without having something to depend upon. No African would ever say, as many Europeans do, "I was born, now I'm here and that's all." No: the African has always lived the question of origin.

The encounter which is missing

The problem is that most Africans, and even most Christians, cannot testify to an encounter in which one heard: "It is I you are seeking." Because too often Christ has not been presented as something that is already present in us, but as something that comes from outside. So today many African scholars are saying that the Christian God has been imported by the whites and that Christianity is not reconciled with the identity and culture of Africa.

For me and many of my friends it is not so, because the way in which we were introduced to Christianity through the person of Don Luigi Giussani and those who followed him was different. It is as if we were told: "Everything you've been looking for in your minds, in magic, it is already present, it is that which has made you, which gave birth to you, which makes you breathe. And I will tell you his name. Instead it's like so many Africans have been told by those who presented Christianity to them: "Put away all idols, all your things, I have brought God to you, I have brought Christ to you." As if Christ were a property. But Christ does not possess anyone like that, he comes in the way he wills, as he draws them to him, coming to every man in this world.

Magic, the spirits and daily life

The consequence of not presenting Christ as something that is in you, but as something that comes from outside, means that ultimately, for many, there is a white God and a God of the African. And when there is a difficulty, an illness, even Christians sometimes look toward the God of Africa and say: " Maybe it’s because of the spirits." So they go to the ones that you Europeans call "sorcerers". They fill their minds with fear. Sorcerers terrorize them, their minds are filled with reactions that come from fear, and they themselves are convinced that to heal themselves their mind must be tortured and filled with beliefs that result from their fear.

Even the sects that blend Christianity with the spirits, those so-called "saved", by following the same method of the sorcerers, they produce agitation and suggestion in the mind, convince you that the presence of God or the good spirits are related to magic, and that everything in life can be obtained through magic. This is a God who tells you: “I can get you everything through magic. " But this is not a God who enters into your normal life, who lives your life with you, who carries it with you. This is a God of psychological suggestion: at the end of the prayer you feel healed, but the next day you're worse off than before.

But God is this tenderness which has come into the world, who took pity on us and touches us all here. This is what Benedict XVI has expressed in his three encyclicals, especially in Deus Caritas Est, where he describes God's infinite love: “the divine madness," he wrote. The peace and reconciliation born of this experience of God: God has made me, for I was nothing and I am nothing, but he has taken me as I am, and in my everyday life.

What follows naturally is to say: "I want to participate in this madness of God, in this being of God." This thing, in time, means that I no longer get angry over the sins of others, for the injustices that the other has done to me and to other people. In the experience of divine love, there is no longer any meaning in my measuring my sins, and those of others. Over time this produces serenity and the desire that my encounter with every human being be with tenderness, not an effort or repeating words or trying to be better than the others.

Those who arrive here in Kampala are girls from tribes hostile to mine, young people who fought or who were child soldiers. I should be afraid of or feel contempt for them. But these things do not affect me any more, for me they are loved and willed by God, and they continually need to be loved and desired. If they do need to eat, I give them to eat; if they need medicine, I give them medicine. When they arrive I welcome them, like all other children, not by judging whether or not they have stolen or killed. They belong to Christ, and therefore they also belong to me.

Reprinted from Il.Sussidiario.

To everything that gives life and love the Church says Yes!

2009-10-05T21:16:00.002-04:00

You know, the church is the one who dreams, the church is the one who constantly has the vision, the church is the one that's constantly saying 'Yes!' to everything that life and love and sexuality and marriage and belief and freedom and human dignity--everything that that stands for, the church is giving one big resounding 'Yes!' The church founded the universities, the church was the patron of the arts, the scientists were all committed Catholics. And that's what we have to recapture: the kind of exhilarating, freeing aspect. I mean, it wasn't Ronald Reagan who brought down the Berlin Wall. It was Karol Wojtyla. I didn't make that up: Mikhail Gorbachev said that...I guess one of the things that frustrates me pastorally is that there's this caricature of the church--of being this oppressive, patriarchal, medieval, out-of-touch naysayer--where the opposite is true.

Archbishop Timothy Dolan, New York Magazine

Thank you Paul! Paul's blog is Communio, and that's where I found this amazing quote.

Me, too

2009-09-26T23:56:00.002-04:00

From the dotCommonweal blog:

The Movement That Moves Me

August 8, 2009, 4:31 pm

Posted by Gregory Wolfe

I believe it was Matthew Boudway who a few weeks ago posted a couple quotations and asked us to guess who had penned them.

One of the two struck me forcefully. A brief excerpt: “It is false to the point of absurdity to see in a ‘belief,’ perchance the belief in redemption through Christ, the distinguishing characteristic of the Christian: only Christian practice, a life such as he who died on the cross lived, is Christian…. States of consciousness, beliefs of any kind, holding something to be true for example — every psychologist knows this — are a matter of complete indifference and of the fifth rank compared with the value of the instincts…. To reduce being a Christian, Christianness, to a holding of something to be true, to a mere phenomenality of consciousness, means to negate Christianness.”

The author was Friedrich Nietzsche, but the person it made me think of was Luigi Giussani (1923-2005), founder of the lay movement Communion & Liberation (CL).

All this by way of preface to the following statement: I’m coming out of the closet. I belong to CL.

I don’t know why I’ve been so shy about sharing this fact about me, given its centrality in my life. Part of it stems, I suspect, from an awareness that lay movements have occasionally been marred by scandals. Another element of my shyness probably has to do with the way that lay movements are so often interpreted in political terms — as being either conservative or liberal. A final element may simply have to do with the general ignorance on the part of most American Catholics about movements; they’re perceived by many still as somehow a church within the Church, a threat to parish life, etc.

In short, I’m afraid of being pigeonholed.

But back to Nietzsche. His words reminded me of these words from Msgr. Giussani: “Christianity is an event. There is no other word to indicate its nature: neither the word law nor the word ideology, conception, or project. Christianity is not a religious doctrine, a series of moral laws, a complex of rites. Christianity is a fact, an event: everything else is a consequence.”

