ARTICLES

LETTERS

NEWS

ROAMIN' CATHOLIC

Contents © 2002
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

We Never Planned Anything

Communion and Liberation's Alternative Culture of Love

BY CHRISTOPHER ZEHNDER

Perhaps men should listen more to their mothers.

In the mid 80s, when Damian Bacich was still in high school, his mother read about a movement of lay Catholics in Italy that went by the provocative name of "Communion and Liberation." "Enthused" by what she read, said Bacich, his mother wrote to Italy to see if any "CL" groups existed in the Bay area, where the Bacichs lived. She received the reply, "no, but be patient."

A couple of years later, in 1986, when Bacich was a student at the University of San Francisco, his mother learned that a group of Communion and Liberation students were meeting at the Dominican school in Berkeley. "She was enthused right away and started going," said Bacich. "Then, she started calling me up and browbeating me into going as well. In order to have a little peace, I went -- and I became interested in what people were talking about. I began reading some of their literature, and one thing led to another; I started to realize that this was the charism that appealed to me, that persuaded me."

Damian Bacich, now a graduate student at UCLA, leads a Communion and Liberation group that meets at St. Joan of Arc church on the Westside. About 20 to 30 members, some from as far away as Pasadena and Orange County, meet each week at the parish for what is called a "School of Community," a meeting where they read and discuss passages from the works of Communion and Liberation founder, the Italian priest Monsignor Liugi Giussani. Each School of Community has "two points," said Bacich. The first is to discover what the text is saying; the second is to "try to compare what is said to our experience, and hopefully to our experience in that given week. That way," said Bacich, "I'm able to understand better what the event of Christ is in terms of daily life, daily experience." Besides their weekly School of Community, Bacich's group sponsors special events. Last fall, they organized an exhibit on the growth and spread of Christianity in the first centuries at St. Joan of Arc's parish hall."

When I first heard the name, Communion and Liberation, I thought it must refer to some quasi-Marxist Catholic group. I couldn't have been more wrong. In the mid 1950s, Monsignor Luigi Giussani initiated a movement called Gioventù Studentesca (Student Youth) in Milan, Italy to show Catholic youth that the Faith was reasonable and attractive. At the time, Communism and other isms were deeply influencing Italian Catholic youth. In 1969, the Student Youth was organized as Communion and Liberation. The movement, from its inception, worked to bring a Catholic influence to bear on the familial, cultural, and political life of Italy.

Since that period, Communion and Liberation has spread to other countries, including the United States. In adapting itself to different places and cultures, the movement has had to adjust itself to the various difficulties Catholics face in these places. "In countries like Italy and Spain, where the country was traditionally Catholic, modernity implied a real challenge to the faith, especially in terms of reason and its relationship to faith," said Damian Bacich. "Catholics felt they had to respond to those things. But in Northern Europe and, especially, in the United States, part of the big struggle for Catholics was to be just welcomed and included in society at all." Thus, while in Italy, members of Communion and Liberation have had a strong political presence, Bacich said that he knows of no American members who are involved in politics.

The unifying element in Communion and Liberation is its charism. What is this charism? "It is first and foremost," said Bacich, "educational, in the sense that the focus of the movement is to recognize the presence of Christ in everyday life. It does this through a companionship, though a friendship that is guided along an educational path. It's a human companionship that's guided to its destiny."

"I would say the whole point [of Communion and Liberation] is an education for the recognition of the presence of Christ in our daily lives. That's the whole thing," said Mauricio Maniscalco. Maniscalco does public relations work for Communion and Liberation in the United States from New York City, and manages the movement's magazine, Traces. "In terms of education, Communion and Liberation is based on three pillars: culture, charity, and mission. Whatever we do is aimed to help us live these dimensions in our daily lives."

Culture, said Maniscalco, "is an understanding of reality and the judgement of reality, according to our Faith. The point is not to do things, but to look at reality and understand it with the eyes of faith." Charity informs culture and motivates one to "give back gratuitously" what he has gratuitously received -- that is, faith. Charity moves one to mission; for, since "faith is a gift," said Maniscalco, "it is something to be offered, shared and brought to those who have not received it yet."

While, presumably, culture and charity are everywhere the same for members of Communion and Liberation, mission admits of more variety. This variety does not arise from a multiform character of mission itself, said Maniscalco, but from the specific circumstances in which various people exercise their mission. Referring to Communion and Liberation members as "friends," Maniscalco detailed the various ways they live out their mission. "I've been a business consultant for a number of years," he said. "We have friends who are entrepreneurs. We have friends who are blue collar. We have friends who are housewives, college students, high school kids. Those are the environments in which you are called to live the three dimensions [of the charism]. The action is defined, in a sense, or addressed, according to the environment in which you are called to live."

Unlike other movements, which embrace a particular work -- helping the poor, for instance -- Communion and Liberation proposes no particular tasks for its members. "We're asked to pray, to work in School of Community, and we usually have a monthly or weekly Mass," said Maniscalco. "But besides that, most people are directly involved in their parishes, or things come up as an outcome of the movement. Communion and Liberation would not promote anything else on top of what I just mentioned. It is just a Catholic experience." So it is that the works that "friends" perform are not "official" Communion and Liberation works. They are activities carried on by men and women inspired by the charism of Communion and Liberation.

