“I care about my freedom.” Thus resounded Fr. Giussani’s voice, forty years ago, at the Rimini Meeting: “Freedom is indispensable: there is no person, no self, except in freedom.” Our age knows how true this is. There is no more pervasive ideal. At the...
The Jubilee of 2025 will be dedicated to a matter that has become increasingly pertinent to everyone and to the everyday: hope. In the Bull of Indiction for the Jubilee, Pope Francis poses several questions: Where does our certainty lie? What is the...
As you will find well expressed by philosopher Francesco Botturi in the first article of this issue, the place given to those who suffer, and thus to those who care for life even in the most difficult situations, is the measure of a civilization’s...
Artificial intelligence is at the center of the world, the protagonist of debates in every sphere. Even for the pope, who dedicated his Message for Peace to it, it is among the priorities for reflection, raising urgent questions about its impact, from the...
“No explosion, wherever it may resound, over the earth, under the earth, or in the boundless spaces of the cosmos, can ever deafen the heart of those who have heard these electrifying words of the Gospel: ‘The Word became flesh.’” The man who wrote these...
"Faith makes me conceive and mobilize my relationship with the things that interest me in a different way, and so a different experience of humanity is created, and this is the test of faith.” Giussani spoke thus to the Movement’s university students...
This issue looks at Fr. Giussani’s bold realism: “It is not realistic for a person to live without this openness to the impossible. As it says in The Religious Sense, the reality of the human person is a relationship with the infinite. The infinite or the...
Just a few syllables. “And who am I?” Leopardi’s brief and boundless verse voices one of the fundamental questions of human life, in which Fr. Giussani identifies the “heart” of the human person, the ultimate, structural material of which we are made. It...
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....