Julián Carrón – Communio

Julián Carrón writes to US Communion and Liberation on the transitus of Lorenzo Albacete

Monsignor Albacete’s life is fulfilled today in front of the merciful Presence of the Mystery who makes all things, and it blossoms in the gladness that we always saw in him.

The encounter with Father Giussani struck his life so deeply that he asked to serve the Movement in the United States, becoming Father Giussani’s witness on the dramatic front where faith engages with a modernity in search of meaning. He sought this encounter with anyone, challenging the American intelligentsia with the sole weapon of his witness, as a man who had been seized and transformed by Christ in his reason and in his freedom.

Therefore, Pope Francis’ words from Evangelii Gaudium are befitting our dearest Lorenzo: “Christians have the duty to proclaim the Gospel without excluding anyone, not as one who imposes a new obligation, but rather as one who shares a joy, points out a beautiful horizon, offers a desirable banquet. The Church does not grow by proselytism but ‘by attraction.’” He was undoubtedly so captivating that he immediately became friends with anyone he met, because he was showing the beauty and usefulness of faith for facing life’s needs.

With his tireless work, he witnessed to us how faith can become “intelligence of reality,” with his ability to recognize and embrace anyone without ambiguity, but for love of the truth that is present in every person. With his suffering, he has reminded us that there is no circumstance, not even the most difficult and toilsome, that can prevent the “I” from having a daily dialogue with the Mystery.

Let us ask Father Giussani, who now meets Monsignor again as an everlasting friend, to obtain for him that peace that is the sign of a life that rests in the eternal. Let us also pray to the Virgin Mary, to whom Monsignor Albacete attributed his encounter with Father Giussani, to carry him toward sharing in the smile of the Eternal.

Let us all pray together and personally that we may strive to live like he witnessed, so that we can inherit his legacy of how to follow the Movement within the Church.

Julián Carrón
Milan, October 24, 2014

“Press on to Make Him my Own”

This evening, members of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation will embark on the annual journey of making the Spiritual Exercises given by the President of Communion and Liberation, Father Julián Carrón. His theme is taken from Saint Paul, “Press on to make Him my own.”

At this link, here is the introduction to the Exercises is given (in various languages).

Prayers are requested for the more than 140 people making the Exercises together, pressing on to make Jesus Christ our own.

Julián Carrón speaks of Pope Francis

Milan, October 16, 2013

Dear friends,

On Friday, October 11th, I had the grace of being received in a private audience by Pope Francis. I experienced in person what we have been seeing for months, every time that he appears in public—the extreme familiarity of his entering into a relationship with the individual, even in the midst of enormous crowds.

Thus I was able to tell him about the journey that we have made in the years since Fr. Giussani’s passing. I emphasized that all of our effort was and is in function of the personalization of faith, as the only condition for being able to live, in daily reality, that newness of life that fascinated us.

At these words, the Pope went immediately to that which constitutes his fundamental concern—that every man, no matter the situation in which he finds himself, can be reached by the Christian announcement, by the mercy and the tenderness of Christ. For this reason, he insisted on the need for witness, that is, the necessity to go to meet the others—in the face of the temptation to close ourselves in defensive positions, incapable of responding to the urgency of the transmission of faith—observing that it will not be the mere “restoration” of past forms that will render Christianity present for the man of today.

I was amazed to read this week, in the Pope’s speech to the Plenary of the Pontifical Council for Promoting New Evangelization, some of the concerns that had emerged in our dialogue, and I would like to share them with you.

1) First of all, Pope Francis reminds everyone of the fact that “new evangelization” means “to reawaken the life of faith in the hearts and minds of our contemporaries. Faith is a gift from God, but it’s important that we Christians show that we live faith in a concrete way, through love, harmony, joy, suffering, because this raises questions, just as it did at the beginning of the Church’s journey: Why do they live like this? What drives them? These are questions that go to the heart of evangelization, which is the witness of faith and charity. What we need, especially now, are credible witnesses who make the Gospel visible with their lives, and also with their words, who reawaken the attraction for Jesus Christ, for the beauty of God… We need Christians who make God’s mercy, His tenderness for every creature, visible to the men of today.”

2) Thus he went on to the second aspect: “The encounter, going to meet the others. New evangelization is a renewed movement toward those who have lost faith and the profound meaning of life. This dynamism is part of Christ’s great mission to bring life into the world, to bring the Father’s love to humanity. The Son of God ‘left’ His divine condition and came to meet us. The Church is within this movement; every Christian is called to go to meet the others, to dialogue with those who have different beliefs, with those who have another faith, or who have no faith. To meet everyone, because we all have in common that we were created in the image and likeness of God. We can go to meet everyone, without fear and without giving up our belonging.”