This insight is what drew me to CL and makes the movement such a vital part of my life. It’s also what attracted Joseph Ratzinger, who became quite close to Giussani and preached his funeral in Milan. As Benedict XVI, he has regularly made statements that closely parallel those of Giussani, such as these words from Deus Caritas Est: “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”

There’s much more I could say, but I’ll leave it at that. I happen to think that lay movements are going to be an important part of the Church’s life in the coming decades, though individualistic Americans have been slow to understand and join them.
I’m curious what people thing, not so much of CL in particular, as of movements themselves. I welcome your thoughts.

Thank you, Scott, for mentioning it so that I could find it!

"we report, you decide."

2009-09-26T22:08:00.001-04:00

"Racism," Cont'd.

So it seems, Memphis Bishop Terry Steib's flag-raiser of "racism" in the church got some brows raised after appearing in last week's edition of the River City's beloved Thursday Visitor.

Given the hubbub -- and after getting told that the Tennessee prelate "doesn't talk to the media" -- Religion News Service's Dan Burke landed a transcript of Steib's original comments courtesy of hometown freelancer Lou Baldwin, who broke the story in the Catholic Standard & Times.

Ergo, via Burke, according to Baldwin, here's the relevant portion:

"I ... know there is a subtle racism that still exists within our Church that leads to a mistrust of the Church among our young African American men and women. (snip)

"Slowly we are moving away from that mistrust to trust in our Church and thereby trust in the Universal Church. You may ask, 'What do you mean by subtle racism?' Well, recently and particularly because of the awarding of a degree to President Obama at the University of Notre Dame, the question [of] racism among the bishops of the country has been raised. I am only raising it because [retired San Francisco] Archbishop [John] Quinn in an article in the America Magazine said that continuing confrontation with President Obama and his administration sends the message that the bishops are insensitive to the heritage and continued existence of racism in America. Archbishop Quinn said that.

"When President Obama was inaugurated four buses full of African Americans Catholics drove for more than 19 hours to be present for the historic moment. But they felt that their celebration was muted because they had heard that so many of our bishops did not seem to understand the significant moment. They seemed not to understand what the whole world took to heart -- that President Obama's election was creating or beginning a whole new era that rejected racial stereotypes and it was opening the door to more embracing international relationships.

"But many of our Church did not share that jubilation. And this, people, I will admit to you too. Nothing was done during other administrations, nothing was said when other presidents who favored the war in Iraq with its constant killing, or who favored capital punishment were given awards in the name of the Church, even though those presidents were not adhering to Catholic Right to Life principles. Because of his clearly unacceptable stand on abortion many who are leaders in the church are willing to pillory President Obama with direct confrontation rather than with clear moral teaching about abortion and public law."

So, there's the script... and as they say "we report, you decide."

From Whispers in the Loggia

The essence of the Christian fact!

2009-09-24T21:25:00.000-04:00

"Ever since the Church began, this has been her method: the most fervent Christians - as Saint Ambrose said - joined together so as not to be displaced by the more lukewarm Christians. It is not necessarily the case that those who do not join with others are less fervent - someone may follow a more personal path. To be sure, nobody can avoid communionality, because this is the essence of the Christian fact!"
Giussani, The Work of the Movement, 58

h/t Fred at la nouvelle théologie

This is something WELL worth supporting

2009-09-19T23:48:00.003-04:00

LAHH* (see below for more information) is participating in the “Share to Win “ contest launched by 3banana.com. We need to collect the largest number of comments on a note describing why people should care about our cause in order to win the contest and collect a money prize that will help LAHH to continue to fulfill their mission of providing employment for persons with disabilities.

What we are asking takes two minutes of your time and few clicks!

To help us to win the contest follow these simple steps:

1) Go to http://bit.ly/Q9mlC where you’ll find our note

2) Click on "Sign up"

3) Fill the information to register

4) Cick on "comment" and leave your message

Make sure you see your comment below our note!

That’s it!
A little effort means a lot to us!

Los Angeles Habilitation House Mission

Creating and maintaining job opportunities for persons with disabilities that will help them to develop, express, and apply their talents and maximize their contribution to the community and society at large. In the future, we will provide support services for senior citizens.

LAHH Torrance Crew

"When I interviewed for the position I now hold with LAHH" - says Cris H. "I expected that I was walking into "just another job. On the first day of Boot Camp I realized I had found an opportunity that was golden. The training was delivered with a level of detail that ensured there was no confusion or miss-understanding about what it was I had to do. The training and methodology behind the OS1 system is such that it makes working as a janitor an enjoyable experience. When I began working with the team at the HRC in Torrance I realized that being here with LAHH was far more than just a job. It has proven to be exactly what a veteran facing so many challenges needed".

- Cris Hartsock, LAHH Employee

Theresa and Nancy

"The fact that LAHH uses the word 'house' in their vision statement sums up the nurturing, compassionate and often contagious warmth that you feel when you meet Nancy and Guido. You feel a sense of 'family' that often many individuals with disabilities long for, the sense of belonging to a family. The LAHH not only becomes a place for them to work, it also becomes a ‘home’."

- Theresa May de Vera, Commissioner, Commission on Disability

Racism? Let's think about this

2009-09-17T21:43:00.006-04:00

A Roman Catholic Bishop asserts that racism was behind the brouhaha surrounding Obama's invitation to Notre Dame

[...] Some racism still exists, [Bishop Terry Steib SVD of Memphis] said, and cited the recent furor in Catholic circles over the honorary degree awarded by Notre Dame University to Obama, who supports abortion on demand.

Other presidents have had disagreements with the positions of the Catholic Church, for example, in war policies and capital punishment, but have received honorary degrees without similar objection, he noted. It is the subtle racism that still exists which contributes to the lack of priestly vocations among young black men because “it leads to a mistrust of the Church among young black men and women,” he said. “Let’s acknowledge that.” .... [from The Catholic Standard and Times]

h/t Rocco Palmo at Whispers in the Loggia

Catholic approach to universal healthcare...

