Why Traces?

A trace is a sign, the sign of a presence, the signature of a presence. It is like the visible gesture of a presence stamped in an environment that cannot contain it fully, in which it is present precisely as traces.
A trace always points beyond itself, to the original presence that engraved it in our world. The Invisible is grasped through its visible trace: in the visible trace of God we are moved to the love of the God we cannot see (cf. the preface of Christmas day).
One of the great tragedies of the modern age is the loss of the ability to grasp the presence of the Mystery through its traces. Ours has been the age of what Walker Percy described as the "evacuation of the sign." Signs have been emptied of their meaning. Words no longer signify reality. This is the greatest poverty of our age. Their meaning is determined by power. We have become like "wingless chickens," Flannery O'Connor said: in order to be more commercially attractive, they are deprived of their ability to jump up and down. We too have been rendered unable to experience what true depth is. Like the ants and the snail in Garcia Lorca's The Adventures of a Bourgeois Snail, we can no longer see the stars.
Yet, liberation from the spiritual diminishment imposed by artificial culture is possible. The key is the reality of an encounter with an exceptional presence. The human person is created in the image of God. Its links with this Mystery cannot be totally destroyed. Deeply engraved in the very structure of the human self, in the "heart" of each human being, is a thirst for the Infinite Mystery which cannot be fully quenched by anything else. It takes the form of original demands or exigencies for truth, goodness and beauty that propel or move man towards his eternal destiny. These can be "activated" only by an invitation that breaks through our solitude and demonstrates a correspondence with what our heart seeks. This encounter is the beginning of liberation.
This magazine is devoted to help us to recapture the ability to detect and grasp the traces of the Mystery of our origins and our destiny. Traces is printed monthly in Italian (Tracce), in Spanish (Huellas) and in other languages. With this issue it will begin to be printed in English, containing in addition articles reflecting the particular situation of our English-speaking readers.
Traces is the publication of the movement Communion and Liberation, founded in Milan, Italy, by Monsignor Luigi Giussani. Addressing Pope John Paul II during the meeting between the Pope and over half a million representatives of the new movements and ecclesial communities in the Catholic Church, Msgr. Giussani said that the fact that has moved and sustained him-being thus the defining charism of our Movement-is the wonder at the mystery of man expressed by the eighth Psalm: "When I consider the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have ordained: What is man that you are mindful of him? And the son of man which you visit him?".
The answer to this question is found in the face, the countenance, the exceptional presence of one man, Jesus of Nazareth. In him we have come to discover the face of man.
Jesus Christ is the countenance of man, of every man and woman that has ever existed and will ever exist, because he is Emmanuel, God-with-us, the Absolute Proximity of God. Jesus Christ is the perfect Trace of the Mystery of a God who is absolute mercy and love. As such Jesus Christ is the fullest revelation of the mystery of man, of his origin and destiny, the center of history and the universe, the measure of what it means to be a human person, the consistency and meaning of all reality. The members of Communion and Liberation have encountered this exceptional presence of Christ in our friendship, living the life of the Catholic Church, guided and sustained by the charism of our founder.
The publication of Traces in English betokens the desire to increase efforts to offer the witness of the movement as a service to the Church and the people in the English-speaking lands of the world. In its pages you will read of the experiences of the members of our movement as they live intensely the challenges of the present time with the joy and the hope of having broken through the limits imposed by a culture afraid of the risk of love for the infinite. English is the dominant language of the world today: in science, technology, economics, diplomacy. From Msgr. Giussani's charism we have learned to love this world which is the stage of the human drama, to discard no experience that is authentically human and, as such, inseparable from the life of Christ. Traces, in English, will allow us to offer our experiences, judgements, observations and proposals about human life to more people than ever before, whatever their religious convictions.
At the last session of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI addressed all the humanists of the modern world who have come to believe that faith in God is an obstacle to human liberation and development. He voiced this plea to them: "We call upon them who term themselves modern humanists, and who have renounced the transcendent value of the highest realities, to give the council credit at least for one quality and to recognize our own new type of humanism: we, too, in fact, we more than any others, venerate mankind."
Traces in English aims to witness anew to this claim.