3) Finally, he invited us to recognize that “all of this, however, is not left to chance or improvisation in the Church. It requires a common commitment to a pastoral project that recalls the essential and that is well centered on the essential, that is, on Jesus Christ. It’s of no use to get lost in many secondary or superfluous things; we must concentrate on the fundamental reality, which is the encounter with Christ, with His mercy and His love, and love our brothers and sisters as He loved us.” This “pushes us to travel new paths, with courage, without becoming fossilized! We could ask ourselves: How is the pastoral life in our dioceses and parishes? Does it make visible the essential, that is, Jesus Christ?”

I ask you to embrace Pope Francis’ question as directed at us—particularly at us, who were born only for this, as all of Fr. Giussani’s life witnesses. Does each of us, each community of our Movement, “make visible the essential, that is, Jesus Christ?”

Pope Francis confided to me that he met the Movement in Buenos Aires at the beginning of the 1990s, and that this discovery was “fresh air” for him. And this brought him to read Fr. Giussani’s texts often, because what he found in Giussani was helpful to his Christian life. Imagine how moved I was to hear these things from the man who today is the Bishop of Rome!

The Pope encourages us to live the nature of our charism personally, in the communion among ourselves, because a movement like ours is called to respond to the needs of this moment in the life of the Church and of the world.

From the closeness and familiarity of Pope Francis comes, for me and for all of us, friends, a new responsibility before God and the Church.

After having furnished the Pope with some facts about our reality—for example, regarding our presence in universities, schools, and various environments of life and work; our many attempts to respond to the needs that we intercept with gestures of charity; and the grace of the vocations to both the priesthood and consecrated life in its various forms—we took leave of each other, but not before he asked me to pray for him.

Obviously, this invitation was directed at me and at all of the Movement. For this reason, I ask you to take his request seriously, in offering and in prayer for Pope Francis every day, that God continue to give him the grace necessary to guide His Church.

And for each of us, let’s ask the Lord for the simplicity to surrender constantly to His voice, which has reached us through the unique accent of our dearest Fr. Giussani, and which continues to call us with the intensity of Pope Francis.

Full of affection, I embrace each one of you.

Fr. Julián Carrón

Father Julián Carrón: Pope Francis has an “awareness of his ministry as Bishop in communion

Father Julián Carrón wrote to members of CL on the election of Pope Francis as the Bishop of Rome.

Within the irrepressible joy of having a new guide for our community of believers, I am struck by how he managed to communicate to us, from his very first movements, with simple gestures comprehensible to everyone, where his gaze is fixed. With his choice of name, Francis, he shows us that he has no other wealth but Christ. He trusts no modality of communicating this if not plain and simple witness to Christ.

Pope Francis’s disarming request expressed the awareness that this witness is pure grace and that we must beg for it: “I ask you to pray to the Lord that He will bless me.” In the Pope’s prayer, together with the crowd in St. Peter’s Square, the miracle of the life that is the Church–whose heart is Christ Himself–took shape before the eyes of the world.

I am struck by the profound harmony, founded on faith in Jesus Christ, between the realism of Benedict XVI, who with his gesture reminded the world that the Church is Christ’s, and the humble realism of Pope Francis, who immediately expressed the consciousness of his ministry as a Bishop in communion and on a journey with the people of the Church of Rome, “which presides in love over all the Churches,” according to a fitting expression by the great Saint Ignatius of Antioch.

Moved by the invitation to start the journey together, Bishop and people, we ask Our Lady to grant each of us the abandonment to Christ that Francis witnesses to us in this moment.

Grateful to the Spirit, who gave a guide to His Church, we therefore start the journey desiring to follow and to serve the Pope with all of ourselves, according to the teaching that we received from Fr. Giussani: “The face of that single man [Christ] today is the unity of believers, who are the sign of Him in the world, or as Saint Paul says, who are His Body, His mysterious Body–also called ‘the people of God’–guided and guaranteed by a living person, the Bishop of Rome.”

Father Julián Carrón
President, Fraternity of Communion and Liberation
14 March 2013
Milan

Julián Carrón says the Evangelization Synod was a “most decisive about the experience”

We need to keep a close eye on what happened at the Evangelization Synod just finished in Rome. A judgment, that is, an assessment of meaning, needs to be made so that we can derive a deeper call to conversion and New Life offered by Christ. Far from being a matter of strategy, the work done at the Synod by the bishops and experts and in time by the Pope, will prove, I think, to be historic.