2009-09-16T22:40:00.001-04:00

Cardinal Martino applauds universal health care initiative

Posted on September 15, 2009 by Carol Glatz, from Catholic News Service

Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, speaks at a press conference Dec. 11, 2008. (CNS photo/Emanuela De Meo, Catholic Press Photo)

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican hasn’t weighed in very much yet concerning the fierce debate in the United States over health care reform. Some of the opposition in the U.S. centers around whether the government should have such a dominant role in providing affordable coverage for all Americans.

Cardinal Renato Martino, who is head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, lived in the United States for 16 years when he served the Vatican’s permanent observer to the United Nations from 1986-2002.

When I interviewed the cardinal today at the end of a Vatican press conference, I asked him what he thought of the current health care debate in the U.S. and whether the government should be offering universal coverage or if it should just be left up to private businesses. Here’s what he said:

The health of their own citizens belongs to the authorities, to the central government. And so I have been 16 years in the States and I was wondering why a big portion of the American people is deprived, have no health assistance at all. I could never explain this… [read the rest here]

No detachment, please

2009-09-15T22:41:00.003-04:00

"The split between the Gospel and our culture is the drama of our times. But one does not free persons by detaching them from the bonds that paralyze them: one frees a person by attaching them to their destiny." Emmanuel Mounier

h/t Karen Kaffenberger

...and Robert George at the Meeting in Rimini

2009-09-15T16:21:00.003-04:00

From Mirror of Justice:

"Elementary Experience" and Natural Law

At the urging of my pals Mary Ann Glendon and Joseph Weiler, I accepted an invitation to speak (in a tag-team partnership with Mary Ann) at the 30th annual "Meeting for Friendship of Peoples" hosted by Communion & Liberation in Rimini, Italy. The meeting, which I had often heard about but never before attended, is quite remarkable. Over the course of a week, several hundred thousand people crowd into an Italian beach town to hear academic and religious lectures, attend concerts and other performances, and socialize. Mary Ann and I were assigned the topic "Elementary Experience and Natural Law." I'm revising my reflections on the subject to present as a lecture at the University of St. Thomas Law School in a few weeks, but in case MoJ readers are interested, here are the opening paragraphs of my presentation.

One’s knowledge of natural law, like all knowledge, begins with experience (one might even say “elementary experience”) but it does not end or even tarry there. Knowing is an activity—an intellectual activity, to be sure, but an activity nonetheless. We all have the experience of knowing. But to know is not merely to experience. Knowing is a complex and dynamic activity. The role of experience in the activity of knowing is to supply data on which the inquiring intellect works in the cause of achieving understanding. Insights are insights into data. They are, as Bernard Lonergan brilliantly demonstrated by inviting readers to observe and reflect on their own ordinary intellectual operations, the fruit of a dynamic and integrated process of experiencing, understanding, and judging... [read the rest here]

We

2009-09-05T13:50:00.003-04:00

We killed [Christ] by enclosing him in the shell of antiquated modes of thinking, by banishing him to a piety devoid of reality, which becomes a devotional slogan or archaeological curiosity. We killed him through the ambiguity of our lives that obscured him.

From "The Sabbath of History" by Cardinal Ratzinger with artworks by William Congdon:

"School of Mercy"

2009-09-05T01:40:00.001-04:00

"The School of Mercy"

from Whispers in the Loggia by Rocco Palmo

Even before Boston's cardinal-archbishop published his own rebuttal to the harsher reactions that accompanied last week's death and funeral of the Senate's "last lion," another hierarch celebrated for his orthodox bona-fides had already sounded a call for calm... and, indeed, a call to conscience.

Published in yesterday's edition of the Madison Catholic Herald, here's the fulltext of Bishop Robert Morlino's column for his diocesan weekly....

Emphases original:
Dear Friends,

As I complete my time of rest and recuperation, I found myself unpredictably (at least had I been able to predict six months ago) with time available to me to watch on the television most of the events surrounding the funeral and burial of Senator Edward Moore Kennedy. For myself, the time was prayerful and well spent because I knew a lot about Senator Kennedy when he was still fairly young and, of course, I was younger still.

Senator Kennedy and I, many years ago, were, according to the common understanding, not quite ready to get in line to go and meet our Judge. There was plenty of time available, we presumed, to prepare ourselves to take our place in that line, and to welcome that part of our humanity which is experiencing the mystery of suffering and death. [the rest here]

Even MORE from the Meeting...

2009-09-05T01:26:00.002-04:00

EDUCATION/ The Teacher as Benefactor: Thoughts on Education as an Event from St Thomas Aquinas

Fr Andrew Davison

Fr Andrew Davison delivered the following paper for the Meeting for Friendship among Peoples last August in Rimini. The theme of the Meeting was “Knowledge is always an Event”.

You have chosen an excellent title for your meeting. Knowledge is always an event. Knowledge is always something specific and historical; it is always linked to particular people and places, particular experiences and objects. This afternoon I offer you an example so that you can illustrate this from your own history. It is drawn from the topic for this session: education. I give you the example of our teachers and the debt we owe to them. [read the rest here]

San Carlo seminarian's judgment: Meeting in Rimini

2009-09-05T01:07:00.004-04:00

Seminarians from the Priestly Fraternity of the Missionaries of St.Charles Borromeo
(The author, John Roderick, is to the far right in the picture).

By John Roderick:

[...] We have all been given the mysterious gift of life and ought to be good stewards of this gift by becoming protagonists and seeking out the full truth and knowledge of ourselves, the people we have been given to accompany us on this journey, and of the wonder of the material world. The Rimini Meeting sought to make this proposal to all of its attendees, that man is capable of arriving at true knowledge of himself, others and the world, and it is an exciting and worthwhile mission. We ought to make this journey as friends, and friendship is the heart and form of what we are called to live, to discover the truth of ourselves, others and the world through a loving companionship. As the 30th International Rimini Meeting for Friendship among Peoples winded down and came to a close, its attendees returned to their families, homes and work environments with the desire to continue and deepen the experience lived together during the days together in Rimini. We can live the experience of the Meeting in our respective circumstances and life situations if we remain faithful to the proposal and method of acknowledging and following the exceptional presences we stumble upon. And through them to seek out the full knowledge of ourselves, the friends and people we have been entrusted in our daily lives, and the mysterious world around us, and to remember that we can only do this work and mission together as a people. [Read the whole thing here]

And here's the program for this year's Meeting

2009-09-05T00:28:00.004-04:00

HOLY MASS

Celebrated by His Excellency Msgr. Francesco Lambiasi, Bishop of Rimini. Live on RAI 1.

