Luigi Giussani

Feb 20, 2014

Over the next couple of days, many thousands of communities around the world will celebrate Masses to mark the ninth anniversary of the death of Fr. Luigi Giussani.

In the early 1950’s in Italy the young priest Giussani was struck by the abyss that seemed to exist between faith (as understood by many people) and the person of Christ, real and present. Overwhelmed by this tragedy Giussani gave his life to helping people to understand that the effective method to personal encounter with Christ is found in human experience. It is not so much the searching person who encounters Christ, but it is Christ who encounters the seeker in the midst of their personal lived human experience.

Joseph Ratzinger and Luigi Giussani were priest contemporaries, both rigorous theologians, and friends. When Giussani was to be buried from the duomo in Milan on 24 February 2005, Cardinal Ratzinger (just a few weeks before he was elected pope) offered to preach the homily, as an envoy of the ailing John Paul II.

The text of this homily is available at this link.

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Latest Posts

the adventure

the adventure

It’s easy to make the mistake of seeing life as a treadmill, day after day ups and downs, a movement through time from youth to old age, then death and beyond.
Too often if feels as if we are helplessly captive carried along by the momentum of all that is expected of us and demanded from us, and we risk falling into an existence mode, a daily rhythm of survival, enduring, coping and so the treadmill rolls on.

the bigger picture

the bigger picture

Over the years, and even in recent months, weeks and days, I’ve prayed many prayers which have not been answered as I had hoped.
You’ve probably had the same experience: praying and wondering if and when or how your prayer will be answered.

moving waters

moving waters

Bible questions still pop up regularly in quiz shows and they often cost otherwise sharp players much needed points.
I’m ready for a question asking for the two names for the last book of the Bible. The book often known as Apocalypse is perhaps more often referred to as the Book of Revelation.
It’s common (thanks to movies) to think of an apocalypse as a devastating and unwelcome time of destruction.

to dream

to dream

The pics I use on these daily posts are sometimes snapped by me, and often borrowed from free-use websites. I thought it might be interesting to move towards using only my own snaps, and then only those taken in the past 24 hours. We’ll see how I go.
I took the pic above yesterday morning on an early walk.

to really see

to really see

Perhaps we find the miracles of Jesus too difficult to understand. How can we cope with what we may not have seen with our own eyes?
Many people cope with the miraculous by reducing it to what they can understand. They say Jesus just increased the blind man’s psychological vision, or opened his eyes of faith rather than actually giving him physical sight.