Luigi Giussani, The Church, And Youth in the 1950S: A Judgment Born of an Experience (Re-Considerations: Historical (And Often Neglected) Texts in the Catholic Intellectual Tradition with Contemporary Comment and Reflection‪)‬

ON FEBRUARY 24, 2005, the then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, personally represented the ailing Pope John Paul II at the funeral Mass for Monsignor Luigi Giussani; his homily would be discussed for months to come in the international press. Speaking for over fifteen minutes without as much as glancing at a text, he called attention to how "Fr. Giussani always kept the eyes of his life and of his heart fixed on Christ. In this way, he understood that Christianity is not an intellectual system, a packet of dogmas, a moralism; Christianity is rather an encounter, a love story; it is an event." The future Pope Benedict XVI asserted that this "love affair with Christ" was Cardinal Ratzinger had his reasons for alluding to a valley of darkness and we can very well guess at what they might be. Luigi Giussani was a very sensitive and gregarious individual, a true gentleman but one also fearless in publicly proclaiming what he knew to be of vital importance to society and the Church. During Italy's so-called years of lead (the period of social and political upheaval and terrorism stretching from the late 1960s to the early 1980s) Giussani and the movement that he founded, Communion and Liberation, drew attacks, even physically violent ones, from many political groups, in particular groups from the left but also from the right and center. Painful as these attacks must have been for Father Giussani, his greatest trial, his experience of darkness, probably came from the criticism and misunderstandings from within the Church itself, and not only beginning with the period of contestation following 1968. A reader of the featured article, "Open Christianity," will quickly understand that Giussani's critiques of the Church, and in particular of its work among the young in Catholic Milan in the 1950s, would not have been easily accepted by the hierarchy and many other Catholics in those years in the world's largest diocese and beyond. (2)