To those who suffer, God does not provide arguments which explain everything; rather, His response is that of an accompanying presence.” In the CL Easter poster, the pope tells us that “God Himself wishes to share this path with us,” in the scandalously...
Pope Francis’s homily at the funeral of Benedict XVI, Saint Peter’s Square, January 5, 2023 “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Lk 23:46). These were the final words spoken by the Lord on the cross; his last breath, as it were, which summed...
"I invite you to accompany me in the prophecy for peace¬–Christ, Lord of peace! The increasingly violent and belligerent world really frightens me; I tell you truly, it frightens me" (Francis, Audience with Communion and Liberation, October 15, 2022). We...
“The present moment, from then on, was no longer banal for me.” This was the newness introduced in a watershed moment in the life of Luigi Giussani in his first year of high school, when what he called "the beautiful day” happened. His story of that day...
They’re the most alive thing I’ve ever encountered,” says Luis from Puerto Rico, speaking of friends he’d met at his university. This issue offers the testimonies of university students in various parts of the world who are reliving “the origin of...
During a recent interview, the Belarusian Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, reflecting on the war, asked herself what sparked the series of events that led up to this point; that is, what happened to the great “Russian soul,” to the incredible...
The conflict in Ukraine has awakened a distress that has all the weight of history and of the future, with its rupture of the global order and of the tragic illusion that it can be recreated at the expense of the absolute concreteness of the person. What...
“Christ ‘bumped into’ my life, my life ‘bumped into’ Christ, precisely so that I should learn to understand that He is the central point of everything, of the whole of my life. Christ is the life of my life: in Him is summed up all that I would desire,...
The December issue opens with the documents that have marked the different steps undertaken in recent weeks, following the resignation of Fr. Julián Carrón from his position as President of the Fraternity of CL: a choice made "to help the change of...
Those who saw the exhibit at the Meeting of Rimini on secularization, which we cover at the beginning of this issue, saw the images of churches transformed into restaurants, museums, or pools, and heard the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor say that for...
The present is the only thing we have. The paradox is that precisely because we have it, we feel this inexhaustible tension to try to live it, to be present in the present. It is never entirely full and for this reason it catalyzes in us a continual...
We do not want to look at the family and its inner workings under a microscope, but rather to open a window onto the horizon that allows it to breathe. The family, fragile and irreplaceable. Today, the attempt to “protect human affairs from their frailty”...
How do we react in situations that are not right?” Pope Francis asked at a certain point during his visit to Iraq. “In the face of adversity, there are always two temptations,” he said, “running away or getting angry,” neither of which achieves anything....
A year after the pandemic began, the data about how children and teens are suffering is alarming. And what would happen if we saw the same data about adults? We would see that today’s denialism is reducing the problem of education to classrooms and...
"The miracle that floors the world is when people who are strangers treat one another as brothers.” The title on the cover of this issue refers to these words, spoken by Fr. Luigi Giussani (the anniversary of whose death sixteen years ago is this month,...
“Hope is a certainty about the future based on a present reality.” Today, can anyone say something so solid without being considered naive or shameless? Read one by one, these words of Fr. Giussani’s are a ray of light in a dense fog. They greet us at the...
A line of Fr. Giussani’s has been recurring often in our conversations and work together in recent weeks, a sign of how much it struck those who heard it at the CL Beginning Day (see the most recent issue of Traces), and also a sign of how we recognize it...
He described today’s world in six words. But he did it 150 years ago, when certain self-evident principles still held up and uncertainty had not seeped into the root of everything. Even so, Friedrich Nietzsche’s line captures today’s dramatic situation:...
There is nothing more wondrous than seeing the flowering of a person’s humanity. Certainly, it almost always happens in a subtle and hidden way, growing a bit at a time, step by step, and one hardly even realizes that it is happening. With only a few...
If one says “school,” other words immediately come to mind. For example, “future,” because the "tomorrow” of any society, at every time in its history, is shaped there, in the classrooms. Or we might think of “hope,” a close cousin of the expectation for...
It will not be the usual summer–that is for certain. In the age of the pandemic, habits have been uprooted all over the place, one after another. These months, too, will be a strange patchwork of commitments to catch up on and forced pauses, time for...