TIEN AN MEN: CHINA TWENTY YEARS LATER

Participant: Harry Wu, Laogai Research Foundation Founder and Executive Director. Introduced by: John Waters, Columnist at The Irish Times.

WORK: AN OPPORTUNITY OR A CURSE?

In collaboration with Unioncamere. Participants: Simona Beretta, Professor of International Economical Politics at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan; Mara Carfagna, Italian Minister for Equal Opportunities; Ivan Guizzardi, General Secretary FeLSA CISL; Lorenza Violini, Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Milan and Director of the Department of Public Administration of the Foundation for Subsidiarity. Introduced by: Dario Odifreddi, Director of the Department for Work and Formation of the Foundation for Subsidiarity.

AFRICA: FORGOTTEN CONFLICTS

Participants: Carl Bildt, Foreign Minister of Sweden and current President of European Union; Franco Frattini, Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs; Mario Mauro, President of the Members of Parliament of the Popolo della Libertà Party at the European Parliament; Bernard Kamilius Membe, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Tanzania; Amama Mbabazi, Minister for Security of Uganda and NRM Secretary General; Raila Amollo Odinga, Prime Minister of the Republic of Kenya; Alhaji Abu Bakarr Sidique Sam- Sumana, Vice President of the Republic of Sierra Leone. Introduced by: Roberto Fontolan, Director of the international Center of Communion and Liberation. On this occasion greeting speech by Antonella Mularoni, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs of the Republic of San Marino.

A HAPPY LIFE FOR GOD AND THE KING. A DAILY ADVENTURE IN THE REDUCTIONS OF PARAGUAY

Presentation of the exhibition. Participants: Aldo Trento, Missionary and curator of the exhibition; Luis Federico Franco Gómez, Vice-President of the Republic of Paraguay; Darko Sustersic, Professor at the University of Buenos Aires. Introduced by Jesus Carrascosa, member of the Council of the Presidency of Communion and Liberation. During the encounter there will be a greeting by Liz Cramer, Minister of Tourism of Paraguay.

KNOWLEDGE AND EDUCTION

Time: 15:00

Participants: Andrew Davison, Lecturer of Christian Doctrine at the Faculty of Theology of Oxford University and Junior Chaplain at Merton College in Oxford; John Milbank, Professor in Religion, Politics and Ethics at the University of Nottingham; Adrain Pabst Lecturer in Politics and Religion at the University of Kent in Canterbury. Introduced by: Stefano Alberto, Professor of Introduction to Theology at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan.

GLOBAL CRISIS: ANSWERS FROM NON-PROFITS

Workshop, Non Profit magazine. In collaboration with Unioncamere. Participants: Salvo Andò, Rector of the Kore Free University of Enna; Giulio Boscagli, Lombardy Region Assessor for the Family and Social Solidarity; Giorgio Fiorentini, Director of the Masters in Management of Non-Profit Cooperatives and Non Profit Social Firms at the Bocconi University in Milan; Carlo Fratta Pasini, President Banco Popolare; Giorgio Vittadini, President of the Foundation for Subsidiarity. Introduced by: Damiano Zazzeron, Manager of the nonprofitonline.it portal and Gianfranco Fabi, Director of Radio 24.

KNOW IN ORDER TO COMMUNICATE

Time: 19:00

Participants: Alberto Contri, President Pubblicità Progresso; Gabriella Mangiarotti, Professor of the Sociology of Cultural Processes and Deputy Rector for the Orientation at Iulm University in Milan; Susan Pointer, Google Director of Public Policy and Government Relations for Europe, Middle East and Africa. Introduced by Roberto Arditti, Director of Il Tempo.

INVITATION TO READ

A Supernatural Work. My Life in Opus Dei
Presentation of the book by Pippo Corigliano(Ed. Mondadori). Participant: the Author, Spokesperson for Opus Dei.
Following:
WILLIAM CONGDON. The Adventure of a Gaze
Presentation of the book by Pigi Colognesi (Ed. San Paolo). Participant: the Author, journalist.
Following:
Right Now, 365 Days to be Lived with Gusto
Presentation of the book by Paolo Massobrio (Ed. Comunica). Participant: the Author, President of the Papillon Club.
Introduced by: Camillo Fornasieri, Director of the Cultural Center of Milan

INVITATION TO READ

The Crisis of the Gift
Presentation of the book by Claudio Risé. (Ed. San Paolo). Participant: the Author, psychoanalyst and writer.
Following:
The West: The Ineludible Encounter
Presentation of the book by Javier Prades López. (Ed. Cantagalli). Participant: the Author, Professor of Dogmatic Theology at the Theological Faculty San Damaso of Madrid; Vittorio Emanuele Parsi, Professor of International Relations at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan.
Introduced by: Camillo Fornasieri, Director of the Cultural Center of Milan.

STORIES FROM THE WORLD.

Review of international reportage, presented by Roberto Fontolan and Gian Micalessin. Guantanamo. An exceptional document. For the first time the television cameras inside the most famous and debated prison in the world. In collaboration with Sky. Production: National Geographic.

GUIDE TO LISTENING

Live – “Spirto Gentil” Series: CD 47
Paolo Forlani guitar and speaker: Villa-Lobos Works for Solo Guitar

Shows

MIGUEL MAÑARA

Time: 21:45 Admission by ticket only

Inaugural show based on Miguel Mañara by O. Milosz. Project and direction by Otello Cenci, with Gigio Alberti, Giovanni Battaglia, Matteo Bonanni, Teodoro Bonci del Bene, Stefano Braschi, Ruggero Dondi, Giovanni Franzoni, Alberto Mancioppi, Alice Torriani. Original music by Roberto Andreoni and Marina Valmaggi, pictorial work by Franco Vignazia.

