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 demonstration in which only estrangement can foster inattention that is dangerous in its inevitable, more or less tumultuous conflicts, a father quick to remind us that in the unfolding of time, in every single moment, the design of Another must be respected: like the design of a father and of a mother for a child.
A good design, like that which reaches out to define the supreme work of a family, or the construction of a reality that can be human within the confused tangle of these exhausting and tormented changes of history.
For this reason, there can’t be an obedience that mortifies the wearying and thus dangerous changes of history, and this only if one acknowledges the existence of an intelligent comparison with the design that happens, as an act that is more acute and powerful than the one that has already happened, as a judgment on things, given according to the point of view that is equal between God and us.
Holy Father, thank you, because the emotion you have provoked in us tells every reflective man that it is not in vain to breathe and to strive for a presence.
From the source of this Meeting, let’s greet each other with all the fullness of our heart.
Fr Luigi Giussani

My thanks to the organizers of the Meeting. In this moment, each of us is aware of becoming an interesting factor, a creator of present realities, a creator of the will to change. I don’t know whether all the sacrifice of the intervention, in the dialogue of these days, was more beautiful, or whether it was more capable of being the sustainer and defender of an enlivened reaching toward life, a passionate love for the mystery of man, a passionate love for man’s destiny. I leave these words as the last we can repeat in this moment: passionate warmth, passionate affection for what man can make be and make belong in his history. Thank you all, and good-bye until next year.
Fr Giussani’s farewell letter at the conclusion of the Meeting in Rimini