There were so many people, twenty years ago, on that cold and rainy day in February, who filled the Duomo of Milan and its piazza for the occasion of his funeral: men and women, young and less young, who had learned from Fr. Giussani to recognize in the encounter with Christ the origin of a new way of living, the rock to which they could entrust themselves so that their own evil and that of others was not the last word on their existence. I was also there, a recently ordained priest, to give thanks to God for the gift of that man who had communicated to me that life was worth living only if spent for a great ideal. As Cardinal Ratzinger said that day: “Father Giussani truly desired not to have life for his own sake: instead he gave life, and it is precisely in this that he found it not only for himself, but for so many others.” And the first way he gave his life was that of spending it so that everyone could know its meaning.
Karl Adam, a twentieth-century German theologian well known to Giussani, states in the first pages of his best-known text that what makes Christianity unique among all religious experiences is that salvation comes through the humanity of Christ: the greatness, the uniqueness of the Christian event in history consists in the fact that the Father saves man through the humanity of the Son made flesh.
Participating in the life of Christ, it is possible to know and enjoy every aspect of reality
This is the way God wanted to redeem His most beloved creature: by making himself like her. He thus burned away, in a single instant, the immeasurable distance that separated Him from us. From that moment, all that was human was not only redeemed and purified but even exalted. By becoming man, God reveals his greatness to man: even the smallest aspect of our humanity, embraced and understood by the saving power of Jesus, shines with a new and positive light.
In the course of his life, the servant of God, Fr. Luigi Giussani, gave himself so that Christ could be known and loved in His exceptionality, which is truly the unity, in Him, of the divine and the human. And through an immersion in His humanity, he never ceased to communicate to the persons he met, beginning with the young people he met at school, that Jesus of Nazareth represents the incarnate ideal of man fully realized and that, participating in His life through the sacraments and the Church, is possible for each one of us to know and enjoy, in a way that is a hundred times more powerful and real, every aspect of reality.
That God saves us through the humanity of His Son, implies that all of reality can be a good instrument for his fulfillment; that everything we see, touch, and taste acquires a new significance, which makes it worthwhile to study, to work, to get married, to have children; that salvation passes through every aspect of our existence lived in unity with Him.
Giussani truly desired not to have life for his own sake: instead he gave life, and it is precisely in this that he found it not only for himself, but for so many others.
For this reason, Giussani always sought to educate those who followed him to an engagement with all of reality, without censoring any aspect of it, from school to politics, from study to entertainment, from art to literature. Everything can and must be lived in the light of the encounter with that humanity of Christ that has left traces in the history of the world, not only through the Gospels but also in the work of those who have been overwhelmingly marked by the encounter with Him, who have allowed themselves to be shaped by an energy capable of transforming minds and hearts, which is His Spirit.
It is here that the mission has its origin and foundation: “because,” says Giussani, “this is the method by which that Man, God made flesh, dilates in time and space, becoming present at every moment of time and space: through the men whom the Father gives Him into His hands or whom He chooses. The baptized man, the man who has been called, us.”
