Luigi Giussani, the Church, and Youth in the 1950s: A Judgment Born of an Experience

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

far from every superficial enthusiasm, from every vague romanticism. Really seeing Christ, he knew that to encounter Christ means to follow Christ. This encounter is a road, a journey, a journey that passes also . . . through the "valley of darkness." In the Gospel, we heard of the last darkness of Christ's suffering, of the apparent absence of God, when the world's Sun was eclipsed. He knew that to follow is to pass through a "valley of darkness," to take the way of the cross, and to live all the same in true joy.¹

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 early1980s) 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

Father Giussani held that he never set out to form a movement. In his address to Pope John Paul II at his meeting with the ecclesial movements and new communities on May 30, 1998, Giussani said that he simply saw a people grow before his eyes and what might easily have been one person's experience became instead a people as a new "protagonist" in history (as he put it).³ Father Giussani became well known in 1950s Milan with the birth and growth of Gioventù studentesca (or "Student Youth"), which I will discuss below, and through his experience with this movement his understanding of the problems of his diocese's work with youth became sharper. From a tiny group of high school students, GS, as it was called, quickly expanded into a lively influential movement by the early 1960s. By the end of the decade it almost disappeared: Giussani was asked to remove himself briefly from his diocese and from GS, he left his high school teaching post, and the advent of the student crisis in 1968 wrought havoc amongst student bodies.⁴ By 1970 the few students left in the movement boldly presented a Christian perspective in the midst of the university student turmoil in the Milanese universities, and the name Communion and Liberation (CL) was introduced to remind the world that true liberation was not brought about by revolution and upheaval but by the experience of communion. CL quickly spread to other...