Among the people appointed to the Synod was Father Julián Carrón, President of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation. He addressed a letter to CL in which he said, in part:

Hearing the call to conversion that came from the synod hall, I could not help but remember the call that Fr. Giussani issued many years ago in Viterbo, inviting us to “recover the truth of our vocation and our commitment.” Because we, too, he told us, run the risk of “reducing our commitment too a kind of theorization of a socio-pedagogical method, reducing it to a kind of activism that follows upon this theorization, and then a commitment to the political defense of it. Instead, our task is to reaffirm and to propose to man, our brother, a fact of life.

The text of the letter: Father Julian Carron on Synod.pdf

Julián Carrón speaks st the Synod on the New Evangelization

Those who hold the rank of Ordinary members of the Synod Bishops are able to make a public contribution at the Synod. On Saturday, October 13, 2012, the President of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation, Father Julián Carrón, made his presentation to the assembled Synod members, and the Pope. Pay close attention to exactly what Father Carrón said,

We can no longer “think of the faith as a self-evident presupposition for life in society”. In fact, “not only can this presupposition no longer be taken for granted, but it is often openly denied” (Porta Fidei, 2).

While reading the Instrumentum laboris (142), I was shocked by this observation: “a concern on the scarcity of initial proclamation taking place everyday”. All the efforts made until today are having trouble generating newness of life that will arouse curiosity on how the baptized live. How can the fracture between faith and life be overcome, a fracture that makes it harder for faith to be found in a reasonable way, and therefore, attractive? Without rediscovering and welcoming the precious gift that is faith, new evangelization risks being diminished to being a question for experts.

To incite this interest, we have an ally in the heart of man from any culture and condition. We know that the heart of man is made for the infinite. Awaiting its achievement remains in him. Because there is “no false infinite that can satisfy him”. “What, then, will anyone gain by winning the whole world and forfeiting his life?” (Mt 16:26).

A doctrine, a group of rules, an organization cannot answer this expectation, only an event. As Fr. Giussani said during the 1987 Synod, “What is lacking is not as much the verbal or cultural repetition of the proclamation. Today’s man perhaps awaits subconsciously the experience of the encounter with persons for whom the fact of Christ is such a present reality that it has changed their lives“. A place where everyone is invited to verify what the first verified on the banks of the river Jordan: “Come and see”, because “a faith that cannot be evidentiated and found in present experience, confirmed by it, that is not useful in answering its needs, will not be a faith capable of resisting in a world where everything, absolutely everything, says the opposite”.

Ecclesial Movements impact Synod of Bishops on Evangelization

By now you ought to see a significant theme in the work of Communio, both on this blog and as a way of being in the Church: it is as Dom Luigi Gioia, OSB Oliv., has said about this theological point, “To describe the whole Church, as well as each Christian community, as a communio before speaking of ‘body,’ or ‘society,’ or ‘institution,’ -terms which have of course their share of truth- is knowingly to make charity the essential element of a Christian community, the condition sine qua non of its existence, its raison d’être.” Charity has as its essential element of extroversion the living and sharing of the truth of the faith received by us from the Trinitarian life of God. Faith is a lens by which we live, it is not a pious statement of what we supposedly believe about God. The sharing of faith, this sharing of charity and faith in a communio, is the heart of evangelization.

Categories being what they are, are helpful in seeing the division of labor and thinking. This is no less is the true for the Thirteenth Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, 7 to 28 October, discussing “The new evangelization for the transmission of the Christian faith.”

The leaders from the various ecclesial movements are worth noting because the vital presence they and the movements they represent have in the life of the Church:

Br. Enzo Bianchi, prior of the Monastero of Bose (Italy)
Maria Voce (Italy), president of the Focolari Movement
Marco Impagliazzo (Italy), president of the Sant’Egidio Community
Lydia Jimenez Gonzalez (Spain), director general of the “Cruzadas de Santa Maria” Secular Institute
Francisco Jose Gomez Arguello Wirtz (Spain), co-founder of the Neo-Catechumenal Way
Chiara Amirante, founder and president of the New Horizons Community (Italy)
Florence De Leyritz, member of the Alpha France Association (France)
Marc De Leyritz, president of the Alpha France Association (France)

*Father Julián Carrón, the President of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation might be counted here, too, but he actually is listed by the Holy See among the bishops.