Sport

XVI TOUR OF THE MALATESTIAN CASTLES AND THE REPUBLIC OF SAN MARINO

Time: 07:00 Partenza da Rimini Fiera

Mario Vicini Long-distance Bicycle Race and Middle- Distance Touristic Cycling Tour
16th Italian Championship UDACE. 5th Italian Championship among bank workers B.C.C. World Cup 2009. Romagna Challenge.
Organized by: Meeting di Rimini, A.S.D. Team C.B.R.-Cicli Vicini e CRAL Banca Malatestiana,
in collaboration with M.S.P. San Marino e Centro Sociale S. Andrea (RSM). Iscrizioni:www.teamcbr.it.

GIOCO DEL LOTTO – SPORT VILLAGE

Time: 11:00

This is a pavilion dedicated to sports, supported by CSI and CdO Sport.
Many activities, exhibitions and introduction to various sports: FIVE-A-SIDE FOOTBALL, VOLLEYBALL, BASKETBALL, TABLE FOOTBALL, CLIMBING, as well as a SPACE FOR CHILDREN TO PLAY AND TRY NEW SPORTS, providing children with an area for free play as well as organized matches and tournaments.

LEARNING THE RULES OF THE ROAD.
Organized by Fondazione ANIA per la Sicurezza Stradale (the ANIA Foundation for Road Safety). Young people can learn from qualified instructors the primary notions of road safety.

HOCKEY IN LINE
Shows and tests of inline skates. With Hockey in line Progetto Romagna-Riccione

BADMINTON

Time: 16:45

Everyone is welcome to come and try this sport. In collaboration with Federazione Italiana Badminton. Activity promoted by CdO Sport.

List of Exhibitions at Rimini this year

2009-09-04T18:49:00.000-04:00

From Constantine to Saint Paul. The birth of the Christian basilica

23 August 2009 - 29 August 2009
Pad. A3

The adventure of knowledge in Masaccio, Beato Angelico and Piero della Francesca

23 August 2009 - 29 August 2009
Pad. A5

Nothing gets lost. The experience of Pavel Florenskij

23 August 2009 - 29 August 2009
Pad. C5

Things never seen before. Galileo, the struggle and wonder of a new gaze on the universe

23 August 2009 - 29 August 2009
Pad. A3

Vocare. María Zambrano, a vocation to knowledge

23 August 2009 - 29 August 2009
Pad. B5

A happy life for God and the King. A daily adventure in the reductions of Paraguay

23 August 2009 - 29 August 2009
Pad. C5

Naples. You don’t need any other gift from Grace

23 August 2009 - 29 August 2009
Pad. B5

Saint Augustine. You can know only what you love

23 August 2009 - 29 August 2009
Pad. A5

Why I think an American Meeting will be tough...

2009-09-01T10:20:00.003-04:00

...40,000 volunteers. FORTY thousand of them.

A brochure for the Chicago Humanities festival recently arrived in our mail box. When we lived in Chicago, we enjoyed going to many of the presentations and concerts -- my good friend Margaret organized most of the events, and she was able to get us free tickets to some things -- for the kids' events, sometimes they needed kids to introduce the speakers, and she invited mine for the job. But Margaret organized these events because she was paid to do it -- it was her job. Then her job ended, and someone else was hired to do the same tasks she did. And now, leafing through the brochure this year, I can't help but notice that each and every event has an admission price -- even to hear professors speak about their academic work. So, my question is, how on earth could we possibly get enough volunteers together in this country?

Here is what Joseph Weiler says about the organization of the Meeting:

It is beautifully organized from beginning to end! That wonderful organization is because of the volunteers who for weeks and months suppress their ego and work for something that is not about themselves or their immediate gratification. This in large part produces the organizational marvel which is, too, the Meeting (Il Sussidiario)

Even if we start small, 40,000 volunteers for one week means roughly 6,700 per day? But forget the numbers -- where are we going to find Americans who will "suppress" their egos?

"A higher form of respect."

2009-09-01T09:58:00.003-04:00

Joseph H. H. Weiler, professor of Law at New York University

WEILER/ In Celebration of the 30th Anniversary of the Rimini Meeting in Italy

The Meeting is not a “place”, an “event” – it is an “Experience” unlike any I have had, and I assure those of your readers who have not attended, unlike any you are likely to have had either. Any person of culture should make a point of attending the Meeting – at least once.

What is the secret of its success? After all, 700,000 visitors in one week, repeated year after year – and many, many of them not particularly religious persons – must have some reason to go, and clearly only a small fraction of them are Members or adherents of CL.

When I was invited the first time in 2003, and I knew it was going to be interesting because many of my Italian friends said to me, “How could you accept to go to that “Meeting?” organized by those people. And then, in the same breath they said, “How does one get invited?”... [read the rest here]

- From Il Sussidiario

Supreme Knight at the Meeting in Rimini

2009-08-31T23:17:00.002-04:00

Carl Anderson's Address at Rimini Meeting

"Work to Better the Moral Compass of Business"

RIMINI, Italy, AUG. 31, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Here is the address Carl A. Anderson, supreme knight of the Knights of Columbus, gave last week at the Meeting of Friendship Among Peoples held in Rimini, Italy.

* * *

Two years ago, Pope Benedict invited us to live out hope "with works of charity, because hope, like faith, is demonstrated in love."

That love of neighbor, which expresses both faith and hope, is the story of the Knights of Columbus.

When the Venerable Servant of God Father Michael McGivney founded the Knights of Columbus in 1882, he did so as a pastor, concerned about the welfare of the most marginalized.

Widows and orphans in 19th century America didn't have much of a social safety net. If a breadwinner died, his wife and children faced a life of poverty, and the likely dissolution of the family, as children would be divided up among relatives able to support them, or worse, would be sent to state institutions for the indigent... [read the rest here]

- Found on Zenit

"...Expert in love, expert in humanity."

