What is Communion and Liberation?

What is Communion and Liberation (CL)?

Communion and Liberation (CL) is an ecclesial movement founded in Milan, Italy, by Msgr. Luigi Giussani in 1954, as an initiative to provide an integral catechesis and an experience of common life for young people. It took initial form as a youth branch of the Italian “Catholic Action” organization in the years immediate prior to Vatican II. The original impetus of CL ---the Gioventu Studentesca—continues to be of one of the more vital and impressive witness of thousands of energetic high school and university students organizing cultural events, participating in the Good Friday Way of the Cross and in pilgrimages and retreats.

At the same time, over the course of fifty years, it has also blossomed into stable forms of adult commitment to the life and mission of the Church: the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation – a lay association of pontifical right; the Memores Domini – individuals in CL who dedicate themselves to God by the virtue which the Church calls “virginity”; the Priestly Fraternity of the Missionaries of Saint Charles Borromeo, recognized as a Society of Apostolic Life; and the Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of the Assumption, an autonomous religious institute of the consecrated life. In all, CL today has over 100,000 adherents throughout the world. Lay members are formed in the movement’s spirituality and participate in its various events and charitable works. They are not, however, separated from the parochial or diocesan context of the local church. While CL members are dedicated to an active participation in the life of their parishes and dioceses, they also seek to show the face of the Church in secular environments: at school, the workplace, and in various cultural centers.

What is the charism of CL?

As its charism, CL lives and witnesses the perennial life of the Church with a certain accent (as Giussani often stresses) –a certain style and certain emphases. It is not easy to articulate in a few words the distinctive “accent” or “style” of CL. To attempt such an articulation risks reducing the charism to a humanly understandable scheme rather than a life that draws its vitality from the grace of the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless, the heart of the CL charism can be described as “a vital awareness of the presence of Christ as the meaning of life” and “friendship within the community as a way of manifesting this Presence, helping one another to recognize it, and bearing witness to it in the world.”

A second facet of CL’s charism is the central place which Mary occupies in the CL experience. CL’s Marian piety is not founded upon any extraordinary or supererogatory Marian devotions. Fundamentally, the place of Mary in CL, profound and pervasive as it is, is the same as it is in any genuine Christian life. In a spirituality that emphasizes the centrality of the Incarnation, and of the presence of Christ in the daily circumstances of ordinary life, Mary has a prominent role.

What is a CL “community”?

A CL “community” is a place of catechesis, friendship and mission. The focus of CL’s spirituality is the real historical event of God becoming man in the Incarnation - as a consequence of faith in His saving death and resurrection -the vital recognition of Jesus Christ as the meaning of every aspect of life. The risen and glorified Christ is not a relic of the past or merely a theoretical idea. Rather, He is present in every circumstance of life, and in Him God gives His love to us as the fulfillment of the desire for happiness that pervades all of our actions, even the most ordinary.

The emphasis on CL’s catechesis and the bond of friendship that constitutes the central features of CL community are orientated towards the cultivation of an awareness that Christ’s loving embrace gives meaning to everything in everyday life, whether it be joy or sorrow. Thus, “loving one another” and sharing life together (in all its beauty and many burdens) is a concrete witness for each person in the community of Christ’s loving presence in his or her daily life. A member of CL will often say, “I know that Jesus loves me because of the way my friends love me and take care of me.” Thus CL’s charism entails a strengthening of the virtue of faith and the development of a more profound and concrete confidence in God through the experience of fraternal charity.

Further, we believe that Christ uses friendship as a means to communicate His loving presence to the person, consecrating the characteristics of human friendship: affection, sensitivity, interest, assistance -and making them signs and instruments of His loving action in the person’s life, while at the same time purifying them through CL catechesis, through the leadership of the movement, and through participation in the Church and her sacramental life (which is always the fundamental, indispensable characteristic of any CL community). Indeed, CL witnesses to the whole Church the dynamic character of Christ’s Mystical Body, concretely alive inside the most ordinary moments of relationships between or among Christians.