Manuela Camagni’s funeral oration by Pope Benedict

At 7:30 this morning in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI offered the Sacrifice of the Mass in the Paoline Chapel of the Vatican Apostolic Palace, for peaceful repose of the soul of Manuela Camagni, the Memor Domini who was a part of the Papal Family who died November 24 as a consequence of being hit by a car.  It is not a frequent occurrence that we hear much of the inner life of the Apostolic Household and equally little is revealed about the consecrated lay people who make up the Memores Domini community of Communion & Liberation. Plus, Manuela’s death, for some reason, has had interesting affect on me, not only because I am a member of the Fraternity of Communion & Liberation but because of the recorded witness of Manuela herself, and how Manuela affected the Holy Father and those with whom he lives. What follows is Pope Benedict’s homily:

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

In the last days of her life, our dear Manuela used to talk about the fact that on November 29 she would have belonged to the community of Memores Domini for thirty years. And she said that with a great joy, getting ready – such was the impression – for an interior feast celebrating her path of thirty years towards the Lord, in communion with the Lord’s friends. But the feast was different from what was expected: precisely on November 29 we took her to the cemetery, we sang asking for the Angels to accompany her to Heaven, we guided her to the ultimate feast, to God’s great feast, to the Lamb’s Wedding. Thirty years walking towards the Lord, entering the Lord’s feast. Manuela was a “wise, prudent virgin,” she had oil in her lamp, the oil of faith, a lived faith, a faith nourished by prayer, by a dialogue with the Lord, by her meditation on the Word of God, by communion in her friendship with Christ. And this faith was hope, wisdom, it was certainty that faith opens up to the real future. And faith was charity, it was giving herself for the others, it was living in the service of the Lord for the others. I, personally, must thank for her availability to put her energies at work in my house, with this spirit of charity and of hope that comes from faith.

She entered the Lord’s feast as a prudent and wise virgin because she lived not in the superficiality of those who forget the greatness of our vocation, but in the great expectation of the eternal life; so she was ready when the Lord came.

Memor Domini for thirty years

Saint Bonaventure says that the memory of the Creator is inscribed in the depths of our being. And precisely because this memory is inscribed in our being, we can recognize the Creator in His creation, we can remember, see His traces in this cosmos created by Him. Saint Bonaventure also says that this memory of the Creator is not merely a memory of the past, because the source is present, it is a memory of the presence of the Lord; it is also a memory of the future, because it is certain that we come from the goodness of God and that we are called to strive for the goodness of God. Therefore in this memory there is the element of joy, our origin in the joy that is God, and our call to reach the great joy. And we know that Manuela was a person interiorly penetrated by joy, precisely that joy that derives from the memory of God. But Saint Bonaventure also says that our memory, as well as all of our existence, is wounded by sin: therefore memory is obscured, is covered by other superficial memories, and we aren’t able any more to overcome these other superficial memories, to go deeper, all the way to the true memory that sustains our being. Therefore, because of this oblivion of God, because of this forgetfulness of the fundamental memory, also joy is covered, obscured. Yes, we know that we were created for the joy, but we don’t know any more where we can find this joy, and we look for it in various places. Today we see this desperate search for joy that increasingly moves away from its true source, the true joy. Oblivion of God, oblivion of our true memory. Manuela was not one of those who had forgotten memory: she lived precisely in the living memory of the Creator, in the joy of His creation, seeing God in all creation, even in the daily events of our lives, and she knew that joy comes from this memory – present and future.

Memores Domini

The Memores Domini know that Christ, on the eve of His passion, renewed, or better, elevated our memory. “Do this in memory of me,” He said, and in this way He gave us the memory of His presence, the memory of the gift of Himself, of the gift of His Body and of His Blood, and in this gift of His Body and Blood, in this gift of His infinite love, we touch again with our memory a stronger presence of God, of His gift of Himself. As Memor Domini, Manuela lived exactly this living memory, that the Lord gives Himself with His Body and renews our knowledge of God.

In His dispute with the Sadducees about resurrection, the Lord tells them, who don’t believe in it: “God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob”. Those three men are part of God’s name, are inscribed in God’s name, are in God’s name, in God’s memory, and therefore the Lord says: God is not for the dead, He is a God for the living people, and those who are part of God’s name, those who are in God’s memory are alive. Unfortunately, we human beings with our memory can remember only a shadow of the people we have loved. But God’s memory doesn’t keep only shadows, it originates life: the dead live here, with His life and in His life they have entered God’s memory, which is life. This is what the Lord tells us today: you are inscribed in God’s name, you live in God with a true life, you live from the true source of life.

