Introduction to the time of waiting for Pope Francis' Audience with Communion and Liberation. St. Peter's Square, March 7, 2015

What would a morning be like without encountering Him again, without being able to recognize Him present, a morning in which distraction or formalism prevailed? What would life be without You, Christ? It would be truly unbearable.

Only in recognizing this can we understand what grace happens every morning when the Lord chooses us again, waking us from our sleep to make Himself known as the companion of our journey, drawing us out of our forgetfulness to be able to recognize Him still alive, to make us understand who He is.

As He did with Mary Magdalene, calling her by name with such an intensity that it made her whole humanity vibrate: “Mary!”. There is no other Christ than the one who happened to Mary. From then on, there is no other Mary than the one defined by the call of Christ. Just as there is no other Paul than the one bowled over by Christ: “I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me.”

This did not happen exclusively in the past. We have seen it in the present. “When we grow up, this word [Christ] can be well known, but for many people He is not encountered; He is not really experienced as present. On the contrary, Christ collided with my life–Fr. Giussani said–my life ran up against Christ, precisely so that I would learn to understand how He is the nerve center, the crucial point of everything, of my whole life. Christ is the life of my life.” Christ collided with his life so that he could experience that “the greatest joy of a person’s life is feeling Jesus Christ alive and vibrant in the flesh of one’s own thought and one’s own heart.” What happened to Fr. Giussani, that he could only continually repeat Möhler’s line, “I think I would not wish to live any longer if I could not hear Him speak”?

Through him the event of Christ reaches us too, wretches that we are. “As we go on maturing, we are a spectacle for ourselves, and, God willing, for others, too. A spectacle, in other words, of limitation and betrayal, and therefore of humiliation, and at the same time of inexhaustible certainty in the power of grace that is given us and is renewed every morning.” (Fr. Giussani).

That Grace began to penetrate into the world through Our Lady, and today reaches us, too, to fill the empty amphora of our hearts. Let us prayerfully ask that it also find the same welcome in us.