Communion and Liberation, said Bacich, embraces various "forms of life in community." "There are priests," he said, affiliated with the movement. There are people who lead a consecrated life. There is also an entity called the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation, which is a recognized lay association under the canons of the Church." The fraternity, said Bacich, "is a way of saying this is the charism I'm officially going to follow as a member of the Catholic Church. In the fraternity, you agree to a rule of prayer, which could be as simple as saying a Hail Mary once a day. You also agree to a certain amount of charitable giving, and to meetings with other members of the fraternity from time to time. The movement also has a group of consecrated people which is known as Memores Domini, and they generally live in houses together and follow [the counsels of] poverty, chastity and obedience; but they live in the world, in the sense that they have jobs in the corporate world, or whatever."

Maniscalco says that, contrary to what one might expect, Communion and Liberation has a very loose organization. "The movement appears to be something big," said; "still, it's about friendship with Christ. So we stay in touch just because we want to stay in touch." Communion and Liberation maintains no membership lists, and one is free to start a local group of "friends" without receiving "credentials" from the leaders of the movement. Of course, the movement is not anarchic. Every local community has what are called "responsibles," so-called because they take responsibility for certain aspects of the work of the community. Damian Bacich is a responsible for his community. The responsibles, said Maniscalco, meet once a week, "maybe have dinner together, and talk about what's going on with friends who are in need, or about something that is happening and how they should propose a common gesture toward it." The local community mirrors what happens at the national and, finally, the international levels. Maniscalco is a responsible for the United States, but the "ultimate responsibles" for the movement are in Milan, Italy. Finally the final responsible and guide for the movement is its founder, Don Giussani.

In what seems to belie the decentralized character of the movement, the responsibles in Milan and Don Giussani propose what texts will be read at any time by local Schools of Community the world over. "The movement is present in more than 70 countries in the world, so circumstances are different. But moments of prayer, for instance, moments of School of Community, those are the same all over the world," said Maniscalco. Damian Bacich said he does not remember that his local School of Community ever read a work that was not assigned.

At the core of Communion and Liberation's reading list are Giussani's trilogy, The Religious Sense, The Origin of the Christian Claim, and Why The Church? Besides these works, the Milan responsibles, said Bacich, have assigned works of the Church Fathers, and have encouraged the reading of great works of literature, both inside and outside of Catholic tradition. But, in the meetings specifically, said Bacich, "we've always read together something like Father Giussani."

Indeed, said Bacich, Communion and Liberation members take Don Giussani as their teacher, much in the same way Franciscans take Francis of Assisi, or Benedictines take Benedict of Nursia. Giussani's trilogy, said Bacich, lays out the "central path" of the movement. This path, said Bacich, begins with the question, "what is it that makes a human being a human being?" and then moves on to the questions: "what is the source of their thirst, their desire for the infinite? Who answers that question which is as the heart of every human being?" Giussani begins to answer these questions, continued Bacich, by saying, "there's a man who came into history who claimed to be the Son of God. From there, we go into what were the characteristics of His claim, and what were His characteristics historically? And then, how is it possible to encounter that man today? The answer is that He instituted the Church, which is where we encounter Him today. That is the core of our catechesis."

Maniscalco thinks following a teacher -- in this case, Don Giussani -- is most important for believers. "If you start practicing CL you realize no one generates unless he is generated," said Maniscalco. "I want to build something in my life and, through my life, to be offered to others. The only way is to follow. This following can hardly be organized; for instance, you don't need to tell your kids (hopefully) that they need to follow their father and mother; if you did, you would be forced to say that the children have no experience of fatherhood or motherhood. Communion and Liberation is an experience of fatherhood and motherhood. When we build some level of organization we really focus on the fact that even the organizational aspects have to be transparent of an experience of fatherhood and motherhood."

Because of their intense fidelity to the papal magisterium, members of Communion and Liberation have been called the "Pope's Rambos." According to an Inside the Vatican article on Communion and Liberation, Don Giussani said of Pope John Paul II, "We serve this man; with our very existence, we serve Christ in this great man. This pope is the event which God has brought about; his human figure is the concrete phenomenon which we must observe, hear, follow, and whose mentality we must make our own." The current pontiff has reciprocated Communion and Liberation's fidelity. On February 11, 1982, Pope John Paul, in a decree, established Communion and Liberation as a "secular institute" under his own jurisdiction. This meant that Communion and Liberation could work in any diocese throughout the world without specific permission from the local bishop. On December 11, 1988, the Holy See's Council for the Laity recognized Communion and Liberation as a private ecclesial association.

Like other movements in the Church, Communion and Liberation has not escaped criticism. Despite its professed fidelity to the magisterium of the Church, some have said the movement is opposed to tradition. When, in a 1995 interview, an Italian journalist asked Giussani if his movement "was founded to combat tradition," he answered that Communion and Liberation "was an adversary to a certain form of tradition, an exterior form which no longer corresponded to life."