Mission means that the CL friendship is open, not exclusive. CL communities seek out and invite others to be with them and to adhere to their life according to the “organic law” of friendship. The bond that unites a CL community is one of friendship and free personal adherence. People live the charism of CL in the measure that they experience therein a real help in belonging concretely to the Church’s life.

Notes from Luigi Giussani What is Christianity

What is Christianity if not the event of a new man who because of his nature becomes a new protagonist on the world scene? (…)

Today’s man, endowed with operative possibilities as never before in history, finds it very hard to perceive Christ as clear and certain answer to the meaning of his own ingenious. Often, institutions do not offer this response vitally. What’s lacking is not so much the verbal or cultural repetition of the message. Man today awaits, perhaps unconsciously, for the experience of the encounter with people for whom the fact of Christ is a reality so present that their life is changed. A human impact is what can shake today’s man: an event that is the echo of the initial event, when Jesus raised his eyes and said, “Zacchaeus, come down quickly, for today I must stay at your house.” (cfr. Lk. 19:5).

In this way the mystery of the Church that has been handed down to us for two thousand years, must always happen anew through grace, must always prove to be a presence that moves, that is, a movement, a movement that by its nature makes the way of living more human in the environment in which it happens. For those who are called, something happens that is similar to what was the miracle for the first disciples. Always, the experience of a liberation of the human accompanies the encounter with the redemptive event of Christ: “And everyone who has given up houses or brother or sisters or father or mother or children or lands for the sake of my name will receive a hundred times more, and will inherit eternal life.” (Mt. 19:28-29, Mk. 10:28-30; Lk. 18:28-30).

Just as Baptism is the grace of the Spirit, so every realization of Baptism is gift of the Spirit that is incarnate in the temperament and history of each person.

This gift of the Spirit can communicate itself with a power that is particularly persuasive, pedagogic, and operative, so as to evoke an involvement in persons, a sphere of affinities and relationships, by which a stable dynamic of communion is realized, “living which is an aspect of obedience to the great mystery of the Spirit” (John Paul II, To Priests of the “Communion and Liberation” Movement, Sept. 12, 1985). (…).

The order of the great ecclesial discipline, channel of the operative freedom of the Spirit, flowers in the living communion with the successor of Peter, place of ultimate peace for every member of the faithful.

Notes from Benedict XVI’s Address to Communion and Liberation March 25, 2007
On the 25th Anniversary of its Pontifical Recognition

Through him (Fr. Giussani) the Holy Spirit aroused in the Church a movement – yours—that would witness the beauty of being Christians in the epoch in which the opinion was spreading that Christianity was something tiresome and oppressive to live. Father Giussani, then, set himself to reawaken in the youth the love for Christ, the way, the truth, and the life, repeating that only he is the road toward realization of the deepest desires of man’s heart; and that Christ saves us not despite our humanity, but through it.

As I recalled in the homily at his funeral, this courageous priest, who grew up in a home poor in bread but rich in music, as he himself liked to say, right from the start was touched, or rather wounded by the desire for beauty, and not any kind of beauty, but he was searching for beauty itself, the infinite beauty that he found in Christ.

Communion and Liberation is a communitarian experience of faith, born in the Church not from a will to organize of the hierarchy, but originated from a renewed encounter with Christ and thus, we can say, from an impulse that derives ultimately from the Holy Spirit. Still today, this offers itself as an opportunity to live the Christian faith in a deep and up-to-date way, on one hand with a total fidelity and communion with the Successor of Peter and with the pastors who ensure the government of the Church, and on the other hand with a spontaneity and a freedom that permit new and prophetic apostolic and missionary realizations.

Dear brothers and sisters, on another occasion very meaningful for you, John Paul II entrusted you with this mandate, and I quote, “Go out into the world to bring the truth, the beauty and the peace that are met in the encounter with Christ the redeemer.”