To be in the world and its problems, you need to be aware of who you are.

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“I will tear out from your hearts of stone and give you hearts of flesh” (Ezekiel 36). This is God's incredible promise to the men and women of Israel. Luigi Giussani cites it in A Face in History: The Task of the Church in the World (recently published by Rizzoli, 276 pp., €17), a collection of eleven lectures from 1969-1970 given at the Charles Péguy Cultural Center in Milan . A “theology course” renamed by Giussani himself as a “school of communion,” it bears witness to the journey of recovery of what remained of the Student Youth movement after the tsunami of 1968.

Last year, Rizzoli published another volume collecting the speeches given by Giussani in those same years, just after returning from the United States, where he had gone to study after being removed from the leadership of the movement he had founded. Giussani begins again with those who remain (in one of those speeches, looking at the audience listening to him, he says: “I thought with a certain pain that of the 180 people present here, only one was born 13 or 14 years ago.” And in another passage: “ Understand the psychological effort I must make.” That book, of which this is the ideal and historic continuation, is titled A Revolution of Oneself, and it seemed to me one of those fortunate coincidences that illuminate the meaning of the words that those lessons were held in a center dedicated to Péguy. Who already as a socialist spoke of revolution as something that changes the subject rather than changing things. For him, “it is not men from outside who make the revolution, but men from within” (Noël Dumont). It is the heart of stone that gives way to a heart of flesh.

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The situation in which Giussani begins again is that of an Italian Catholicism—he will say so several times in these pages—that has succumbed to two temptations: that of secularization, adopting the categories of the ideologies of the time, and that of cultic intimism, which he defines as a "somewhat magical conception of the Christian presence in the world." To put it bluntly, after the socialist Péguy, let us turn to the communist Antonio Gramsci , who, fifty years earlier, commented on an initiative of the Italian Catholic Youth, which had announced a prize competition, asking these two questions: How can we attract young people to Catholic circles? How can we spread good press among young people? “Decrepit youth, the Catholic one, having lost all internal warmth, seeks practical accommodations, correctional enticements, to saturate itself with members; it doesn't matter that most are dead weight, cumbersome, anodyne […] it's enough that on occasion hundreds of names can be reeled off like rosary beads, to protest against a statue of a naked woman or the display of pornographic magazines. […] Prize competitions aren't enough to bring a corpse to life: the time of miracles is over, and Lazarus sleeps the sleep of the just in his tomb, and never again will his eyelids open to see the light of day .”

It's hard to argue with him, but despite his many points, Gramsci isn't right. This is made clear when he says: "Catholics expect redemption from grace. We expect nothing from anyone but ourselves."

Here, Giussani intervenes at this level, responding to this misunderstanding into which not only the '68ers, the left, but also many Catholics, including GS members, have fallen: it will not be us, with our ideas, our theories, our projects, our commitment, and our actions (things that Fr. Giussani is careful not to discourage, and has done so first and foremost with his personal and tireless industriousness) who will resolve humanity's problems (love, work, culture, and politics), also because "it is not the task of Christ and of the Christian fact as such to resolve them." These problems can be addressed more intelligently, more willingly, by a new man, a "new creature" ("in St. Paul it is like a fixed idea"), to remain in the image, men with "a heart of flesh."

"For the mission given to us, we first need something that comes before our actions, something that is given to us, something that is within us without us, which is grace. [...] Something that comes first." Recognizing and embracing this gift—says Giussani—is the true alternative to a world in which man presumes on himself, believing he is self-determining.

To truly share the needs of the people of our time, to exist in the world, in history, and in its problems, we need a personality, a face, an awareness of who we are. But this is not the individualistic awareness of the self, but rather the awareness that "the formation of our personality is a given, a grace, a gift, something that comes to us physically, through a physical instrument: the history of the Church, the tradition of the mystery of Christ, into which we were baptized, into which we were born." In short, says Giussani, the awareness of a person invested by the encounter with Christianity present today is inseparable from the awareness of communion, of community. In the face of so many intra-ecclesial diatribes, the words of the Gospel come to mind: "What God has joined together, let no man put asunder." We think that Jesus was speaking only of marriage, but these words instead concern reality as such, of being. Self-awareness and communion—to put it in legal jargon—stand together and fall together.

In this regard, Don Giussani says in the first of the two books: "The more one becomes self-conscious, the more one understands that one is one with the other." It is this unity, otherwise impossible, that can change the world ("what we are passionate about is the salvation of the world"), but beware—he warns repeatedly—of its sociological and activist reduction. "Companionship is not a cue to be present," it is a dimension of the self, of self-awareness and of the freedom that recognizes and adheres to it. The awareness of oneself as part of a body ("that materialist Don Giussani," a cardinal who was very fond of him once told me, smiling) reaches this level of the person and changes him. What capacity would it have to navigate history with a hope for change, in the face of the evil we witness daily, a reality that is incapable of changing me? Don Giussani says it better: "One cannot have real certainty that the Christian fact will resolve the world except through the mediation of the certainty that this will happen for me."

“The point at which God, that is, Christ, the Church, brings about the salvation of the cosmos is the person. It is therefore in the change of the person that a more just and healthy future is brought about.” With one drawback, which frees us Christians from the temptation and attempts at power to which we bend the mystery of hope that is the person of Christ: whoever truly follows him prepares himself to embrace poverty (which is a different, strange way of possessing everything; Giussani calls it “virginity”) and to be considered a foreigner: “The poor man who goes around in rags is a stranger on the street.” Twelve years after these interventions by Giussani, Saint John Paul II confirmed them: “You are without a homeland. Because you do not let yourselves be assimilated by this society; this society cannot assimilate you. You are without a homeland.”

Péguy—it's worth returning to—speaks of revolution as an excavation, a deepening. Giussani deepened this awareness of self and communion during the next twenty years of leading the CL movement, up to the culmination of his public interventions on May 30, 1998, when, before John Paul II and a packed St. Peter's Square, he said: "The Spirit of Jesus, that is, of the Word made flesh, becomes experienceable for everyday man in His redeeming power over all individual existence and human history, in the radical change He produces in those who encounter Him and, like John and Andrew, follow Him. […] What might have seemed, at best, a singular experience became a protagonist in history, and therefore an instrument of the mission of the one People of God. This now forms the basis of the search for unity expressed among us." And, with a dramatic look at the evil that our freedom chooses (even in the Church, as he said in his last interview: “The Church has begun to abandon humanity in my opinion, in our opinion, because it has forgotten who Christ was, it has not relied on… it was ashamed of Christ, of saying who Christ is”) he concluded: “The Mystery as mercy remains the last word even on all the ugly possibilities of history” .

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