Notes regarding Communion and Liberation

A movement that has deeply impacted my Life, and vision of reality, Christ and the Church

Many have asked about my experience and passion for CL. Please find some notes from the website, feel free to browse the site.

-All information can be found on Communion and Liberation's official website www.clonline.org

JR

Communion and Liberation is an ecclesial movement whose purpose is the education to Christian maturity of its adherents and collaboration in the mission of the Church in all the spheres of contemporary life.

Communion and Liberation began in Italy in 1954 when Msgr. Luigi Giussani established a Christian presence in Berchet high school in Milan with a group called Gioventù Studentesca (Student Youth), GS for short.

The current name of the movement, Communion and Liberation (CL), appeared for the first time in 1969. It synthesizes the conviction that the Christian event, lived in communion, is the foundation of the authentic liberation of man. Communion and Liberation is present today in about seventy countries throughout the world. There is no type of membership card, but only the free participation of persons. The basic instrument for the formation of adherents is weekly catechesis, called “School of Community.” The official magazine of the Movement is the international monthly, Traces – Litterae Communionis

The following documents describe the life, educational method and the fundamental gestures in the experience in CL life

Communion and Liberation is an ecclesial movement founded by Fr. Luigi Giussani; its earliest manifestations date to 1954. Arising in Milan and spreading rapidly throughout Italy, it is now present in some seventy countries all over the world.

CL defines itself as a movement because it does not, first of all, take the form of a new organization or structure (there are no membership cards) nor as a special insistence on some particular aspect or practice of the life of the faith, but as a call to live in the present the Christian experience as defined by tradition. The aim of life in CL is to propose the presence of Christ as the only true response to the deepest needs of human life in every moment of history. In the person who encounters and adheres to the presence of Christ there is generated a movement of conversion and witness, which tends to leave its mark on the environment in which he or she lives (family, work, school, neighborhood, society, etc.). Born in the schools as a proposal to young people, CL today extends its call to everyone, irrespective of age, occupation, or social position.

In recent years, the presence of CL in society has become more specifically attuned to its educational, cultural, and social nature. At a moment when, for various reasons, even politics and the confrontation of ideas seem to have lost their ability to involve people on a personal level, and in which, not only in Italy, some have presumed to disguise the struggle for power as a moral revolution, the movement is concentrating on the crisis at the root of all the social and political crises: the crisis in education.

Through the action of many committed adults in the schools (where the use of the old initials GS still continues) and as youth group leaders, CL today offers its contribution to keeping alive positive educational proposals in a society that seems at times definitively exhausted and emptied of all its urge to idealism. And, through the social and also political action of members and friends of the Movement, the same question continues to be raised that marked one of the earliest battles of GS from the 1950s: the right to freedom of education. "You can make us go around naked, but at least leave us the freedom to educate," was and is one of CL's slogans. This freedom, in fact, encompasses all the true freedoms that a non-oppressive society must guarantee and value: from free enterprise to freedom of association.

The Movement, through its publications and the free, responsible action of committed lay people in the mass media and in publishing and cultural concerns, has reaffirmed the centrality of the method of the Incarnation against every spiritualistic, gnostic, or Pelagian reduction, and, on the opposite side, against every dualistic separation between what regards the temporal and what belongs to faith.

From the point of view of the Movement, these most recent years have been marked by an increasing centrality of the catechism offered by the "School of Community" and by the growth of Fraternity groups, that is, groups of adults spontaneously coming together to commit their lives in a desire for holiness through a "rule" of personal ascesis, a lived communion, and charity.

CL's contribution to the Church and the world is thus distinguished by three words: education, fraternity, and works. These are the three factors on which currently and concretely CL spends its energy with the aim of contributing to the human glory of Christ in history.

The organizational structure of a movement like CL is elastic by nature. At its top is the General Council (commonly called the "Center") presided over by Fr. Julián Carrón and uniting the directors in Italy and abroad for every sphere - school, university, work, culture, etc. - in which the Movement operates.

Each of these spheres is led by its own group of leaders. On the local level - national, regional, or city - the Movement is guided by "diakonias," that is, groups of leaders available for service (as their name indicates) to the life of the community.

The leaders are chosen from among those who show the clearest awareness of the Movement's aims and most generous witness and dedication of service to the community.

Outside of Italy there now exist communities which, due to the number of their participants and the maturity of their experience, have become important for the leadership of the Movement; this is the case of Spain, whose leaders now take part in the general direction of the Movement.

