There is something that is changing the young people of CLU here at Notre Dame. It’s easy for the students to consider School of Community as just another of the thousands of activities, including religious ones, that the college offers. It’s easy to perceive the Movement as just “the night for School of Community” and then everyone goes off to his or her own life. This year, little by little, Sofia has become a tornado. As she always says, she has realized that her encounter with the Movement has created a life that has seized her and that she has a great passion for Fr. Giussani. She invites everyone to things, and following her example, others have begun to do the same. A real movement has been created. On their own initiative, they’ve started to recite Lauds, to eat breakfast together, to meet on weekends, and to look for each other as in a true companionship. Sofia and others in the community wanted to do the Way of the Cross on Palm Sunday, so they started to organize it a couple of weeks before. They did everything on their own. Ila and I asked them if they wanted to start reading the premises outlined in The Religious Sense. We invited them to brunch to talk about the first premise. Fifteen students came, three of them new. They had all done the reading and it was a beautiful, true dialogue. It is evident that something is moving them in a new and unthinkable way. It seems to me that what’s happening to them is what Fr. Giussani relates when he talks about the beginning of the Movement. It’s happening to them and to us–to Ila, myself, and the other adults like Maria, Denise, and Lucia, who are attracted to following them.

Chiara, Notre Dame (USA)