So, in this moment of sadness, we get comforted. And the new liturgy after the Council dares to teach us to sing “Halleluiah” even during the Mass for the dead. This is bold! We feel most of all the pain for the loss, we feel most of all the absence, the past, but the liturgy knows that we are in the Body of Christ and that we live starting from the memory of God, which is our memory. In this interlacement of His memory with ours we are together, we are living. Let’s pray the Lord that we may feel this communion of memory more and more, that our memory of God in Christ becomes more alive, so that we can feel that our true life is in Him and in Him we stay united. In this sense, we sing “Halleluiah”, certain that the Lord is life and that His love never ends. Amen.

Father Julián Carrón’s message on the occasion of Manuela Camgni’s death can be read here.

Priesthood: “First of all, authentically human,” Fr Carron suggests

Father Julián Carrón, published the following commentary on priesthood in the L’Osservatore Romano (June 9, 2010), at conclusion of the Year of Priest.

I will never forget the impact of a question at a spiritual retreat with some priests in Latin America. I had just finished saying that often our faith lacks the human, when a priest approached me and said that when he was in seminary, they taught him that it was better to hide his concrete humanity, not to have it in sight “because it disturbed the journey of faith.” This episode made me more aware of how Christianity can be reduced and of the state of confusion in which we are called to live our priestly vocation. Once someone asked Fr. Giussani his advice for a young priest, “That he be above all a man,” he answered, to the surprise of those present. We find ourselves at the polar opposite of the advice given the seminarian: on the one hand, to look away from one’s humanity, and on the other, a gaze full of fondness for oneself.

So then, what is decisive for our faith and our vocation? What do we need? Fr. Giussani repeatedly indicated that “the forgetfulness of the ‘I’,” the absence of authentic interest for one’s own person is the “supreme obstacle to our human journey” (Alla ricerca del volto umano, Rizzoli, Milano 1995, p. 9). Instead, true love for oneself, true affection for oneself is what leads us to rediscover our constituent exigencies, our original needs in their nakedness and vastness, so as to see ourselves as relationship with the Mystery, entreaty for the
infinite, structural expectant awaiting. Only people so “wounded” by reality, so seriously engaged with their own humanity can open themselves totally to the encounter with the Lord. Fr. Giussani affirms, “In fact, Christ offers Himself as the answer to what “I” am and only an attentive and also tender and passionate awareness of myself can throw me wide open and dispose me to acknowledge, admire, thank, and live Christ. Without this awareness, even that of Jesus Christ becomes a mere name” (At the Origin of the Christian Claim, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal 1998, p. 4).

“There is no response more absurd than that to a question one hasn’t asked” wrote Reinhold Niebuhr. This also applies to us when we uncritically submit to the influence of the culture in which we are immersed, which seems to favor the reduction of humanity to our biological, psychological and sociological antecedents. But if humanity is truly reduced to this, what is our task as priests? What use are we? What is the sense of our vocation? How can we resist a flight from reality, taking refuge in spiritualism or formalism, seeking alternatives that make life bearable? Or wouldn’t it be better, obeying the cultural climate, to become social assistants, psychologists, cultural operators or politicians? As Benedict XVI reminded us in Lisbon, “Often we are anxiously preoccupied with the social, cultural and political consequences of the faith, taking for granted that faith is present, which unfortunately is less and less realistic. Perhaps we have placed an excessive trust in ecclesial structures and programs, in the distribution of powers and functions; but what will happen if salt loses its flavor?” (Homily at Holy Mass at Terriero do Paco of Lisbon, May 11, 2010).

Therefore, everything depends on the perception, first of all for us, of what humanity is and what truly corresponds to our infinite desire. The decision with which we live our vocation therefore derives from the decision with which we live our being men. Only within an authentically human vibration can we know Christ and let ourselves be fascinated by Him, to the point of giving Him our lives to make Him known to others. “Why does the faith still absolutely have a chance of success?” then Cardinal Ratzinger asked himself, and answered, “I would say because it finds correspondence in the nature of man. […] In man there is an inextinguishable nostalgic aspiration toward the infinite. None of the answers sought is sufficient; only the God who has made Himself finite, to lacerate our finiteness and lead it in the breadth of His infinity, is able to meet the questions of our being. Therefore today as well, Christian faith will return to find humanity” (Fede, Verità, Tolleranza [Faith, Truth, Tolerance] Cantagalli, Siena 2003, pp. 142-143).