2009-08-31T23:09:00.004-04:00

Alessandro Meluzzi

Found on Zenit:

Book Links Mystery of Cross, Freedom, Love

Psychiatrist Explains How God is Found in Sacrifice

By Mirko Testa

RIMINI, Italy, AUG. 31, 2009 (Zenit.org).- A new book by Alessandro Meluzzi illustrates how man encounters both God and himself in the dimensions of gift and sacrifice, which are incarnated in the cross.

This book, titled "Abbracciare la Croce: Dolore, libertà e tenerezza in Dio" [Embracing the Cross: Suffering, Freedom and Tenderness in God], was presented last week at the 30th Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples, sponsored by the Catholic lay Communion and Liberation movement. [the rest here (You'll have to read the rest in order to understand the title)]

“That nature which pushes us to desire great things is the heart”

2009-08-31T23:03:00.002-04:00

That's the theme of next year's Meeting in Rimini! Read the press release here.

The internet is an enabler

2009-08-31T16:03:00.003-04:00

From Il Sussidiario:

GOOGLE/ Susan Pointer: Knowledge is in the Google DNA

Susan Pointer is Director of Public Policy & Government Relations at Google and in this interview shares with ilsussidiario.net her impressions on the Meeting of Rimini and its theme “ Knowledge is always an event”.

What in the Meeting and in its theme – “ Knowledge is always an event”- impressed you more?

What struck me immediately I walked into the venue was the energy in the conference centre - the energy from a very large and mixed group of people all coming together in one place to meet and exchange opinions and ideas.... [read the rest here]

Fr. Carron's beloved Maria Zambrano

2009-08-30T23:29:00.002-04:00

From Zenit:

Philosophy and Poetry Meet to Contemplate Reality

Rimini Meeting Reflects on Maria Zambrano's Works

RIMINI, Italy, AUG. 28, 2009 (Zenit.org).- There were long lines of people at the entrance of the exhibition "Vocare -- Maria Zambrano, A Vocation to Knowledge," and a very crowded hall at its opening.

At the Rimini Meeting of Communion and Liberation, great interest was shown in Spaniard Maria Zambrano (1904-1991), a thinker considered in some circles on par with the her 20th-century contemporaries such as Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil and Edith Stein.

Pupil of philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, though shunning Marxism, she lived for a long time in exile from her native Spain (in Italy from 1954 to 1964) because of her opposition to the Franco regime. Returning to Spain in 1984, she won the prestigious Cervantes Award in 1988.

Innumerable are her works translated into Italian, among which is "For Love and Liberty" ("Per l'Amore e per la Liberta"), Marietti publishers, 2008.

In opening the exhibition at the Rimini Meeting on Wednesday, its creator Carmen Giussani said that "ideas do not meet, people meet" and "the exhibition has a most beautiful biographical section that enables one to know Maria Zambrano."

Giussani placed Zambrano's long life in the context of the drama of the 20th century, which also touched Spain and Europe.

The creator of the exhibition recounted that exile from Franco's Spain marked Zambrano's life intensely, specifying that her philosophy openly distanced itself from Communist Marxist thought.

Realism

In the introduction to the essay published by the Florentine Publishing Society, which runs through the exhibition, Giussani says that Zambrano supported a philosophical and artistic current known as Spanish realism, which did not simply copy reality, but rather showed an admiration for the world "without pretending to reduced it to nothing." The current expressed "being in love with the world."

Giussani also pointed out how in her works Zambrano criticized "the arrogance of modern reason, which pretends to define the real within its own limits."

"The novel and poetry are without a doubt ways of knowledge in which thought is diffused, sparse, wide, in which knowledge on essential, ultimate questions flows without being clothed in any authority, without being dogmatized," wrote Zambrano.

Maria Regina Brioschi, creator and curator of the exhibition -- together with Giussani --, which opened at the 2008 Madrid Meeting in April of that year, said that Zambrano "criticized Western philosophy that, beginning with Descartes, has ended by reducing reason to self-affirmation."

"In such a position, reason runs two risks," she added, "that of arrogance and of humiliation, which together lead to despair. This is the confusion in which 20th century man finds himself."

Father Carron on St. Paul/ At the Meeting

2009-08-30T23:24:00.001-04:00

Priest Urges Participation in Christ

Communion and Liberation President Speaks to Rimini Crowds

RIMINI, Italy, AUG. 28, 2009 (Zenit.org).- St. Paul shows us that a real experience of Christ is needed, beyond mere knowledge, for true conversion, said the president of the lay movement, Communion and Liberation.

Father Julián Carrón affirmed this Tuesday to an audience of 20,000 gathered in Rimini for the 30th Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples sponsored by the movement.

The conference, which started Sunday and will run through Saturday, is centered around the theme: "Knowledge Is Always an Event."

Father Carrón's conference on "Event and Knowledge in St. Paul" recalled the life of Saul of Tarsus before his conversion, the change effected in him by his encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus, and how this encounter transformed his way of relating to reality.

The priest affirmed that for Paul "in the experience of the encounter with the Risen One, the reality of Christ becomes transparent."

He added, "In no other moment of his life were Paul's reason and freedom challenged as they were by this event."

"St. Paul's experience reveals the condition to know Christ: participation in the event which is made present in human experience," Father Carrón explained.

In this sense, he continued, Paul's case "is proof that knowledge is always an event."

Beyond reason

The priest added, "His encounter with Christ dilates his reason, called to recognize the novelty before it, as occurred with the disciples."

The movement's president stated: "Christian event and reason are not in opposition in knowledge.

"On the contrary, the Christian event frees reason from the limits to which it is normally conformed, restores its more specific dynamism: to be open to understanding the totality of reality in its radical novelty, as presence of God among men.

"The Christian event leads reason freely beyond what it could attain with its own strength."

He explained that the Apostle to the Gentiles invites us to submit reason to the lived experience so that reason will not become the criterion of judgment without experience.

The priest stated that "Paul's case is paradigmatic for any moment of history as for him, and for all men, the event of Christ remains contemporary in the life of the Church, in their historical and cultural circumstances, enabling them to live the same experience that consists in having the certainty of what is proclaimed."

