What Father Giussani gave me has remained a focus for my life, a vocational commitment, and also the source of a suffering that I have been willing to endure, and — slowly, increasingly, to my own surprise — even embrace.
He was a devoted and faithful priest of the ancient church in Milan, and (in a surprising and compelling way) he was a man — a man who lived every aspect of his life with a passion for the meaning of things, and a man who dedicated all his efforts and energies to the glory of Jesus Christ as God’s answer to the mysterious searchings of human reason and longings of the human heart.
Father Giussani didn’t propose his own greatness, or competence, or ability to “fix” all our problems. He was a humble man. He proposed Jesus Christ. He taught the truth.
And I remember the man, the teacher, speaking with such ardor and conviction in the years when he was still full of physical vitality, giving his lectures surrounded by a pile of dog-eared books on the desk and a bottle of mineral water.He taught us about the fulfillment of reason in the encounter with the Mystery who became flesh, who defines history, who stays with us and awakens in our hearts the adherence of faith, hope, and love. He said things like these words:
"This is the ultimate embrace of the Mystery, against which man–even the most distant, the most perverse or the most obscured, the most in the dark–cannot oppose anything, can make no objection. He can abandon it, but in so doing he abandons himself and his own good. The Mystery as mercy remains the last word even on all the awful possibilities of history.
"For this reason existence expresses itself, as ultimate ideal, in begging. The real protagonist of history is the beggar: Christ who begs for man’s heart, and man’s heart that begs for Christ."
~ Luigi Giussani
