Message sent to CL on the occasion of Fr. Giussani death by Cardinal Theodore Edgar McCarrick

Since we are in Holy Week, my thoughts about Msgr. Giussani turn to the profoundly significant words that he wrote in Egli Solo È!. In that book of meditations on the Way of the Cross, Don Luigi writes-(if you will forgive this inexact translation), “We too are among the murderers of Christ like all the others, but for us it is totally different, just as His relationship with us is a totally different one. His Presence in our lives remains so special because it is truly part of us. In His mercy, He has chosen us, He has pardoned us, embraced us, and continues to embrace us.”
Luigi Giussani lived his life in the embrace of God. To him, the Presence of Jesus was so real that he could not conceive of life without it. All his teaching calls us into deeper communion with the living Christ. And it is Christ and only Christ who calls us to freedom, to liberation, and to the joy that His constant Presence brings to each one of us, if we only allow that Presence to fill our lives with the fire of His love. We will miss the eloquent and mystic voice of Msgr. Giussani, but all of us who followed him, or who admired him from afar, will surely be graced now even more by his powerful prayers.
Cardinal Theodore Edgar McCarrick,
Archibishop of Washington, DC