“A charism,” Fr. Giussani has written, “can be defined as a gift of the Spirit, given to a person in a specific historical context, so that this person can initiate an experience of faith that might in some way be useful to the life of the Church. I emphasize the existential nature of charism: it makes the Christian message handed down by the apostolic tradition more convincing, more persuasive, more ‘approachable.’ A charism 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. St Gregory Nazianzen writes, “If I were not Yours, my Christ, I would feel like a finished creature”. It is thus from His presence that both morality and the passion for the salvation of man (which is mission) spring up.

“From the first hour of class at the Berchet high school in Milan,” Fr. Giussani recalls, “I tried to show the students what moved me: not the wish to convince them that I was right, but the desire to show them the reasonableness of faith; that is, that their free adhesion to the Christian proclamation was demanded by their discovery of the correspondence of what I was saying with the needs of their hearts, as implied by the definition of reasonableness. Only this dynamic of recognition makes whoever adheres to our movement creative and a protagonist, and not simply one who repeats formulas and things they have heard. For this reason, it seems to me, a charism generates a social phenomenon not as something planned, but as a movement of persons who have been changed by an encounter, who tentatively make the world, the environment, and the circumstances that they encounter more human. The memory of Christ when it is lived tends inevitably to generate a presence in society, above and beyond any planned result.”

The three dimensions of experience: culture, charity, mission

• Culture: a test of experience, political action, ecumenism

  First the life of GS and then of CL has always been marked by fervent cultural activity. CL’s cultural liveliness arises from the passion to verify the capacity of the Christian faith to offer a more fertile and all-encompassing criterion for interpreting reality and events. St. Paul’s advice: “Test everything; retain what is good,” remains for CL the best definition of cultural work: everything can be encountered and compared using the criterion of the clarity about man brought by the Christian revelation, and on the basis of this criterion, we can retain and give value to what is true and good in everything.

  From the earliest days of GS Fr. Giussani’s young people, subjected to a cultural and scholastic environment that, then as today, tends to marginalize the Christian event as a hypothesis for reading reality, engaged themselves, through symposia, newsletters and the nicknamed “revision cards,” in an effort to have their say on questions raised by their school lessons or current social and cultural events. Alongside these, authors, texts, and problems were rediscovered and proposed that had been censured or neglected by the prevailing cultural tendencies.

  In this “school” individuals and groups grew up, who then started or contributed to cultural initiatives, on their own responsibility, at a national and international level, along with a myriad of undertakings, great and small, embracing both the joy of sharing experiences and the passion to communicate the proprium of the Christian event.

  Thus there grew up, in and outside of Italy, hundreds of cultural centers and dozens of private schools, often promoted by parents’ cooperatives; publishing houses were started, journalistic and publishing activities realized, academic institutes and foundations promoted, and international meetings established (like the annual “Meeting for Friendship between Peoples” in Rimini), involving the most illustrious names in international culture and debating the most burning and authentic questions of the present moment.

  All this has attracted both benevolent and ill-intentioned feelings to the movement, to the extent that, above and beyond the inevitable errors that this work brings with it, observers feel a difficulty, if not a preclusion, in considering the Christian identity to be the bearer of an original judgment on culture and society. Those who, even within the so-called Catholic world, see faith as something regarding questions “up above the clouds” and not as a factor that intervenes in history and culture would prefer the Christian community to stay out of questions that extend beyond the sacristy door.

  In a committed Christian experience the political dimension naturally descends from the cultural dimension. Political action, in the conception of CL, is one of the fields in which a Christian is called with greater responsibility and ideal generosity to verify the unifying criterion that guides his existence in the face of the problems posed by the life of society and institutions. God gave men power so that they could work in His creation thrugh the commitment of their own talents, family, and society, to the point of that “demanding form of charity” – as Pope Paul VI called it – which is politics. It should thus not be surprising that out of CL have come people engaged on various levels, directly and on their own responsibility, in political action.

  In particular, following the line marked out by the Church’s social doctrine, what gives life to Christian commitment in politics is the defense of that highest good which is freedom, a necessary condition so that man can seek adequate answers to what his heart desires and his needs demand. The political action typical of the person educated in the Movement must tend, thus, to create the conditions so that the individual and society, in the whole of its activities of production, culture, and association, are not diminished or penalized by a statist view or by a position of privilege granted only to some for reasons of power. A synthesis of the CL conception of politics is well expressed in Assago 1987. Senso religioso, opera politica [Assago 1987. Religious sense, political works], which contains Fr Giussani’s talk to the assembly of Christian Democrats of Lombardy held in Assago on February 6, 1987. The text is published in L. Giussani, L’io, il potere, le opere [The I, Power, Works] (In Italian only; Marietti, 2000).

