EDITORIALS
from issue no. 03 - 2005
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Reflections without prejudice by “one who comes from outside”
The speech given by the president of the Senate at the launch of the book “Un caffé in compagnia” (“A coffee in company”), a collection of Renato Farina’s interviews with Don Luigi Giussani. Rome, 28 February 2005
by Marcello Pera
President of the Senate, Marcello Pera, with Renato Farina and Don Julián Carrón at the launch of A coffee in company
This launch of the book of interviews of Renato Farina with Don Giussani comes a few days after the latter’s death. We still have in our hearts and eyes the funeral ceremony, Milan cathedral and the square packed with people, the quiet regret, the crowd above all of young people, the lucid and scrupulous homily by Cardinal Ratzinger improvised with a command of concepts and language, the dense speech from Don Julián Carrón, the applause and also the silences. In some way, today’s launch continues that ritual because the author of the interviews was a friend of Don Giussani and is a leading figure in Communion and Liberation, and because the other presenter is the successor of Don Giussani.
You can therefore understand the embarrassment of someone such as myself who, today, feels like a guest at a function for which he believes himself unqualified. No institutional qualification, because the institution that I preside doesn’t count here; and no full personal qualification either, because as regards Don Giussani and his world, I am one who “comes from outside”.
That, however, was well known to our friends Farina and Fontolan and therefore I think I should respond to their kind invitation by admitting at the start the problems that my coming from outside creates for me. There are at least three.
2. THREE DISADVANTAGES
The first problem is cognizance. Of course I am a reader, but even a careful reader, an interested one, even a partaking reader is not the same as a cognizant one. Theological thought, in the narrow or broad sense, is not a terrain on which I move with ease. I have some notions and some points of reference, I have arrived at some convictions, but it would not be proper of me to consider myself a scholar of theology. What I say will be said, and should therefore be listened to, as the reflection of one who is trying to understand rather than judge. As one who comes from outside, and is curious about things inside, must properly do.
The second problem is tardiness. To Don Giussani, to Communion and Liberation, to the world of Catholic associations and of the Church, as to all my current taking of positions as regards religion, faith, identity, I have come late. For much of my life I have been concerned with other things and so today, not having received the grace of faith - if anything that of intellectual and spiritual restiveness - I am aware that I must systematize a not facile series of themes and problems of a religious and existential nature. On one point, I must confess I have had some luck. In the fact that I have thought a lot and also taught and written a great deal on questions such as that of the relationship between religion and science or between faith and reason or on questions like that, crucial today, of the relativity and historicity of beliefs in confrontation with their aspiration to truth or universal value. If I did not have that work behind me, I could not today sustain what I do sustain on the subject of the relationship between religion and politics, science and conscience, in reference, for example, to the problems of bioethics, to the Christian roots of Europe, to our identity crisis. I agree then that I come from outside, but I believe I am not altogether unprepared.
There is finally the third problem, which brings me directly to Farina’s book. For me, Don Giussani, even now that I can say I know him a bit better from his writings, from his work as organizer, from meetings with his friends and collaborators, from the books that have been written on him, remains wrapped in mystery still or, if a more secular term will fit, in a paradox. For me at least, Don Giussani is not easy reading. Reading him does not lead to easy understanding. And understanding is not of easy translation. And yet a great many people read him, understand him, follow him. He seems to me a prophet, because the relationship that gets established between a prophet and his followers is that of the perception of his presence, guidance, charisma. Which, if I’m not wrong, is exactly the experience of the faith, which makes the word difficult to comprehend because that word is lived life.
3. SOME ATTENUATING CIRCUMSTANCES
Having set out my problems and my difficulties, I should also speak of at least two advantages.
The first. I have never nursed prejudices against religious experience. Not only because of the upbringing I received in a modest family of people who were believers and practisers in so far as they could be, but also out of intellectual formation. Faith, I retain, is a fact and religion, I am convinced, is not only a culture but an inborn and irreducible form of experience, in the sense in which the categories are forms of experience according to Kant. Get rid of his faith, and you will have mutilated a man; get rid of religion, and you will have beheaded history.
The second. I have never nursed prejudices against religious commitment. I have never thought that being secular meant cultivating a garden and defending it from the incursions of believers. And that has helped me not to believe that religion can be confined in mere subjectivity, without its being allowed to look and operate outside. This seems to me lucky, because I see that the secularists who still today think the opposite are finding themselves in difficulty even in understanding the rebirth of religious sentiment and identity in the world, from the Islamic to the Christian. And in difficulty also in reacting when this rebirth passes the sign of affirmation of identity and becomes a danger for coexistence.
With these caveats, I come now to the points that I believe I have learned from Farina’s Don Giussani.
