Your Excellency,

I thank you on behalf of all the Communion and Liberation communities present in the Diocese of Milan for having celebrated with us this Holy Mass dedicated to Fr. Giussani and to the Fraternity, and hosting us in our beautiful Cathedral.
I thank you in particular for your words this evening, which for us are a further sign of the closeness and affection that you constantly express towards the life of our communities, their responsible, and each one of us, making your authoritative guidance a concrete and certain sign of the Church’s embrace of us all.

In the path we are following in obedience to the Pope and to the Church, which is also a path of renewal and rediscovery of what is essential in the charism given by God to Fr. Giussani and that we have inherited, there is a fundamental point to which we tentatively wish to look, as the intention addressed to Our Lady in this celebration says: unity among us in following the Church. Aware of the task that has been entrusted to us, we thus wish to commemorate Fr. Giussani by first of all taking care of our unity–as the Holy Father also urged us to do in a letter that he recently sent to the entire movement–so as to contribute to the building of the Church and, as God wills, to bring to the world the proclamation that the presence of Christ is the hope for men and women of all times.

The impetus of the mission, of the gift of ourselves in response to the call we have received, helps us to identify with Fr. Giussani’s “full” and overflowing heart and when he climbed the steps of the Berchet high school, right here in Milan, beginning the great adventure of which we are part and for which we are here now. And what we are becoming more aware of in this year’s journey, Your Excellency, concerns precisely the origin of our being together: it is in fact through an experienced and overwhelming correspondence of the heart, which came about through the charism given to Fr. Giussani, and illuminated by the grace of faith, that we have bound ourselves to the event of Christ in the form of this companionship. We would not be here if something had not touched our humanity so deeply to make us say, like Peter, in those moments when our measure is exceeded by a greater measure: “Even if we do not understand what you say, if we go away, to whom shall we go? Only you have words that give meaning to life.” In an unpublished text that we have recently published, Fr. Giussani reminds us that “Christianity is the story of men who in some way, coming into contact with this event, with the event of Christ, with this fact in history, followed Him, each one as they could, each as they can […] Morality is striving that happens like following, and you follow as well as you can, as you are able, according to the grace given to you.”

We therefore renew our total willingness to respond as we can to the needs of the Church and we entrust ourselves to you and to your prayers to reaffirm even more strongly, aware of all our limitations, what we hold dear more than anything else: Christ, the “God made man,” our joy and our salvation.

Thank you Excellency!