As every year, the Movement of CL offers a beautiful image and text as an aid to live Easter.

This year, the image is a painting of the Washing of the Feet by Giotto (Scrovegni Chapel, 1303/1305, Padua).

The text consists of two quotes. The first, Pope Francis, is taken from the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii gaudium p. 164 to 165 and 266.
The second, by Luigi Giussani, is from the book The Risk of Education, Rizzoli, Milan, 2005, p. 20-21.


Here are the two texts:

“Jesus Christ loves you; He gave His life to save you; and now He is living at your side every day to enlighten, strengthen and free you.” This first proclamation is called “first” not because it exists at the beginning and can then be forgotten or replaced by other more important things. It is first in a qualitative sense because it is the principal proclamation, the one which we must hear again and again in different ways. It is the message capable of responding to the desire for the infinite which abides in every human heart. But this conviction has to be sustained by our own constantly renewed experience of savoring Christ’s friendship and His message, convinced from personal experience that it is not the same thing to have known Jesus as not to have known Him, not the same thing to walk with Him as to walk blindly. We know well that with Jesus life becomes richer and that with Him it is easier to find meaning in everything.
(Pope Francis)


As a result of the education I received at home, my seminary training, and my reflections later in life, I came to believe deeply that only a faith arising from life experience and confirmed by it (and, therefore, relevant to life’s needs) could be sufficiently strong to survive in a world where everything, everything pointed in the opposite direction.
Showing the relevance of faith to life’s needs, and therefore–and this “therefore” is important for me–showing that faith is rational, implies a specific concept of rationality. When we say that faith exalts rationality, we mean that faith corresponds to some fundamental, original need that all men and women feel in their hearts. It follows that a justification of faith entails describing ever more amply and intensely the effects of the presence of Christ in the life of the authentic Church, the Church whose “guard” is the Roman Pope.
(Luigi Giussani)