Don Luigi Giussani, who died in Milan on 22 February 2005
OF DON GIUSSANI
The first point is this. The Christian faith comes from an experience. It is an event, as Don Carrón reminded us in Milan cathedral, a happening, an encounter, a revelation. It is a He who comes towards us, who manifests himself and lets himself be known. Some important consequences follow from that. The first is that faith is not replaceable by any reasoning, theory, explanation. A fact is a fact: one perceives it, one recognizes it. The second consequence is that if the faith is a fact, then the fact of the faith is stronger than any point in doctrine worked-out and approved. The fact - God become man - is untouchable tradition, doctrine is instead the revisable elaboration of the fact. Don Giussani tells Farina: «What is Christianity? One: God became man, died and rose again, and lives amongst us. Two: the fact that this happening cannot be kept silent, it needs to be proclaimed; it’s so simple: that is why Christians have been chosen, for the mission» (p.124).
The second point is connected to this concept of mission, a simple concept, as Don Giussani says, but that also in recent times had become timorous and controversial in sectors of the Catholic Church itself. This is the issue. Holding the Christian faith, being Christians, means many things at the same time: feeling a presence, witnessing to it, preaching the message, committing oneself to its realization.
Various consequences derive also from this point. One in particular: that the life of the Church must be marked by fidelity to the tradition. Therefore, if, in the name of tradition, one judges that this or that historic position of the Church or of its hierarchy is an accommodation or a compromise or a moving away from tradition, then one must be intransigent.
I believe that this intransigence, this courage, is what has been described and very often criticized as Don Giussani’s and Communion and Liberation’s fundamentalism. The accusation seems to me unjustified. Was Don Giussani fundamentalist and rigid in preaching the tradition or were the doctrine and the religious practice of the post-council Church accomodating in preaching dialogue with modernity and ending up by sliding into the dilution of the Christian faith into a merely cultural message?
This launch of the book of interviews of Renato Farina with Don Giussani comes a few days after his death. We still have in our hearts and eyes the funeral ceremony, Milan cathedral and the square packed with people, the quiet regret, the crowd above all of young people, the lucid and scrupulous homily by Cardinal Ratzinger improvised with a command of concepts and language, the dense speech from Don Julián Carrón, the applause and also the silences
It’s useful on this point to reread the
interview of 1988 on The secret faces of Peter, that is perhaps the clearest, and certainly the
most dramatic in the book. In it Don Giussani speaks about the «disaster» and
the «chasm» the Church was heading for ten years earlier, of the choice that
«had led Catholic associations to seek refuge in every kind of political Left»,
of fidelity to tradition, of the torments and disappointments of Paul VI, who
«felt the destruction of the Catholic presence in society», and finally of the
invitation of the Pope to go ahead. And he says: «When one is well aware of
being faithful to the tradition one has been taught, and finds that as the
magisterium of the Church evolves it re-underlines the same things, and is not
aware of ever having contradicted it; then what matters to that man is to do
something, and that’s all. And doing courageously, and also judging and
reproving what does not accord with the living tradition» (pp. 106-7).Here there is evidence of Catholic fundamentalism only for those who hold that Christianity is not fidelity to Christ but adherence to one of many variants of liberation culture. And that Christianity doesn’t mean the salvation of all in the other kingdom, but the emancipation in this world of a chosen few, the poor, the disinherited, the weak, or even the working class or the non-property owning classes. Don Giussani did not think that way and opposed it. And for that was considered fundamentalist, opposed by some, the secular leftist progressives, and misunderstood by others, the Catholic modernists, they, too, leftist. A strange fate that, well looked at, puts the choices of the Church of that time more in question than the positions taken by Don Giussani.
And this brings me to the third and last point for consideration that Farina’s book stirred in me, that of commitment. The Christian is committed to preaching, to the mission, to good works. He is committed to being in society, but not so as to lead it in this or that direction - social justice, peace, tolerance, etcetera – but to shape it and point it in only one direction, which is that of Christ. If that is how it is, one sees that Christianity, as Cardinal Ratzinger reminded us in Milan cathedral, is not properly a culture and still less a culture of the liberation of people from a social or historical condition. It is a mistake – I quote Cardinal Ratzinger again – «to change Christianity into a moralism, moralism into politics, to replace belief with doing». That is why the Christian is an awkward presence: because, when authentic, he refuses to be regimented into any of the current cultural and political frameworks. And that is why he stands in the way: because he demands and does not content himself. His goal is beyond, not here. It regards everyone, not some.
Let me finish here. For one who comes from outside, I believe I have already said a lot. Certainly, I have listened to much of what is said from inside.
