Davide Prosperi
Good evening everyone, welcome. I greet and thank all of you here at the Dal Verme Theater in Milan and all the people connected from Italy and abroad. I know, from our friends who find themselves in the various venues where the remote viewings have been set up, that several personalities from the Church and civil society are taking part in this meeting, as well as many people who do not belong to the Communion and Liberation movement: thank you for your presence and I hope that this will be another opportunity to get to know each other better. We have just listened to Fr. Giussani introduce the theme of religious sense this way: “It is not only a fact, an event, but the most impressive and most in- eradicable fact in human history“ (Episode 1 of the Il senso religioso [The Religious Sense] podcast; min 5:13). The audio is taken from the podcast produced by Choramedia and available online, which covers all the contents of the book The Religious Sense, for the first time with Fr. Giussani’s own live voice.

Already in this excerpt, albeit brief, that we listened to, one grasps very well–I think–the intensity with which Fr. Giussani introduced first of all young people, but also anyone he met, to the theme of religious sense, the vibrant passion with which he invited to take seriously with all one’s reason and all one’s humanity that desire for meaning, that tension towards the infinite that every man experiences and finds oneself in. On the other hand, this very convictionof his has always fueled his untiring commitment to the education of young people. We recall a famous sentence of his from his book Porta la speranza: “We suffocate young people if we demand from them an enthusiasm towards limited things” (Porta la speranza [Bring Hope], Marietti 1820, Genoa 1997, p. 68). For Fr. Giussani, any proposal that is not aimed at opening one’s gaze, at introducing an experience of total meaning for existence, is limited [...]

Download the full text