This certainty that Benedict XVI testifies to continually even in the face of all the evil we bring upon ourselves or cause others – just think of the pedophilia issue – invites us on a journey to rediscover and deepen our understanding of the reasonableness of the faith: “Our faith is well-founded, but this faith needs to come alive in each of us […]: only Christ can fully satisfy the profound longing of every human heart and give answers to its most pressing questions about suffering, injustice and evil, concerning death and life hereafter” (Homily at Holy Mass at Terriero do Paco di Lisbon, May 11, 2010). Only if we experience the truth of Christ in our life will we have the courage to communicate it and the audacity to challenge the hearts of the people we meet. In this way, the priesthood will continue to be an adventure for each of us and thus the opportunity to testify to our fellow women and men the answer that only Christ is for the “mystery of our being” (G. Leopardi). Thank you.

Father Julián Carrón is a priest of the Archdiocese of Madrid and he is the President of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation centered in Milan, Italy. He was appointed by Benedict XVI to be among the experts at the Synod of Bishops on the Word of God and he is a consultant on the Pontifical Council of the Laity.

That Nostalgia for the Infinite

There is a phrase of Dostoevsky that accompanies me these days, when I have to speak of Christianity to all kinds of people in Italy and abroad: “Can an educated man, a European of our time, believe –truly believe– in the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ?” This question rings like a challenge for all of us. It is precisely on the answer to this question that the success of the faith depends today. In an address given in 1996, the then cardinal Ratzinger answered that faith can have this hope “because it finds a correspondence in human nature. In man there is a nostalgic hope for the infinite that cannot be extinguished.” In this phrase he indicated the condition necessary: that Christianity needs to find the humanity that pulsates in each of us in order to show all the greatness of its claim.

Yet how many times are we tempted to look at the concrete humanity in which we find ourselves–for example the unease, the dissatisfaction, the sadness, the boredom–as an obstacle, a complication, an impediment to the realization of what we desire. Thus we get angry with ourselves and with reality, succumbing to the weight of circumstances, in the illusion of going ahead by cutting away a piece of ourselves. But unease, dissatisfaction, sadness, and boredom are not symptoms of a illness to treat with medicines; this happens more and more often in a society that mistakes disquiet of the heart for panic and anxiety. They are rather signs of what the nature of the “I” is. Our desire is greater than the whole universe. The perception of emptiness in us and around us of which Leopardi speaks (“want and emptiness”), and the boredom of which Heidegger speaks, are the proof of the inexorable nature of our heart, of the boundless character of our desire–nothing is able to give us satisfaction and peace. We can forget it, betray it, or even deceive it, but we cannot shuffle it off.

So the real obstacle on our journey is not our concrete humanity, but disregard for it. Everything in us cries out the need for something to fill the void. Even Nietzsche perceived this; he could not but address the “unknown god” that makes all things. “Left alone, I raise my hands/ … to the unknown god / I want to know you, you the Unknown,/ Who penetrate deep into my soul, / Shake up my life like a storm,/ Beyond my grasp and yet so close to me!” (1864).

Christmas is the announcement that this unknown Mystery has become a familiar presence, without which none of us could remain a man for long, but would end up overwhelmed by confusion, seeing his own face decompose, because “only the divine can ‘save’ man, that is to say, the true and essential dimensions of the human figure and his destiny” (Fr. Giussani).

The most convincing sign that Christ is God, the greatest miracle that astonished everyone–even more than the healing of cripples and the curing of the blind–was an incomparable gaze. The sign that Christ is not a theory or a set of rules is that look, which is found throughout the Gospel: His way of dealing with humanity, of forming relationships with those He met on His way. Think of Zacchaeus and of Magdalene: He didn’t ask them to change, but embraced them, just as He found them, in their wounded, bleeding humanity, needful of everything. And their life, embraced, re-awoke in that moment in all its original profundity.  Who would not want to be reached by such a look now? For “one cannot keep on living unless Christ is a presence like a mother is a presence for her child, unless Christ is a presence now -now! – I cannot love myself now and I cannot love you now” (Fr. Giussani). This is the only way, as men of our time, reasonably and critically, to answer Dostoevsky’s question.

But how do we know that Christ is alive now? Because his gaze is not a fact of the past, but is still present in the world just as it was before. Since the day of His resurrection, the Church exists only in order to make God’s affection an experience, through people who are His mysterious Body, witnesses in history today of that gaze capable of embracing all that is human.

Father Julián Carrón
President of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation
Corriere della Sera
24 December 2009