  The battles which have involved not only single persons but the entire Movement, like that for freedom of education and for parity between state-run and private schools, or the more general one for respect of the principle of subsiduarity, tend to make concrete the unity between cultural work and political action.

  Finally, CL’s concept of culture coincides with the most authentic sense of the term ecumenism. Ecumenism is not the search for a lowest common denominator between diverse experiences with the aim of justifying a tolerance that resembles, in actuality, a lack of mutual love. Ecumenism as the true meaning of culture, on the contrary, indicates the capacity to embrace even the most distant and different experience from one’s own (for example, the experience of Buddhist monks on Mount Koya, or Russian Orthodox culture, or the Hebrew tradition), by virtue of the fact that having encountered the truth by grace and not by one’s own merit makes one able to recognize every glimmer of truth and to enhance it.

• Charity: free giving as a law, the working of charity

  One of the actions promoted by GS as early as 1958 was charity in the area of the “Bassa milanese”. Every week, several hundred students went from Milan to its outskirts, called the “Bassa,” where the living conditions of many families were close to the poverty line and social life was practically non-existent. One afternoon a week, the students stayed there playing with the children and organizing, in accord with the local parish priests, periods of reading instruction and catechism. They also tried to help the families meet their needs.

  “Life must be total sharing,” explains Fr Giussani, “but disattention, fear, love of comfort, obstacles in the environment, malice, all empty life of the value of charity. To create a mentality of charity, the most humble and effective way is to begin to live some remnant of free time expressly, purposely as a sharing in the life of others. Commitment involving physical sacrifice, moreover, is essential for it to influence our mentality.”

  The charitable proposal thus was and is the educative tool for bringing about this “conversion.”

  Today, charity work in CL takes the most diverse forms: going into an oratory or neighborhood to play with children, or to a nursing home to keep elderly persons company; helping younger children with their studies, sharing difficult situations like poverty, mental illness, or the last stages of terminal illness, helping people find work, etc. Here too, as with the cultural dimension, operational developments, from the simplest to the most complex, are tied to the free initiative and choice of commitment of individuals or groups who adhere to CL and do not involve the Movement as a whole.

• Mission: a Catholic witness

  From the beginning, GS youth were educated to a sense of mission also through attention to figures of missionaries working in distant and difficult places. Throughout its entire history, CL has contributed to the missionary work of leading personalities (from Marcello Candia to Msgr. Pirovano, from Father Lardo to Mother Theresa) or religious organizations or orders (the PIME [Milan] Fathers, the Comboni Missionaries). But what counted most was the proposal made to these high school students to support entirely and responsibly (perhaps for the first time in Church history) a missionary action in Brazil, at Belo Horizonte, in 1962. The mission in Brazil has a significance that goes well beyond the fact that with the departures of those twenty-year-olds the first seeds were sown of the Movement’s presence in Latin America: for the whole history of the Movement that gesture has meant that there is no distinction between an invitation to a “ray” or School of Community meeting or an offer of companionship to a colleague and the action of Christian proclamation carried out by the many missionaries, today also including representatives of CL, in difficult areas of Africa, Asia, or the Americas. It is the same universal mission of the Church, the same announcement.

  A sense of mission in one’s own sphere and the testimony to which the Movement calls its members are understood above all as the offer of one’s time and talents to Christ, more than as the capacity for initiative or strategies for communication. Just as it spread from Milan into Romagna through Fr Giussani’s encounters or the vacations spent by the early GS youth on the Adriatic coast, also in these years the Movement arose in countries near and far (for example, in Mexico, Taiwan, or Siberia) for reasons that were sometimes fortuitous (a trip taken for work, unexpected friendships or collaborations). Along with these phenomena, with the passing years the invitation has become more pressing on the part of Bishops and priests from all over the world to CL to send priests or lay persons educated in the Movement.

  Under this profile, more than being concerned with its own dissemination, CL has always understood mission as service to the mission of the Church and as the possibility of a call to the Christian experience in every sphere of study or work in which its members are found, anywhere in the world.