Father Carrón concluded, "The only way to grow in knowledge of Christ is to accept now the participation in the event of Christ, in the power of his resurrection and in communion with his sufferings."

The priest's audience included Cardinal Antonio María Rouco Varela, archbishop of Madrid, Bishop Alfonso Carrasco Rouco of Lugo, Spain, Bishop Jesús Sanz Montes of Jaca, Spain, and several Italian government ministers.

- Published in Zenit, here

"...this is the real Blair speaking."

2009-08-30T22:00:00.003-04:00

Commentary on the Meeting in Rimini, published in Il.Sussidiario.net

WATERS/ Blair: A Passion that Cannot be Exhausted
by John Waters

At one point in Tony Blair’s speech, when he was talking about his commitment to faith as the salvation of the human condition, the woman beside me whispered: “Vittadini wrote this!” I shook my head and pointed insistently towards Tony Blair. No, I told her, this is the real Blair speaking. She shook her head, reassured but still incredulous... [read the rest here]

Harvard's Dr. Edward Green at the Meeting in Rimini...

2009-08-30T20:35:00.002-04:00

Dr. Edward Green speaking at the Meeting in Rimini, photo by Sharon Mollerus

Scientist: Pope Was Right About AIDS

Says Abstinence, Fidelity More Effective than Condoms

RIMINI, Italy, AUG. 27, 2009 (Zenit.org).- The director of Harvard's AIDS Prevention Research Project is affirming that Benedict XVI's position was right in the debate on AIDS and condoms.

Edward Green stated this in an address at the 30th annual Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples in Rimini, sponsored by the lay movement, Communion and Liberation.

Green, an expert on AIDS prevention, said that "as a scientist he was amazed to see the closeness between what the Pope said last March in Cameroon and the results of the most recent scientific discoveries." [read the rest here]

And Sr. Edith Bogue, OSB reported in Monastic Musings Too:

In his Washington Post article, Green also commented on the straight-jacket that he and other HIV/AIDS researchers face when they question the efficacy of condom-oriented AIDS programs – which have become an ideology as much as a policy. He said,

“We liberals who work in the fields of global HIV/AIDS and family planning take terrible professional risks if we side with the pope on a divisive topic such as this. The condom has become a symbol of freedom and — along with contraception — female emancipation, so those who question condom orthodoxy are accused of being against these causes.”

Tony Blair: "It is a privilege to address the famous Rimini Meeting".

2009-08-30T20:22:00.003-04:00

Tony Blair is the former Prime Minister of Britain

MEETING OF RIMINI/ The full text of the speech by Rt Hon Tony Blair

It is a privilege to address the famous Rimini Meeting. It is an honour to be associated with “Comunione e Liberazione.” It is a pleasure always to be in Italy. It is here in this country that I have spent many happy times; and where 30 years ago, almost to the day, I proposed to my wife and three decades and four children later, I at least am still pleased to recall the memory.

I am also, as you know, a very new entrant to the Catholic Church. I am therefore humble about addressing such an august gathering of so many eminent people. But I thank you for making me so welcome. Ever since I began preparations to become a Catholic I felt I was coming home; and this is now where my heart is, where I know I belong...

[read the rest here]

My friend Scott writes...

2009-08-30T20:19:00.001-04:00

...over on his blog, Καθολικός διάκονος :

What happens when language prevails over reality

Oscar Giannino's response to the challenge that his approach to life was too philosophical, helped me arrive at a judgment regarding my recent re-reading of some of Samuel Beckett's works, particularly when he said that "the prevalence of language over reality, condemns culture to being merely a descriptive shelf on which the prevalence of Non-being drowns, rather than the instrument for continuous transformation based on the person who wants Being."

With these words Giannino described well my repulsive attraction to Beckett. It is my thanatos urge to wallow in contingency with no reference to transcendence. At least it consists of dismissing my desire, as in the case of Godot, seeing my longing as pointless and absurd, a distraction from really living. I think this is where Camus stands out, he takes transcendence seriously and does not dismiss it as fantasy, he wrestles with meaning... [read the rest here]

An American in Rimini

2009-08-27T12:48:00.005-04:00

"[...] But if there was a less political, more cultural response–one that saw itself as intellectual but not esoteric, religious but not parochial, maybe an American version of the Meeting would be possible. It’s hard to imagine today, but there is no question that America would be a richer, more vibrant and more decent place as a result."

Peter Beinart in Traces Magazine, October 2000

* * *

Here is a small taste taken from the meeting:

Marco Bersonelli, moderator of the panel discussion, "Science: The Human Experience of Discovery," just one of many, many interesting presentations, discussions, talks, musical performances and art displays on offer this year at the (free) Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples, held annually for thirty years and offered by the Movement of Communion and Liberation. Here is an excerpt for the press release for "Science: The Human Experience of Discovery":

The encounter of the 26th at 5pm in the Auditorium B7 is an exceptional occasion. The speakers that discuss about the topic of knowledge in the field of science, are two Nobel prizes for physics, the 2006 John Mather, senior astrophysicist at the observational Cosmology Laboratory of Nasa's goddard Space Flight center, and the 1964 Nobel Charles Townes, professor at the Sapce Science laboratory of the University of California Berkeley, and also the great paleoanthropologist Yves Coppens, professor emeritus at the Collège de France.

“We are not here to speak abstractly – the moderator Marco Bersanelli, professor of astrophysics enters immediately into the topic – instead we want to see from inside which kind of size of reason a scientific discovery requires and we want to discover it through the testimony of who lives it personally”. “What is the contents of your discoveries – Bersanelli asks to the three scientists – what happened and which factors have let you to make them?”.

Coppens, the discoverer of Lucy, the famous skeleton of hominid found in Ethiopia in the 1974, tells his experience: “The discovery of Lucy has came through a long series of events, or better, an event in series”. That is his narration of the founding of the first bones, day after day, until the unexpected discovery. “After that we have found 52 bones we have thought that, for the first time, they could belong to the same skeleton, an hominid lived 3,2 millions of years ago. Then – Coppens continues – the founding of the emibasin, that has made us to hypothesize that it was a girl, the study of the weigh, of articulations and of her plausible behaviors. From an event to another everyday we have discovered something new” [...] Read the rest here: Science the Human Experience of Discovery

"the price American Catholicism had paid..."

