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4 Comunione e liBerazione Laying the Building Blocks of a Parallel Christian Society in Italy you cannot have a faith without a cultural expression and judgment on the world. Faith has to do with life—politics, sport, everything we live—it encompasses all of life. —Volunteer at Comunione e Liberazione’s 2008 Meeting of Friendship among Peoples, Rimini, Italy The tacit indictment that the networks of the Muslim Brotherhood and Shas make of government welfare efforts in their countries is in good part responsible for their success in recruiting followers and garnering political support. Comunione e Liberazione (CL) is a Catholic integrist (orthodox) movement that developed its religious , cultural, and economic institutions in Italy, which, unlike Egypt and Israel, has a highly developed welfare state. Thus, a weak welfare state is not a necessary precondition for adopting the strategy of bypassing the state with a network of alternative institutions. Quite the contrary, CL built its institutions to obviate the need for such a strong state, an agenda that has been much shaped by its struggles against secular communist and socialist parties. Comunione e Liberazione is working to secure greater roles for the Church and the pope in Italian society.1 CL is today the “largest [Catholic] renewal movement in contemporary Italy.”2 But since its founding in 1954, the movement has faced many challenges to its survival, including the defection of most of its membership to radical left movements in the late 1960s, the failure of efforts by its political wing to reverse Italy’s liberalized abortion and divorce laws in the 1970s and 1980s, the dramatic fall in the midst of corruption scandals of Christian Democrat politicians associated with the movement in the early 1990s, and the death of the movement’s charismatic leader in 2005. Comunione e Liberazione survived these crises and continues to thrive in Italy because it developed a society-wide network (rete) of over 1,100 faith-infused social service, cultural, and educational institutions linked with tens of thousands of CL- Comunione e liBerazione 89 inspired or -affiliated businesses. The institutions include Solidarity Centers to connect unemployed young people with CL-affiliated businesses, a national Food Bank Foundation that furnishes meals to needy individuals and families by using the excess production of CL-affiliated farms and food companies, homes for recovering drug addicts and the disabled, hospices for the terminally ill and patients with AIDS, organizations providing financial assistance to families in need, bookshops, consumer cooperatives, and primary and secondary religious schools, among others.3 Some of the nonprofit organizations are partly funded by grants from the Italian government, others are based on partnerships with CL-affiliated businesses, and many draw upon the movement’s “common fund,” to which participating Catholics are encouraged to give to monthly as “witness to a communal concept of personal property.”4 As with the other movements whose stories we tell, CL’s institution-building grew out of a strongly communitarian theology that sees religious experience as fully realizable only in a community, emphasizes mutual responsibility, and encourages an active presence in and engagement with the world. The strict side of this communitarianism can be seen in Comunione e Liberazione’s insistence on obedience to Church teachings and the pope and in its efforts to bring Italian law into line with Church doctrine—for example, on abortion and divorce. Its caring side is visible in the extensive services it offers throughout Italy. yet unlike the “state within a state” or “surrogate state” established by the Muslim Brotherhood and Shas, which are intended to prefigure a new religion-infused state, the “parallel society”5 that Comunione e Liberazione has built under the slogan “More society, less state”6 is intended to show that largely nonstate social service agencies, schools, and for-profit enterprises can meet citizens’ spiritual, cultural, and material needs better than can the state. ChariSm, CommunitarianiSm, and militanCy Father Luigi Giussani founded the movement that later became Comunione e Liberazione in 1954. Giussani’s orthodox theology begins with Christ’s resurrection as the “charism”7 or “saving event of human history”8 —an event made immediate and contemporary through the individual’s experience of a personal encounter with Christ. This encounter, which Giussani called “bumping into” Christ,9 is said to have two consequences : the communion and liberation referred to in the movement’s name. The idea that religious or spiritual life can only be lived in communion (comunione) with others experiencing the same encounter with Christ is a...

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