Luigi Giussani

Monsignor Luigi Giovanni Giussani (October 15, 1922 – February 22, 2005), Italian Catholic priest, educator, public intellectual and founder of the international Catholic movement Communion and Liberation (Comunione e Liberazione).

Traces Magazine, March 2005: Luigi Giussani

Biography

Luigi Giussani was born in Desio, near Milan, Italy. His father, Beniamino Giussani, was an artist and anarchist who instilled in him a love of beauty, particularly in poetry, painting and music, and a desire for justice. From his mother, Angelina Gelosa, he received his religiosity. Giussani entered the Milan diocesan seminary at a young age, where he discovered a way to understand "secular" works of art (such as the poetry of Giacomo Leopardi and the music of Ludwig van Beethoven) as expressive of the religious sense and as unconscious prophecies of Christ's incarnation. With his fellow seminarians, including Enrico Manfredini (who later became Archbishop of Bologna) Giussani founded a study group and newsletter under the name Studium Christi.

Giussani was ordained to the priesthood in 1945 at the young age of 23. His ordination had been accelerated by the authorities in the Milan archdiocese because they feared that the serious respiratory health problems he was experiencing at that time (and which would plague him his entire life) would lead to his death before becoming a priest. Following ordination Giussani began teaching at the Venegono Seminary. His academic interests were Eastern Christian Theology and American Protestantism. In the early 1950s he requested of his superiors to be allowed to leave seminary teaching to work in high schools. He taught at the Berchet Lyceum (classical high school) in Milan from 1954 to 1964. During this time his primary intellectual interest was the problem of education; his involvement with the religious instruction of the students at Berchet was instrumental in the rapid growth of Gioventú Studentesca (GS, Student Youth), at the time a student wing of Azione Cattolica (Catholic Action). In the booklets Conquiste fondamentali per la vita e la presenza cristiana nel mondo (Fundamental Conquests for Christian Life and Presence in the World) (1954, co-authored with Fr. Costantino Oggioni) and L'esperienza (Experience) (1963), Giussani outlined the fundamental ideas behind his approach to the formation of young people. Both texts received the imprimatur of the severe ecclesial censor Msgr. Carlo Figini.

In 1964 Giussani began teaching introductory theology at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, a position he occupied until 1990. In obedience to a request of his Archbishop, Giovanni Colombo, Giussani left Gioventú Studentesca in 1965 and devoted himself to theological studies. In the late 1960s Fr. Giussani was sent by his religious superiors on several periods of study in the U.S. and wrote Grandi linee della teologia protestante americana. Profilo storico dalle origini agli anni 50 (An Outline of American Protestant Theology. An Historic Profile from the Origins to the 50s).

Pope John Paul II and Monsignor Giussani

In 1969 he returned to guide the former GS group, which had broken away from Azione Cattolica in the wake of the tumultuous student rebellions that swept Europe following the events of May 1968. Under the new name Communion and Liberation, the movement Giussani founded attracted university students and adults in addition to high school students. Members of the movement, which Giussani led from 1969 until his death in 2005, became influential not only in the Church but also in politics and business.

In 1983 he was given the title of Monsignor by Pope John Paul II. Giussani outlined his views on politics in a famous address^[1] to an assembly of the Italian Christian Democratic party at Assago on February 6, 1987.

Giussani died in 2005. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI, delivered the homily at his funeral.^[2] Traces, the magazine of Communion and Liberation, published a retrospective issue on the life and work of Giussani in March 2005. He is interred in Milan's Cimitero Monumentale. Every day a large number of visitors come to pray before his tomb, and Mass is celebrated there daily.

On January 17, 2006, the Holy See officially recognized Giussani as the co-founder, along with Fr. Étienne Pernet, A.A, of the Sisters of Charity of the Assumption, a community of women religious.

Giussani's writings have been translated into many different languages, attracting a worldwide following.

