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....
The grievous and deadly series of terrorist attacks affecting different countries in the world is a phenomenon that fills us with dismay. The use of violence in a blind–and at the same time, carefully studied–manner is an extreme deviation of hate, one...
“Not only am I interested in education, but also, in particular, in the type of innovative suggestions Fr Giussani proposes in recovering education as a Christian activity. I would have much to say about the book The Risk of Education. But, alas, I am in...
While this editorial is going to press, a war whose outcome and consequences are unforeseeable is underway in Iraq. A coalition headed by the United States has decided to respond in this way to the failure of Saddam’s regime to respect the UN resolutions...
We offer here the article by Fr Giussani published on the front page of the most important Italian daily Corriere della sera, entitled “Certain Kinds of Pacifism, More Hate Thrown into the Streets.” February 25, 2003 Dear Editor, The sides that are...
This issue of Traces devotes ample space to a forum on the condition of youth. The generations of young people who have come on the scene, one after the other, in recent decades have found a world whose characteristics and “climate” are changing....
Recently, the daily newspaper Le Monde, which has always been an authoritative secular voice in France, acknowledged, after a poll, that the Christmas and New Year’s holidays are those most widely shared by the French people and that, above and beyond...
By the spirit one goes to God… What a heart-breaking misfortune!” These words by Arthur Rimbaud contain the drama of human consciousness, especially for contemporary man. To the men of our time, God–according to the teaching of centuries of philosophers...
Someone wrote that violence is the midwife of history. The midwife is the factor that makes it grow, the motor, the lever setting concrete historic changes to motion. Only violence, they say, changes the state of things. Hosts of men, under various...
The world has always been marked by war–not only war between peoples and nations, but also the division that worms its way into the most “normal” relationships, into friendships and families. It seems that men are carriers of a disease impossible to stamp...
What I want to tell you is like a clearer and more profound vindication than can be imagined on the apparent uselessness of life, on the apparent negativity of plans. Whoever has not experienced it, whoever has not felt it, and thus has not done it...