“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 same time, there is no rarer experience. Everything is in the name of freedom, but freedom is in danger of becoming a mere name in the ideological illusions that affirm it as a break with the past, an absence of ties and truth, in the very fear we have of freedom, or in the bitter restlessness that overwhelms us when we are free to do whatever we want. It does not satisfy.
Fr. Giussani approaches the theme with the existential radicality of someone who knows that, however misunderstood, it is indispensable because man is made freedom, “The mystery of mysteries.” But when do we feel free? he asks in The Religious Sense, to take us to the heart of the matter: When are we truly ourselves? Challenging all reductions, he says that freedom is total satisfaction of the boundless desire that we are–“freedom is the experience of the truth of ourselves.”
Davide Prosperi’s speech–“Culture: Being for Christ”, available on the CL website– is devoted to the relationship between truth and freedom in being a witness today, in a post-Christian world. In the following pages of the issue, you will read some contributions on the journey of freedom in extreme situations, although the drama of what makes us free is played out every day for everyone.

For Giussani, even if the whole universe were to be thrown at them, the human being is greater. This absolute dignity is revealed by Jesus’s gaze, full of passion for the person: “What would it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and then lose himself ? Or what could a man give in exchange for himself ?” Giussani adds, “The anti-power is love.”
So, “here is the paradox,” it is a love, a bond, that makes us free: “Freedom is dependence upon God. It is a paradox, but it is absolutely clear that concerning the human being–the concrete human person, me, you–once we were not there, now we are, and tomorrow we will no longer be: thus we depend.” For Giussani, there is only one dependence that saves freedom, there is “only a single limitation to the dictatorship of man over man”: lived religiosity. Either humans are in direct relationship with God and are free in the face of everything, or they are a slave to everything.
This is the theme of the path suggested by the Movement for the summer vacations. For Giussani, vacation time was never a break from life, but a plunge into life. Indeed, he called it “the noblest time of the year,” precisely because it is “the moment when one becomes as involved as he likes in the value he recognizes as dominant for his life.” The time of freedom.