Works

Books translated into English

PerCorso Trilogy

• The Religious Sense, McGill-Queen's University Press (October 1, 1997). ISBN 0-7735-1626-3.
• At the Origin of the Christian Claim, McGill-Queen's University Press (January 1, 1998). ISBN 0-7735-1627-1.
• Why the Church?, McGill-Queen's University Press (October, 2000). ISBN 0-7735-1707-3.

Other works translated into English

• Morality: Memory and Desire Ignatius Press (November 1, 1986) ISBN 0-89870-090-6
• He Is If He Changes 30Days (1994)
• Religious Awareness in Modern Man Communio 25, no. 1 (1998): 104-140.
• The Risk of EducationCrossroad (August 15, 2001) ISBN 0-8245-1899-3
• The Psalms Crossroad (June 2004) ISBN 0-8245-2124-2
• The Journey to Truth Is an Experience McGill-Queen's University Press (October 2006) ISBN 0-7735-3148-3

Selected online texts

• Luigi Giussani Works - Opera Omnia, in progress

Essays, book excerpts

• "The Kingdom of Caesar and Action" (1954)
• "Experience" (1963)
• "Simon, Do You Love Me?" (1998)
• "The Five Without" (1998)
• "Moved By The Infinite" (2003)
• "Faith Is Given Us That We Communicate It" (2004)

Speeches and addresses

• "From Utopia to Presence" (1976)
• "Religious Sense, Works and Politics" (1986)
• "In the Simplicity of my Heart I have gladly given You everything" (1998)
• "Woman, Do Not Weep!" (2002)

Interviews

• Excerpt from interview with Robi Ronza
• Interview with Angelo Scola
• Interview with Renato Farina

Quotes

• "For me, reason is openness to reality, a capacity to seize and affirm it in all its factors. For that other teacher, reason is the "measure" of all things, and a phenomenon becomes true only when it can be directly demonstrated." (The Religious Sense)

• "The method is imposed by the object!" (The Religious Sense)

• "Existence expresses itself, as ultimate ideal, in begging. The real protagonist of history is the beggar: Christ who begs for man's heart, and man's heart that begs for Christ." (Testimony before John Paul II, 1998)

• "I believe that unless the end of the world comes first, sixty or seventy years from now Christians and Jews can be one." (Interview, 2002)

• "[T.S. Eliot] asked himself "Has the Church failed mankind, or has mankind failed the Church?" . . . Both, both, because first and foremost it is mankind who failed the Church, because if I need something, I chase after it, if it goes away. No one chased after it . . . The Church began to fail mankind, as I see it, as we see it, because she forgot who Christ was, she did not rely on..., she was ashamed of Christ, of saying who Christ is." (Interview, 2004)

• "The faith is not given us in order that we preserve it, but in order that we communicate it. If we don't have the passion to communicate it, we don't preserve it." (Written contribution to the XXI plenary assembly of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, 2004)

References

1. ^ Religious Sense, Works and Politics
2. ^ Funeral Homily for Msgr. Luigi Giussani by Cardinal Ratzinger, published in Communio: International Catholic Review

Further reading

• Gordon Urquhart. The Pope's Armada: Unlocking the Secrets of Mysteries and Powerful New Sects in the Church, Bantam Press (June 1, 1995). ISBN 0-593-03388-4
• Davide Rondoni (Editor), Luigi Giussani (Introduction). Communion and Liberation: A Movement in the Church, McGill-Queen's University Press (April 2000). ISBN 0773520317
• Elisa Buzzi (Editor). A Generative Thought. An Introduction to the Works of Luigi Giussani, McGill-Queen's University Press (December 2003). ISBN 0773526129

External links

• Luigi Giussani Works - Opera Omnia, in progress
• The "Right Way" of Fr. Luigi Giussani by Sandro Magister, L'Espresso
• Italians mourn Catholic priest with far-reaching influence, Financial Times
• Editorial by Gregory Wolfe, Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion
• Communion and Liberation official site
• Works by or about Luigi Giussani in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Persondata
Name	Giussani, Luigi
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Date of birth	October 15, 1922
Place of birth
Date of death	February 22, 2005
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