Being! Or Nothingness

Assuring Our Unity to the Church, Peter Speaks

Benedict XVI's Address to Communion and Liberation
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Dear brothers and sisters,

It is a really a great pleasure for me to welcome you here today, in this St Peter's Square on the occasion of the 25 anniversary of the pontifical recognition of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation. Perhaps we expected the sun, but even water is a sign of grace and the gift of the Holy Spirit. I address my cordial greetings to each one of you, particularly to the prelates, the priests and the directors here present.

In particular I greet Father Julián Carrón, president of your fraternity, and I thank him for the fine and profound words addressed to me in the name of you all.

My first thought goes -- it's obvious -- to your founder Monsignor Luigi Giussani, to whom many memories tie me, since he had become a true friend to me. Our last meeting, as Father Carrón mentioned, took place in Milan Cathedral two years ago, when our beloved Pope John Paul II sent me to preside at his solemn funeral.

Through him the Holy Spirit aroused in the Church a movement -- yours -- that would witness the beauty of being Christians in an 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 the 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. How can we not recall Father Giussani's many encounters with my venerated predecessor John Paul II?

On an anniversary dear to you, the Pope pointed out that the original educative innovation lies in reproposing in a fascinating way, in tune with contemporary culture, the Christian event, perceived as the source of new values and capable of giving direction to the whole of existence. The event that changed the life of the founder wounded, so to speak, the lives of very many of his spiritual children, and gave rise to the many religious and ecclesial experiences that form the history of your vast and articulated spiritual family.

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.

At the Feet of Peter

Greeting to Holy Father Benedict XVI by Fr. Julián Carrón
President of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation                                                                                     

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Your Holiness:                      

The feeling that invades each of us is one of immense joy, and we are so happy to be able to meet You and to share this moment with You. Permit me to thank You with all my heart on behalf of my friends for this priceless gift.

                     

The last time that we met You, on the occasion of the funeral of Fr. Giussani, is still very alive in our memory. We will never be able to forget how moving was Your willingness to come to celebrate and Your words which were so full of affection and profound comprehension of him. Since then, often we have found ourselves speaking of Fr. Giussani with the same words you used to described his personality to us that day: a man wounded by beauty, who led people not to himself, but to Christ, and thus conquered hearts!

                     

From him, from his tireless witness, we learned what You have never tired of repeating to everyone since the day you assumed the Papal Throne: the beauty of Christianity. We are fascinated by the beauty of Christ made persuasive by the contagious intensity of Fr. Giussani, to the point of repeating the words of Jacopone da Todi: “Christ in His beauty draws me to Him.” We have discovered this beauty of Christianity without abandoning anything that is authentically human. Instead, for us, living the faith coincides with the exaltation of what is human. Fr. Giussani’s entire educational endeavor aimed to show the correspondence between Christ and all authentic human needs. Fr. Giussani was convinced that only a proposal addressed to reason and freedom, and verified in experience, was capable of interesting man, because it is the only one able to making him perceive its truth, that is, its human usefulness. In this way he showed us how it is possible to live the faith as men, in full use of reason, freedom and affection. We want to follow in his footsteps.

                     

When faced with so much grace it is impossible not to tremble at our own disproportion. We have therefore often revisited, particularly in preparing for the meeting with You, the words Fr. Giussani spoke to us in 1984 in honor of the thirtieth anniversary of the birth of the Movement:

                     

“As we mature, we are a spectacle to ourselves and, God willing, to others. A spectacle, that is, of limits and betrayals, and therefore of humiliation, but at the same time of an inexhaustible surety in the grace that has been given to us and renewed every morning. This is the source of the naïve boldness that characterizes us, through which every day of our lives is conceived as an offering to God, so that the Church may exist within our bodies and souls, through the materiality of our existence.”