2009-08-26T22:53:00.006-04:00

Mary Ann Glendon at the Meeting in Rimini, photo by Sharon Mollerus

MEETING in RIMINI/ A formula for America

Lorenzo Albacete

mercoledì 26 agosto 2009

I first heard about the Meeting in Rimini from Sister Carol Keehan, who was at that time (around 1994) president of Providence Hospital in Washington, DC. I had suggested her name to the Meeting authorities as an expert in non-profit institutions and she was consequently invited to make a presentation at the Meeting. It was shortly after Msgr. Giussani had asked me whether I would help him in his efforts to “firmly plant Communion and Liberation on the American soil.” Upon her return she told me that she had never seen anything like it in the United States, and in fact wondered whether there could ever be an “American Meeting” but that we should try to make it possible some day.

Sister Carol never told me why she thought it would be so difficult to have something like the Meeting in America. She just said that she found it difficult to find the words to describe her own experience.

On the following year I attended the Meeting for the first time. It seemed to me that the difficulty for a similar encounter in the United States was actually the price American Catholicism had paid to be accepted as compatible with American culture, especially its view of religious liberty. In order to be accepted as part of the American religious landscape, the Catholic Church had obscured that which distinguished Catholicism as totally different from other religious traditions. Before something like an “American Meeting” could take place, it would be necessary to educate American Catholics to understand the relation between faith, reason, and experience that had given birth to the meeting in Rimini.

On August 25, 2000 I invited two prominent American liberals to participate in the Meeting in an “Encounter with American Liberalism.” The two were Peter Beinart, at the time the editor of The New Republic, America’s most respected magazine of American liberal thought, and university professor Peter Berkowitz who was working on a book on Christianity and American liberalism. Both Beinart and Berkowitz are Jews. Beinart accepted the invitation to describe their experience at the Meeting in an article for Traces in which he explained why he thought it was difficult to imagine an “American Meeting.”

According to Beinart, the Meeting had three dimensions that in America were in fact experienced as incompatible. The Rimini Meeting was like a meeting of the “Christian Coalition,:” whose approach to faith and culture was defined by evangelical Protestantism. Rimini was also an uncompromising expression of Christian faith, but unlike evangelical Protestantism, this was not a defensive faith, but one apparently not afraid to be open to all authentic human experiences. As Berkowitz had told me, this was a Christianity not seen in America.

So much was this the case that the Meeting at times seemed like a meeting in America of The Modern Language Association, an organization diametrically opposed to any expression of faith. Like the Rimini Meeting, he said, this Association is known for its insistence on intellectual seriousness, so much so that Americans liberals outside the academic establishment often found it difficult to understand what they were talking about at their meetings!

Finally, Beinart wrote, the Rimini Meeting reminded him of the Epcot Center at Disney World in Orlando, Florida, featuring exhibits about all the countries of the world and the inventions of the future. Rimini was like Epcot in that it also was a “mass event” not associated with any side of the culture war.

The path to an American Rimini requires a method that will eliminate the incompatibility between these three dimensions: faith, intellectual rigor, and an orientation towards a truly human future. If this happens, he said, an American Meeting would make America a “richer, more vibrant, and more decent place as a result.”

Nine years later this has been happening in the United States, especially through the experience of our Crossroad cultural centers. This year in Rimini the presentation on America might well be called “An Encounter with American Conservatism.” If the participants have the same experience as the American Liberals, the “Rimini method” would have begun to bear fruit in the United States.

From Il Sussidiario

Something more about our Pope and the Rimini Meeting...

2009-08-24T18:41:00.004-04:00

Inside the auditorium

Pontiff Sends Message to Rimini Meeting

30th Year for Communion and Liberation Event

RIMINI, Italy, AUG. 23, 2009 - Benedict XVI has sent a message to the 30th Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples, alluding to the theme of the gathering by affirming that an encounter with Christ is an "event" that creates communion.

The papal message, sent by the Pope's secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, was read at today's opening Mass of the week-long conference, sponsored by the Catholic lay Communion and Liberation movement. Some 700,000 people are attending, reflecting on the spiritual heritage left by the movement's founder, Monsignor Luigi Giussani.

This year's theme is "Knowledge Is Always an Event." The papal message echoed that idea, recalling that "'event' is a word with which Don Giussani tried to re-explain the very nature of Christianity, which for him is an 'encounter,' that is, an experiential fact of knowledge and communion."

The Pontiff relates the words "event" and "encounter" to explain how knowledge is gained, and particularly, knowledge of God.

"It can be asked if there is knowledge more necessary for man that that of the knowledge of his Creator; if there is a knowledge described more adequately by the word 'encounter' than that of the fundamental relationship that exists precisely between the spirit of man and the Spirit of God," he wrote.

The fathers of the Church, the papal message continues, insisted "on the need to purify the eyes of the soul to be able to see God, inspired in the Gospel Beatitude: 'Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God.'"

"Man's reason can only be exercised, and thus reach its true goal -- knowledge of the truth and of God -- thanks to a purified heart that sincerely loves the truth it seeks," the note added. "Purified in this way, the human spirit can open itself to the revelation of the truth."

Through his message, Benedict XVI called participants in the Rimini Meeting to "go with confidence to the Lord, welcoming his mysterious presence, which is the fountain of truth and love for man and for society."

According to its organizers, the Rimini meeting seeks to "create points of contact between experiences and people of different faiths and cultures who share a positive desire for knowledge and reciprocal enhancement."

Among the speakers this year are Tony Blair, former British prime minister; Jeb Bush, former Florida governor; Cardinal Antonio María Rouco Varela, archbishop of Madrid and president of the Spanish episcopal conference; John Milbank, writer and professor from the University of Nottingham; and Carl Anderson, supreme knight of the Knights of Columbus.

(From Zenit)