Perhaps there is yet another reason to go to the Rimini Meeting this year. The volunteers and workers who are its protagonists, those who visit it, and all those who profess a love of freedom will be challenged by the title chosen by its organizers:...
An oft-used adage says, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” Many indicators published these days in the press assert that Italy and, more in general, Europe, are heading for an even more difficult period, particularly economically. The...
Our time, and especially the century just passed, has always appealed to people’s desires. They all spoke of it–philosophers, doctors, politicians, salesmen, and advertisers–often exalting and at the same time impoverishing their meaning; or bending human...
“My friends, let us serve this man, let us serve Christ in this great man with all our existence.” These were Giussani’s words to us as he left his first audience with John Paul II at the beginning of 1979. We have tried to realize these words in all...
Fifty years ago, Paul Claudel died. His work and his person are still the object of much debate. Some despise him and some place him among the great. What is important for us is that his genius has left us some great works, like the Announcement Made to...
We offer the text of Fr Giussani’s reflection on Christmas, written for the 8:30 pm edition of Channel 2 Television News on the Italian national television network, at the request of the editor, Mauro Mazza. December 24, 2004 Why does Jesus come? How...
We are living in a time that many call a time of crisis. In the analyses of the social changes, both anthropological and economic, we often get the feeling of an age that is drawing to a close. And the new one that looms over the horizon has often the...
To tell the truth, it wasn’t a car but a coach, otherwise there would not have been room for all of them. It was a mixed company: a policeman and his fiancée, a former wide guy and his friend, a nephew of anarchist bombers (himself a kind of anarchist)...
Milan, August 2004 Dear friends, The Pope’s words show us in a surprising and exemplary way the labor of an educative work for the people of God as a love for man, as the concern of a parent for an only child–a father quick to intervene in every social...
For some time now, an anti-Christian controversy has been back in action. On a number of occasions, and in relation to different facts, philosophers, journalists and so-called mâitres a penser have accused the religious sense of being the direct or...
Recently, Cardinal Ratzinger and the President of the Italian Senate, Marcello Pera–one a believer and the other a non-believing liberal–expressed, each from his own point of view, their concern at the grave moment we are living. What is at stake, they...
“If we eliminate Christ, we kill God,” Nietzsche had declared, and the whole modern era took this terrible affirmation of one of its tragic prophets seriously. He had seen that the idea of God can be so weakened as to have no effect on human life and...
We are living in a terrible time. Many call it “a time of war.” Certainly, it is a period of horrible large-scale massacres, of scenes of hatred that leave us stunned and bewildered. There is disquiet and fear in the air, and no one is immune to it. We...
When he spoke at Minneapolis in the course of the presentation of Fr Giussani’s book Why the Church?, the new Archbishop of Boston, Sean O’Malley, quoted the British weekly magazine The Economist, which dedicated its front page to Our Lady and to the...
One of the unwritten imperatives of today’s world requires us to think that in order to feel alive, we have to change often: change locations, change loves, change jobs, change looks. The poet T.S. Eliot warned in the Choruses from the Rock, “The world...
We present here the editorial by Fr Giussani published on the front page of the Italian daily Avvenire , December 24, 2003 Joseph was not amazed by the fact that the woman had a child, but that that child was that woman’s, Mary’s. It was his because he...
In a conversation published in this edition of Traces, Pietro Citati, the well-known literary critic and leading intellectual, among the most secularist newspapers in the Italian daily press, says he feels a strong new attraction for Catholicism. Now that...
There is a new fad spreading through the world, from New York to Paris by way of Rome and Milan. It is called a “flash mob.” It could also be called “a date with nothingness.” Somebody launches via Internet a call to meet, at a certain hour and a certain...
He dominates everything, drawing existence out of nothingness, And not only in the beginning, but constantly. John Paul II wrote these lines in Roman Triptych, his recent book of “meditations.” And we dedicate them to him, on the twenty-fifth...
Four years ago, seated at a noisy, companionable dinner at the Meeting [for the Friendship Among Peoples] in Rimini, the Jewish American writer Chaim Potok intoned King David’s Psalm 8, “O Lord, what is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man...
The Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples in Rimini, Italy, familiarly called “the Meeting,” is an event whose weight in the private lives of many people, and also in the so-called public life of Italy–and not only Italy–has become greater over the years....