Brand new.
The 1980 conversation now turned into a book, The Meaning of Birth, is due out on December 7, and available for pre-order from Slant Books.
The reviewers of the book which can be read from the link above will draw you into reading not only for information but with regard for human and spiritual formation.
Those who are familiar with Bill Congdon’s artwork will note that the cover bears his piece on the Incarnation.
Thanks to Greg Wolfe!
Some of you may have seen this 2021 New Encounter presentation on the Servant of God Father Luigi Giussani. The staff of the NYE are making it available to us now.
“The plan of God is absolutely beyond us, always; it cannot be narrowed or imprisoned within the limits of our imagination. But one who is always willing to change everything according to what God wants–and mark these words, what God wants through the circumstances, because, for Our Lady, three minutes, a minute before, it wasn’t even imaginable that the Annunciation could happen–circumstances, especially those that vex us the most, that are inevitable circumstances, these are precisely the ones that mark the road of God; the person who is open to this is not attached to anything of his own, and he’s free. So the first consequence is that he is attentive, extremely attentive to the needs of others. In fact, as soon as the Angel left, Our Lady decided right away, a girl of fourteen or fifteen years, to travel that very long journey–one that when you go to Palestine you usually do by bus or by car–of over 60 miles in the midst of that stony land, to go visit her cousin Elizabeth, because the Angel had told her that she was six months along with the child in her womb. The first thing she did was to share the need and the toil of her cousin Elizabeth, at very great sacrifice. When are you free? You’re free when you’re willing to do what God wants. Before the Infinite, only before the Infinite is man free, detached from himself. When you’re like this, you’re immediately ready to feel and meet the needs of others. What a lesson for us! These are the first characteristics of a man who lives life as a pilgrimage.”
Luigi Giussani, from “Mary: Faith and Faithfulness”
Regis Martin wrote a superb article on Father Luigi Giussani for Crisis Magazine today (13 Feb 2014) in “Recalling Luigi Giussani’s Passion for Christ.” Martin certainly captured not only the essence of Giussani, but the entire life of the ecclesial movement of Communion and Liberation and the work of conversion to Christ Jesus.
To note, Father Luigi Giussani is being considered for sainthood by the Catholic Church, and thus bears the title title of Servant of God at stage of the process. Giussani died on 22 February 2005, with a funeral Mass offered and preached by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.
Dr. Martin is a Professor of Theology and Faculty Associate with the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. Among his academic interests is the thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar. He was educated by the Dominican friars at Rome’s Angelicum and has authored several books and articles. His recent book is Still Point: Loss, Longing, and Our Search for God (Ave Maria Press, 2012). Martin is a very well-regarded as a Catholic lay theologian.
Ubisi Monastery. Ascension of Jesus detail
The Ascension is the feast of the human. With Jesus, physical, carnal humanity enters into the total dominion with which God makes all things. It is Christ who goes to the root of everything. It is the feast of the miracle, an event which by its strength recalls the mystery of God.
This is why the Ascension is the feast where all of Mystery gathers together and where all of the evidence of things is gathered together. It is an extraordinary and very strange feast, where all the faces of all things meet to cry out to unaware, inattentive, obscure, and unseeing man the light of which they are made, to give him back the meaning by which he entered into relationship with everything, to shout out to him the task he has in things, his role among things. Everything depends on him; all things were made for man.
Whoever tries to render witness to the Lord with his life is already part of the mystery of His Ascension, because Christ who ascended into heaven is Man for whom everything is made, Man who has begun to take possession of the things of the world.
Father Luigi Giussani
The Holy Rosary
Pope Francis commenting on Monsignor Giussani:
“When people say to Fr. Giussani, “How brave one has to be to say ‘Yes’ to Christ!” or, “This objection comes to my mind: it is evident that Fr. Giussani loves Jesus and I don’t love Him in the same way,” Giussani answers, “Why do you oppose what you think you don’t have to what you think I have? I have this yes, only this, and it would not cost you one iota more than it costs me…. Say “Yes” to Jesus. If I foresaw that tomorrow I would offend Him a thousand times, I would still say it.” Thérèse of Lisieux says almost exactly the same thing: “I say it, because if I did not say ‘Yes’ to Jesus I could not say ‘Yes’ to the stars in the sky or to your hair, the hairs on your head…” Nothing could be simpler: “I don’t know how it is, I don’t know how it might be: I know that I have to say ‘Yes.’ I can’t not say it,” and reasonably; that is to say, at every moment in his reflections in this book, Giussani has recourse to the reasonableness of experience.”
Today is the 8th anniversary of the death of Father Luigi Giussani. A perfect day, the feast of the Chair of Saint Peter. Perfect because of Giussani’s and our total affection for and following of the magisterium of the Vicar of Christ. Giussani taught us to follow Jesus, and his ministers.
The President of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation,
Father Carrón’s, said the following in tribute to Carlo Maria Cardinal Martini in a September 4th editorial in Corriere della Sera:
“And like Archbishop Montini, who initially confessed that he did not understand
Fr. Giussani’s method, though he did see its fruits, Cardinal Martini also
encouraged us to go forward. I am still moved by the words that he addressed to
Fr. Giussani in 1995, during a meeting of priests, when he thanked ‘the Lord,
who gave Msgr. Giussani this gift for continually re-expressing the core of
Christianity. ‘Every time that you talk, you always return to this core, which
is the Incarnation, and – in a thousand different ways – you propose it again.'”
The full text of the editorial: Julian Carron Letter on Carlo Martini’s death.pdf
This text is a brief, honest and yet key reflection not only on the life and influence of Cardinal Martini, perhaps an excellent synthesis of Christian life and how it is extroverted in a human being. There are some very tiresome reviews of who the Cardinal was, and what he meant to the Church too often in political language. To my mind those authors who evaluate a man such as Martini in this manner does not abide with the Gospel and faith.
The letter of Father Carrón acknowledges the fact that Communion and Liberation has significantly neglected the various opportunities of collaboration with Cardinal Martini that presented themselves over the years. This admission to members of CL should help all of us to reassess how we live and breathe in our given ecclesial context. This is a serious point that we can’t pass off to circumstance. That is to say, we who claim to be faithful members of CL need to work more diligently with the Diocesan Ordinary “in giving reasons for our hope” in concrete ways so that we are witnesses as the Servant of God Pope Paul VI said (cf. the letter).
We continually need to get to the heart of who our influences are as people. That is true of Father Luigi Giussani who is being spoken of not only as the founder of the ecclesial movement of Communion and Liberation but also because his cause for canonization is now being studied. Father Ignacio Carbajosa Pérez, 45, said of Father Luigi
Giussani, “For me the most striking thing was to hear this man with this love
for my humanity, finally, to find someone who knew very well what is my
humanity and then looked upon it in a sympathetic way.” (Read more of what Father Ignacio told David Kerr here at The Rimini Meeting 2012.)
This love affair with Christ, this love story which is the whole of Monsignor Giussani’s life was however far from every superficial enthusiasm, from every vague romanticism. Really seeing Christ, he knew that to encounter Christ means to follow Christ. This encounter is a road, a journey, a journey that passes also–as we heard in the psalm–through the “valley of darkness.”
Pope Benedict XVI
