I have been wanting to write a post more specifically on Communion and Liberation, the lay movement to which I have belonged for almost 20 years. Communion and Liberation (CL) was founded in the 1950s in Milan, Italy and is now present in 90 countries, including the US, including the Diocese of Phoenix, and starting on Friday including Saints Simon and Jude Cathedral.
What is Communion and Liberation?
Communion and Liberation, in its essence, is a proposal for education in the Catholic faith. It is an education that doesn’t end at a certain age, but lasts a lifetime because it is always being renewed and deepened. The same is true of the Gospel, which reveals new discoveries even after we’ve heard it a thousand times. The same is true in the experience of love, of artistic creativity, and even in the simplicity of everyday life. The search for what is true, beautiful, and good, and for happiness is never-ending. This is Christianity: the adventure of life, not a kind of training for life.
CL is a proposal for education in Christian maturity. I know that this could mean everything and nothing. So what is it that makes CL unique? What characterizes this charism? I will offer a couple of points and then talk about my own experience of this charism.
Father Giussani, the founder of CL, taught that the Christianity is at heart not a moral or doctrinal system but an event, an encounter with a presence, the presence of God-made-man, Jesus Christ. When faced with the widespread ignorance of the Christian event among young people in the 1950s (all of whom were well-catechized and moral upright), Giussani left his job teaching and a seminary and entered the high schools of Milan as a religion teacher. From there, he proposed Christianity as an event, an encounter, not just the memory of an encounter. Christianity is happening today in the Church, and we can help each other to recognize Christ’s presence. This “help” that we give each other to recognize the event of Christ in our life is what Giussani means by education. Christian maturity, then, happens the more I enter into a living relationship with Christ here and now, and the more Christ introduces me into his relationship to the Father.
It is possible to know Christ as the answer here and now because I take seriously the questions of my humanity. Giussani loved to quote Reinhold Niebuhr, who said, “Nothing is worse than the answer to a question no one is asking.” By taking the questions that I have, the question that I am, seriously, I can truly understand the answer offered in Jesus Christ. The question that the young people were asking in Giussani’s day was the question of “liberation”, of freedom, of how to be truly free. And these young people did not even think to look to the Church for the answer to this question; instead, their minds were captured by the various forms of political liberation, especially Communism, offered in their day. Giussani took these questions seriously, and offered the Communion of the Church as the most adequate response to our human search for Liberation. Thus, Communion and Liberation.
Now to my experience: I met CL in 2005 when I found a magazine called Traces on the table at a coffee shop in Phoenix. The local CL community just happened to have their meetings at Cafe Fiat in Central Phoenix and had left the magazine there in hopes that someone might pick it up. Later that week, someone named Matt Henry, a seminarian home from Oregon, picked up the magazine and read a short passage in which Giussani was commenting on the Gospel encounter between Jesus, John, and Andrew. “What are you looking for?” “Come and see.” Giussani explained these words in such a compelling way that I was hooked. When I went back to the seminary in Oregon I got as many books as I could find of Father Giussani in the Mount Angel Library. Fast-forward another year and I am in Denver, still reading Giussani, and hear one of my professors speak in a way that sounded a lot like Giussani. I asked him if he had ever heard of Giussani, and the professor told me that he was part of a movement founded by Giussani and would I like to come. And so I attended my first CL meeting in 2006, a meeting called School of Community. And so the story goes. I was hooked at how these people were trying to see Christ living and active in their daily lives and helping each other not to settle for easy answers in their lives. I kept going, and in 2010, when I finally moved back to Phoenix, I met the local CL community in my home Diocese.
Fast-forward a couple more years and I am in Italy for further study. CL is really big in Italy. In Rome, there were 1,000 adults, not including college and high school students who also have their own Schools of Community. Every weekend, the American priests in my house would be amazed that I was going to another Italian city to meet more “friends”, people to whom I was connected through CL. Back in the US, where there might be 1,000 adults in the whole country, I have been a part of CL communities in Arizona and Texas, and have developed friendships with people in CL all over the country. Equipped with my theological knowledge, my love of Giussani, and my now-fluent Italian, I started translating articles and books by or about Giussani. I still do that work today. You can find some of the books I translated in the Cathedral Gift Shop.
That is how I met CL and how it has continued to be a part of my life. We are a small group in Phoenix of about 15 people or so. Small but mighty! So, why do I stay? I will put it like this: It is one of the few places in the Church where we ask not so much “what” we believe, or “how” we are to act, or “why” is the faith reasonable, but “where” is Jesus happening today. It is not that we don’t care about what or how or why, but the most interesting part of the Christian adventure is where, where Jesus is showing himself alive and present in our world and in our lives today. There are so many voices, even in the Church, that would treat Christ as a “bel ricordo”, a nice memory, and then life in the Church just becomes a competition of ideologies vying for the power of who gets to interpret that past event. But if Christ is showing up today—in the sacraments, in the surprising encounters, in the unexpected—then life does not depend on how well I can manage things for myself. Life depends on Christ present. And this is freedom / liberation! And Christ present means the friendship / communion of the Church that touches my life in specific faces. Giussani would say that the Church touches all of us through a particular “accent”, and CL is one such accent (or “charism”) in the life of the Church.
Which brings me to the School of Community… School of Community is the weekly catechesis of Communion and Liberation. It is a place where we talk about Christ present, about the questions that really matter, and about the unexpected ways that God is answering those questions today. We do not talk about Church politics or about liturgical niceties (generally), but about the adventure of life in Christ. The word for this is “experience”, but experience not in the sense of my subjectivity ruling over everything. Experience in this context means my life, judged in the light of an authoritative reading. This reading is generally something from Servant of God (Did I mention that? His cause for canonization has started!) Luigi Giussani, or from one of the Popes, or from a retreat given by the movement of CL. We allow this text to shed light on what happened in our week, to help us understand where Christ has been at work. It is actually the opposite of subjectivity. It is the reality of our life judged in the light of an authority. And the results, at least in my experience, have been explosive!
Oh, and we sing a lot!
Maybe everything that I wrote today just sounds like gobbledygook, but hopefully intriguing gobbledygook. In the end, I can only invite you to “come and see”.
And so, this Friday begins the CL adventure at Saints Simon and Jude Cathedral. 7pm in the school library (next to the big arch at the entrance of the school). We would love to have you, either this week or in the weeks to come. Thanks for reading!