A Winning Attraction

WAEL FAROUQ
Professor of Arabic and Islamic History and Philosophy at Cairo University
One Step toward an Identification
I would like to express three things that I feel in my heart about the meeting between the Movement and His Holiness Pope Benedict.
1. The invitation I was given to take part in this gesture was very significant to me. It was an invitation to share in the life of dear people, of a dear person. Whoever knows Arabic culture will perhaps be even better able to understand what it means for me to have been invited to share in such an important gesture in the life of friends.
2. I was thrilled to see and listen to the Pope in person; he is a man with a spirit as pure as a child’s. If I may make a comparison, it was just like what I felt when I first saw Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, a work that I had long loved but only known through photographs and reproductions in books.
3. I realized that consciousness lives in relationships. It was the encounter which I had that enables me to understand. Being there in Rome was another step in that identification that enables me to re-read my whole history and my culture with new eyes.

OSCAR GIANNINO
Editor, Libero Mercato
Me, My Mother, and Fr. Giussani
Last March 24th, in St. Peter’s Square, I was there too with the whole Movement, in the rain, which came pelting down at times, and with my stick to support me. To tell the truth, I was only bothered by the rain toward the end; it didn’t trouble me much. I only really noticed it when the meeting with the Pope was over. One reason I wasn’t bothered was that there was someone at my side, Roberto Mazzotta, President of the BPM, who was so kind as to shelter me under a spare umbrella he had.
Throughout the ceremony, even before it began and then while Fr. Carrón was reminding us all of the significance of this meeting on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the pontifical recognition of the Movement, the invitation to all to “become beggars” in the world was fused with the absolutely indelible memory of my first meeting with the person we knew as “Don Gius.” The meeting came late in life, actually. I’d begun reading everything about Fr. Giussani I could lay hands on–books and transcripts of introductions to historical seminars of GS and the Movement, not many years ago. All this would take time to explain, and I’m not sure it would be of interest.
Let’s put it like this. I grew up in a fiercely secular culture. But that means little. It wouldn’t even be right to say “laicist,” the term being used today, ever since politics has again divided Italy on questions like de facto marriage and homosexual unions. Not even “laicist” would adequately express the hardness of my convictions, from pre-adolescence until I was well over 20 years old. When I was not quite 14, I joined a political party, partly because I was fascinated by the rigor and moral intransigence of its leader, Ugo La Malfa (in 1974, people my age tended to choose very different parties). Above all, though, it was because I saw it as the best party and, more than any other, the heir to the anticlericalism.
You have to understand that my anticlerical extremism was actually not a tough illiberal conviction, which would already make me despise it today. It was something very different, anchored in my upbringing and the development of my character.
That anti-ecclesiastical extremism had a private side to it, not public or political. It was a reaction to my childhood and the strong faith that always nurtured my mother, sustaining her day by day, ever since I can remember. Hers was a belief anchored in the Church as a shared community of salvation and redemption, with utter respect for the doctrines and teaching of the hierarchy. In my eyes, as a precocious reader, it came to seem naively folksy, with all those rosaries and prayers to the Madonna, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the whole calendar of saints. It struck me as too fatalistic and submissive, this popular faith of my mother, too little convinced of what will power and individual tenacity can do to change this world and above all the lives of each of us. So, as a reaction, I grew up like ivy climbing up the wall of denial of the Church and its ministers. And it did not help that in every generation my mother’s family had given at least one son through vocation to Holy Mother Church. As a boy, traveling the world and seeing the really terrible inequalities in income and education in certain regions of the planet, I found it hard to reconcile them with the life of a papal nuncio like my mother’s brother, now in the Vatican State Secretariat. But I’ll cut this short. In the early nineties, my life changed sharply. Let’s just say a lot of things went wrong and made me reflect very, very deeply on the alleged coherence which I believed had inspired my private and public life (for years I had been one of the leaders of a political party and its national spokesman).
My reflections lasted some years, and they took the only form I’m capable of: I read like one possessed. I also returned to the Book, now in a very different spirit than my youthful times, when I only cared for Formgeschichte and the textual exegesis of the Bultmann and Cullman School, thanks to an inspiriting encounter with a teacher in high school. Now I found a very different reality in Joshua ben Joseph made man and suffering flesh. But here I am not concerned with my journey to the mystery of Christ, but with Don Gius. And you would never have understood anything of the meeting, if I had not troubled you with the preliminaries.
In those years, I was mulling things over day after day, so that much of what I had thought and done now appeared in a totally different light. At a certain point, I talked to some of the friends that I still used to see in Rome from our days at high school in Turin. At the very time when I was plunging into all his books that I could lay hands on, they told me it was not so impossible to meet Fr. Giussani after all. The meeting did take place, practically more by chance than good management, since I hadn’t scheduled an appointment and I had an urgent engagement for the same hour, which only fell through at the last moment.
We spoke for only a few minutes, but it was one of those experiences that delve deep inside you. In some way, my friends–those I’d stood against at the high school elections, naturally, and with whom I had continued to argue in the years when they were working for Il Sabato–by the irony of fate and our ability to rethink ourselves over a period of time, had clearly talked to Fr. Giussani about me. I was the assistant editor of a monthly that was about to become a weekly, and I was already writing about the Church and Catholics in a very different way from in the past.
But Fr. Giussani said nothing of all this. To my amazement, he spoke to me of my mother. He left me without words, utterly overwhelmed. He told me that his mother’s name was the same as mine, and that we have to lend ear, heart, and an open mind to mothers, to the lessons of life expressed day by day in their actions, thoughts, and even their omissions. He spoke so gently, but at the same time paternally, without insistence yet piercing straight to the heart, with a smile on his lips and in that tone both soft and determined that you all know so much better than I.
There and then it struck me as a singular coincidence. But I never freed myself from the nagging sense of guilt until, many months later, I unburdened myself in a long talk with my mother. We spoke of her faith, of my past choices, and of the depth of a commitment certainly directed toward eternal life, as Fr. Giussani said, but already repaid a hundredfold here below, among men and women, for them and with them, without forgetting for a single instant the value of taking this choice into every nook and cranny of our lives, working and loving day by day.
I have been long-winded. I apologize. These were my thoughts as the rain fell in St. Peter’s Square. And I will thank Don Gius from my heart until the last moment of my labors here on earth.

