From August 30 to September 2, the Equipe of the Communion and Liberation university students was held in La Thuile, bringing together more than 400 adults and young people from 16 countries around the world. During this meeting of people from different communities and places, we discovered the awareness of belonging to a single body, and the sharing of each person's experience was lived as a gift, as charity towards one another.

The title, “The Path to Freedom,” took up the work begun in the various communities during the summer vacations. Fr. Francesco Ferrari’s introduction, in which he referenced the many contributions that had been sent to him, framed the theme thus: “What does freedom consist of? It is not only free will or the absence of constraints. Freedom, Fr. Giussani taught us, is the satisfaction of a desire, of a need. It is an experience of fulfillment.”

This freedom is experienced in human companionship, at the same time a sign and place of Christ's companionship, which began for each person with an encounter. “But what does it mean to encounter Christ?” In these days we have been accompanied by some texts from A Revolution of Self. Life as Communion (1968-1970), a book that collects some of Fr. Giussani's interventions between 1968 and 1970.

After a moment of silence for everyone to prepare their heart, to welcome the richness of the assembly, our work began. What were the characteristics of this meeting? Paolo spoke about a group of young people from a poor neighborhood in Chile who met the priests of the St. Charles Fraternity. “These young people live giant dramas: drugs, prison, broken families. But when you ask them if there is hope for them, they answer by thinking of the faces of those priests with whom they experience the newness of an incredible love. For them, this is the beginning of liberation. And that is what happened to me as well.” Martino told us about a girl from his university who, after the death of a close friend whom she had been living with, looked for the students from the CLU. Although she did not know them well, she asked to be accompanied. After two months of friendship, she wrote that that house, where her friend had faced part of her illness, had become for her “full of life, a fertile ground, for new friendships to grow. A place full of a life that overcomes even death.” This encounter occurs in different ways for each person; its common characteristic is the birth of a presentiment, before which freedom is called to make a decision: “Because the content of that presentiment is the intuition of an unimaginable love, of a life full of meaning because it is a revelation of who God is, that God is love, and then life can be a positive adventure. Christ dead and risen, alive and present. This is within the initial intuition! The intuition of a fulfillment, of loving and being loved, the intuition of an impossible love, which has a name: Christ. No voice calls you like that.”

But how do you realize that you have met Christ? Because your life changes. Davide Prosperi witnessed to us the possibility of a change that allows the experience of a hundredfold, which “is not a measure, it is a multiplying factor. It means that you begin to see and live what you did not see and did not live before” and introduces the possibility of a new rereading of reality, that is, of recognizing ”how one's whole history is inscribed within a gaze of love that gives us the certainty of not being abandoned.” This encounters marks the beginning of a path.

During the second assembly we saw that, so often, our weaknesses and limitations seem to object to this path. So what does it mean that the community, that the Church, is the path of encounter with Christ? And how can this relationship be lived out in circumstances that seem unfavorable? Paolo, from Norway, told us: “Mine is a very small and sometimes intermittent community. This semester it was supposed to be just me, but then I found out that I had been given three other people to walk with me.” An amazement full of gratitude, because “the encounter with specific faces gives rise to the presentiment of something else, which becomes the center of our affection and intelligence, the center of what our heart seeks, which is the person of Christ. The more we know him, the more we return in amazement to those faces.” Then, if everything is born from the original love of Christ, everything I encounter is given for my destiny. If Christ is the center, we are never alone. It is possible, in every circumstance, to become aware of belonging to a story, to the Church. That is why the other is also a gift of His charity.

The gratuitousness we are the object of is expressed in our desire to offer the beauty we have received to the whole world. “I want to sing to you, Lord, as long as I have breath.” This expansion of the heart is the promise that is renewed within this companionship.