Four years ago, I returned to Bovisa, a neighborhood on the northern outskirts of Milan. Here, at the Polytechnical University, I had spent hours and hours in my university career as an apprentice architect. And here today I am the chaplain. After the pandemic, the space designated for a chapel was transformed into a study room. I am, therefore, a chaplain without a chapel: I have access to two offices but I celebrate Mass during the lunch break in the rooms that the University makes available from time to time. Much rides therefore on relationships and on the “visibility” that my tenure on the two Campuses is able to have. It is about picking up on the needs expressed and not expressed by the young people.
This past year, my energy went above all into preparing and guiding a series of meetings on education to affection and sexuality that I called The Jeweler’s Shop, borrowing the title of the theatrical work of Karol Wojtyla. I took an afternoon to paper over some spaces near the dispensers of coffee and soda with the flyers, which held the details of the initiative over the background of two wedding rings. And the short phrase: “A laboratory to learn the vocabulary of love.” I know that in the Mechanical Engineering, two young men commented, after having taken a bit of a distracted look at the flyer: “It must be a metalworking laboratory.”
At the beginning of the year, I collected dozens of questions from the students, which I used as a starting point to design a six-month course. Here are some of them, all of which are interesting: “What is the origin of the Church’s position on affectivity and sexuality? Isn’t loving each other physically a form of good?; ”What does virginity really mean?“; ”What does it mean to keep each other company while in a long-distance relationship?”; “How can we have the patience and freedom to accept an answer that may not be what we expected?”; “What is the point of loving and giving ourselves to another, sexually and emotionally, if it risks hurting so much?”; “Marriage scares me because it is inevitable that love will end”; “With some of my friends, I struggle to understand the affection I feel for them. Why does thinking about certain faces warm my heart so much? What is the line between caring and loving?”; “How is it possible to walk together when you have different views on sexuality? And who can you trust so that you don’t have to live the relationship alone?”
The task of two Christian fiancés is to always begin again.
The course sought to address these and other questions: education in love as part of one’s personal educational journey; the transition from falling in love to love; the promise of engagement and the testing of the relationship; a summary of John Paul II’s theology of the body; the sexual act and the Church’s teaching on premarital relationships; marital chastity and virginity in the charism of Fr. Giussani. Each lesson was punctuated by videos, details of works of art, pages from novels, and testimonies from friends. We drew content from texts by Scola, Caffarra, and other disciples of the Polish pope. Despite the complexity and sensitivity of the topics, participation was numerous and very attentive.
Many of them shared their reactions with me at the end. Two in particular struck me: “But how can you not want for something so good to be opened up to the world, to generate more, to deepen more and more together?” “I was fascinated and inspired by the immense capacity for love that dwells in my heart. This happened especially when you said at the end: ‘The task of two Christian fiancés is to always begin again.’”
I will conclude with a quote from St. John Paul II, which explains well why I hope to repeat the experience in the next academic year: ”Love is not something that can be learned, and yet there is nothing that is so necessary to learn! […] If you love human love, there is also a keen need to commit all your energies to ‘beautiful love’. Because love is beautiful.”