EMILIO FEDE
Director of Channel TG4
Two Hours Live
that Saturday in St. Peter’s Square. Those thousands of people from all over the world who came to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation. Those prayers, almost murmured, echoed by the music. And those banners extolling faith in God.
The live images of TG4’s Special are eloquent, as is the testimony of those who dedicate to the honor of God their commitment, their way of being in a society all too often distracted and mortified by insolence, by selfishness. Speaking live, I ask a Spanish journalist what the sense of belonging means to her, and she replies, almost with tears in her eyes: “Always being ready to follow the path that this community has shown us.”
There are a hundred thousand people in the square. They come from more than seventy countries around the globe. The Pope welcomes them and blesses them and utters words that contain the essence of the feeling that almost hangs physically in that atmosphere, and which none of us will ever forget.
When I was asked to provide a commentary on that transmission I was afraid it was a task beyond me. Then my memory went back Christmas Eve 1981–when I was director of TG1–and a young priest of Communion and Liberation enabled me to be received by Pope Wojtyla. There, in a private chapel, he administered the Sacrament of Communion to me. And perhaps I did succeed in finding the right tone and the right words. The right words, too, when I interviewed Fr. Julián Carrón who, in the name of Fr. Luigi Giussani, its founder, is today the guide of this Fraternity.

Magdi Allam
Assistant Editor, Corriere della Sera
A Sign of Destiny
it was the first time I had come to St. Peter’s Square to see and applaud the Pope. And probably it is a sign of destiny that the Supreme Pontiff was Benedict XVI, who more than any other embodies that happy association between faith and reason with which I identify myself totally, to the point where I have been called a “Ratzingerian Muslim.” And in the same way it was certainly no accident that found me there, in the midst of my friends from Communion and Liberation, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the foundation of the Fraternity of Fr. Giussani’s Movement, with which I share a spirituality founded on the experience of an encounter between people of good will and the supremacy of the foundational values of our humanity. I experienced it as an extraordinary manifestation of spiritual fellowship between the Guide and the congregation of the faithful, who feel they are participating in a human and religious mission in defense of life, of truth, and of freedom. And I was among them, with conviction, passion, and determination.

Maria Rosaria Parruti
Magistrate for the Enforcement of Sentences, Pescara
Convicts, a Holiday for Prison Guards, and Those Two Rented Vans
I got the idea of inviting a group of convicts and prison guards from the penitentiaries of Lanciano and Vasto to the meeting with the Pope in St. Peter’s Square because, together with the chaplain of the prison of Vasto, long a friend of mine, I wanted the beauty of the encounter with Christ that had touched me to reach the people I work with every day. I wanted, in short, the opportunity that I had been given to reach them as well.
A person who is sent to prison must, no doubt, have committed some grievous error, which has led to their committal. But nearly always the people who are in this situation have also been denied many of life’s opportunities. What is the rehabilitation our Italian Constitution speaks of in Article 27, if not the attempt to offer these people an opportunity to change? We ask them to reform themselves, but this is possible only if they are aware of their errors.
So it was that we decided to organize the day’s journey. What moved me most was when difficulties arose (because of an error, the presence of the prison officers was not recognized as part of their duty, and therefore no vehicles were made available for the use of the guards and prisoners), the group of prison guards on duty decided to accompany the prisoners by using their holidays, and they rented two nine-seater vans to make up for the lack of transport. They wanted, in short, to be present, even though it meant depriving themselves of a day’s holiday and paying for the transport for all! To my mind, this bore remarkable witness to what Fr. Carrón said to the Pope: “Man’s heart is still capable of recognizing beauty, if we find it on our path.”
There were sixteen of us in all. We were accompanied and assisted by my friends, who gave us passes enabling us to get seats for the occasion.
For obvious security reasons, the detainees were not furnished with umbrellas, but this was also an opportunity for sharing. Together with the agents, we tried to shelter everyone. Detainees and agents were deeply impressed by the intensity of the care everyone showed in following the gestures of the ceremony, by their chorality. Even the rain was an opportunity to tell each other that without some effort nothing good can be constructed.
To those who devoted their energy to organizing the journey, I subsequently sent the very fine article by Marina Corradi published in Avvenire the following day. It struck me as a highly effective judgment on our experience and expressed the hope that the seed sown and all that we saw and understood may flower when and as God chooses.

PAOLO ZANINONI
Editorial Director, Rizzoli
A Non-Aggressive Certainty
of that day, March 24th, I preserve the memory of the powerful words of the Psalms ringing out across the square, so strong and essential that I felt I was hearing them for the first time that day. I found in that voice a non-aggressive certainty, a consciousness free from prejudice that we rarely encounter nowadays, and which harmonized well with the endless smiles of that day. Smiles everywhere, even after journeys that I imagine were laborious, even under a downpour that may have seemed a nuisance but actually created an unexpected happiness.