How, I asked Maniscalco, might one understand Giussani's statement? "I was born in Italy in 1955," said Maniscalco, "so when I was a young teenager, I learned (because of the common mentality) that tradition was something to get rid of. By definition it was a negative word. Of course, I had no clue about what tradition was all about. Now I would say that, according to the Latin traditio, meaning to pass from hand to hand, tradition is, for us, the life of the Church. The life of the Catholic Church. Our tradition is the tradition of the Catholic Church, and tradition is not just a pious memory of the past, but is something that comes from the past and is fully alive and present now."

Damian Bacich said that Communion and Liberation is opposed to tradition as an external expression, without internal content. "I think that you cannot assume, in the last twenty or thirty years, that just because a person comes from a 'Christian' culture, that they are aware of the implications of that culture," said Bacich. "Father Giussani insists on understanding the reasons behind the Faith; faith without reason is a weak faith. So, the question is, who is Christ, and where do I meet him and how? Every exterior form of the Church is a consequence of the living presence of Christ, so without that reference to that living present reality, every exterior form winds up being suffocating."

If some accuse Communion and Liberation of being an adversary of tradition, others criticize it for being "integrist" and "fundamentalist" -- of idealizing the Middle Ages. According to the Inside the Vatican story, Don Giussani considers medieval man the ideal human being. "For the Middle Ages," said Giussani, "faith was not a cage to keep out the new and unexpected, and freedom was not the most essential element in every undertaking, but was, rather, participation in God's divine plan for history."

But not only does Communion and Liberation idealize the Middle Ages, say critics, the movement takes an adversarial approach to modern culture -- even to the point of proposing an alternative culture.

Damian Bacich met this criticism head on. "When it's possible for a group of three or four high school students to get guns and walk into their classroom and murder their classmates and teachers, obviously there is something wrong in the culture," he said. "There has to be an alternative to a type or expression of culture that would create conditions for something like that. I would say that that expression is the culture of love to which the pope always refers. Christianity is such an incredible force that always creates culture just as it did in the Middle Ages and continues to do to this day. Mother Teresa created a culture around herself in Calcutta of not abandoning the poor to the gutters -- but that's not the same as advocating a return to the Middle Ages, that's advocating a return to a culture where faith and life are not divided. The Middle Ages were full of brutality and other evil things; but the Middle Ages did not propose a division between God and man as the Enlightenment and the culture that followed it have. The attitude that has been proposed by the Enlightenment culture is, if God exists, He doesn't have anything to do with real life."

Maniscalco said that the Catholic faith demands an engagement with all of life because it penetrates every part of man's being. "My faith is either completely one thing with my life, or it is not," he said. "Personally, I would not be interested in a God who had nothing to do with a good chunk of my life. Do you want to call that 'integralism'?

Modern society wants Catholics to relegate their religion to the realm of personal and private devotion. "This is not the case with Communion and Liberation, just because I am myself," said Maniscalco. He related that when he worked in human resources at a bank, he used to struggle with the managing director, who thought that employees' personal problems should not affect their work performance. "I would say, that's impossible. Of course you can judge the person according to the way he does his job; but you can't claim that we're so sliced up that there's a Mauricio Maniscalo at work and a Mauricio Maniscalco at home. It is the same with my faith." If Christianity influences one at home, it must influence his engagement with the outside world.

Nor should one's failures discourage one. Referring, perhaps, to the sometimes tempestuous engagement of Communion and Liberation members in Italian politics, Maniscalco noted that Christians are "faulty" or can take "wrong turns or step into a mine field. That's probably what we've been accused of, some of us, with our involvement in politics or with the economy in Italy. But you can't skip that level. It would not be human and it would not be interesting."

But in proposing an alternative culture -- in bringing Christ to society -- does Communion and Liberation aim at the conversion of all of modern society to the Catholic Church? "Let me give you a hint," said Maniscalco. "What Father Giussani has been stressing, especially in the past two years, is that it is the I, myself, that is the one and only place where the miracle of change has to happen. There's no community, there's no people unless there's each and every 'I' present in the fullness of his and her humanity. So the focus and goal of Communion and Liberation is the education of every single person to the encounter and recognition of Christ's presence. Will this bear fruit in terms of a society and civilization of love? Well, it is bearing fruit in my personal life. It is bearing fruit amongst my friends. It's been bearing fruit, to some extent, in the civil and political society where the movement developed its presence. But, again, this is not a strategy; Father Giussani would tell you even now, we never planned anything. We just grew deeper in our familiarity with Christ. Each and every one of us. This will bear fruit according to God's will.

For more information on Communion and Liberation, contact Damian Bacich at dbacich@ucla.edu, or call the movement's national office at (212) 337-3580; or write the national office: The Human Adventure Corporation, 420 Lexington Avenue, Suite 2754-55, New York, NY 10170-0002."

TOP