Communion and Liberation, Msgr. Luigi Giussani

Fr. Meinrad Miller: "How Communion and Liberation Moved Me"

Seven years ago this fall an event happened here at Benedictine College that would change my life. My college roommate, B.J. Adamson, had told me over the years about a Catholic movement he had discovered back in Denver: Communion and Liberation (CL). B.J. would often tell me about the method of the movement's dynamic founder, Monsignor Luigi Giussani (October 15, 1922-February 22, 2005), and of a friend of the movement here in the United States Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete. Cardinal Stafford, then the Archbishop of Denver, had spoken highly of CL.

Giussani: "Open Christianity"

Logos Journal Fall 2007.

I point the finger at myself for having yielded to stoic asceticism instead of Christianity. I charge myself with having placed 90 percent of my cards on the structures of human will, on the exercise of freedom and its feeble energies, and then simply sticking on a label with the words "Jesus Christ." What I should have done instead was to turn to the human and Christian conscience, to that Christ who is imprinted upon every Christian.

Zucchi: "Luigi Giussani, the church, and youth in the 1950s: a judgment born of an experience."

Logos Journal Fall 2007.

Thus for Giussani, everything began from that event, from meeting up with a few students, a phenomenon that he understood to be nestled in the great story of Christ's encounter with John and Andrew and Peter and Simon and the many disciples who followed. It was clear to Giussani that these high school students were not his to be "managed" but that God's Mystery had somehow entrusted their friendship to him. As he would put it in later years, "I belonged to those three teenagers, I did not belong to them but to the unity with them." It was this perception of the Church that allowed him to eschew any reductionist approach to the life of community. He understood that a movement had burst forth within him, that it was an application of what he had apprehended his whole life, starting from his family, and the teachings of all his professors in the seminary: "the existence of God, a true philosophy of the understanding of life, to cut to the chase, the Church. The synthetic word is the Church, to belong to the Church." (23)