When I speak about the Fraternity of St. Charles, people often ask me: “Why did you name it this?”. I must immediately make a qualification: the charism from which it draws its origin is that of Fr. Luigi Giussani, the gift of the ecclesial movement of Communion and Liberation, but in 1985, I could not have called it Fraternity Don Giussani. He would have been the first one to oppose this. Why Saint Charles then? At first glance, between the two, one can note such a distance that it appears unbridgeable. Is there anything in common between the saint of Arona and the priest of Brianza? St. Charles was the legislator saint, who gave back weight to norms, rules and asceticism; Fr. Giussani was the poet of the moral life as a tension to the Ideal and the Infinite. We could dwell on comparisons of the many differences of epoch, temperament and sensibility, but in this way, in the end, we would not really give their due to either. There are, in fact, aspects that are common to both of these great men.
I lived the first years of my life on Lago Maggiore, in Leggiuno, the land of the Borromeos. My parents had moved there because of the war and it was there that I began to get to know St. Charles. The towns of the lake, in fact, still held signs of his passage there. At the age of 12 or 13, I even met the saint in a dream, as he told me: “You will be ordained a priest on my feast day.” At that time, I absolutely was not thinking about becoming a priest, but when the bishop called me to tell me that, unlike the rest of my seminary companions, I would be ordained on the 4th of November, I suddenly remembered that dream. Without thinking of a vision or a particular apparition, he communicated the meaning of an affection protection on his part. When then, ten years later, I had to decide which name to give to our Fraternity, I thought of him. On the other hand, the implicit idea was to contribute to a reform of the Church, a motive for which I wanted to connect myself to the saint who, following the Council of Trent, had carried out the greatest reform that the Church has seen in modern times. Like St. Charles Borromeo, so Fr. Giussani was a great reformer, helping the Church to pass from one epoch to another.
He was strong because he loved. He loved Christ and men.
To be a true reformer means to rediscover the power of the origin. St. Charles wanted to go beyond the forms of his own family and of the pontificate to go straight to man and to Christ, the two great passions of his existence.
Then Cardinal Ratzinger, in an interview with Vittorio Messori, affirmed: “The more one analyzes Borromeo’s attitude in his world, the more one discovers that, while appearing to be loyal to it, he attacks its very form. And not only that of Spanish etiquette, but form understood as a mask, as a disguise of reality. When he attacks, everyone knows that he is unmasking a substance that is kept silent either for convenience or for fear.” Just like the founder of Communion and Liberation, St. Charles therefore paid great attention to form, but he was a great opponent of formalism.
Fr. Giussani too passed through the then outdated ways of formal and moralistic assent to Christian tradition in order to clear the path of man’s journey towards his fulfilment. The heart of his passion was the constant question of how to bring man closer to Christ. They are, in fact, two lovers, driven by their mad love to overcome every pattern and every convention, to reveal to man the beauty of Christ’s humanity. This explains the opposition that both St. Charles and Fr. Giussani encountered in their lives.
The aspects that impress me most about St. Charles is the strength that came to him through the faith, even despite the fact that his physical constitution was tried by difficulties and fasts. He was strong because he loved. He loved Christ and men, he lived concretely in total relativity to them. He felt his responsibility in front of the time that God had entrusted to him, that was expressed above all in the necessity for silence, for prayer, for study. The hours passed before the Crucifix and the Eucharist were for him a real need. In that silence, he brought to Jesus the enormous weight of suffering faces, of the illness and poverty of that century, of the fights of political leaders, of the resistance and the abandonment of entire communities. Together with all of that, the prayers, the new initiatives, the new creative impetus of a Church who, after the tragedy of division, sought new forms through which to live and express itself. Without Charles Borromeo, the Church would not have the missal, the breviary, the catechism, seminaries, the schools of Christian doctrine, but above all, it would not have had that of which it absolutely had a need: a living icon of Jesus, as a man full of mercy for other men.
