Message sent to CL on the occasion of Fr. Giussani death by Chiara Lubich

I have a memory of Msgr. Giussani that I’ll never forget. I had met with him in Milan in November 1998, shortly after that historic meeting of the movements with the Pope in Saint Peter’s Square, on the eve of Pentecost that year. It is one of the few times that I’ve had the impression of meeting a saint, a holiness achieved with not little suffering. I had another strong impression, which I repeated to his collaborators: “I’ve met an authentic charism!” On that Pentecost eve, the Pope had asked of us “communion and commitment.” For this reason, I went to Milan. That meeting was, for all of us, as Msgr. Giussani also wrote later in a letter to his Fraternity, “the greatest day of our history.” And he added, “I also said so to Chiara and Kiko, who were next to me in Saint Peter’s Square: How, on these occasions, can we not cry out our unity?” “Our responsibility is for unity, to the point of valuing even the least little good thing in the other.” From that time on, occasions have not lacked for growing in reciprocal knowledge and in communion, both personal and as movements, in Italy and abroad. There remains in my heart an immense gratitude for his life, spent without stinting in the service of a charism that has injected into the Church a new flow of intense spiritual life, throwing wide open to thousands and thousands of men and women of the world the personal encounter with Jesus, and evoking many concrete works in response to the longings of our time. Now my and your prayer is not only for him, but for his Work, in the certainty that it will bear new, greatly abundant fruit in the Spirit.
Chiara Lubich, Focolari Movement