Fr. JC Maximilian

I have always wanted to do a bit more with this blog. Mostly I have just been publishing my homilies here, and I really appreciate the feedback that I get from those of you who read and comment. Yet, when I started this blog I hoped to also have posts discussing books that I am reading, maybe films that I see, etc. Of course the focus would be on the spiritual life, but more than just my homilies. I have never really gotten to do that, mostly because parish life can keep me very busy.

However, for New Year’s I wanted to make a resolution. While I am still busy in my parish assignment, I know that I can find time to do more spiritual reading, and then share some of my thoughts about what I am reading. This has become more important to me since coming to St. Theresa’s because I have become separated from what had been the spiritual highlight of my week for the past three years; School of Community. What is School of Community (SoC)? It is the basic gesture of the new ecclesial movement known as Communion and Liberation.

Communion and Liberation (CL) really started in a high school in Milan, Italy in 1954, although it was not called CL at the time. It was started by Fr. Luigi Giussani, who had decided to start teaching in high school after having taught theology at the local Catholic University. Msgr. Giussani stated that he never intended to start a “new” spirituality or movement in the Church. Rather he wanted to re-propose the Christian event in a way that would be interesting and provocative to his students. He was concerned that for too many of his students, Christianity had become a mere abstraction, a set of rules and dogmas. For Msgr. Giussani, Christianity has always been about encountering Jesus Christ, the Divine Mystery, as a real presence in the everyday experiences of our lives. The Church, instead of just being another institution, is really a life — it is the life of Jesus who gave His Spirit to the Church.

“A charism,” Fr. Giussani has written, “can be defined as a gift of the Spirit, given to a person in a specific historical context, so that this person can initiate an experience of faith that might in some way be useful to the life of the Church. I emphasize the existential nature of charism: it makes the Christian message handed down by the apostolic tradition more convincing, more persuasive, more ‘approachable.’ A charism is an ultimate terminal of the Incarnation, that is, it is a particular way in which the Fact of Jesus Christ Man and God reaches me, and through me can reach others.” Else where Msgr. Giussani said, “I tried to show the students what moved me: not the wish to convince them that I was right, but the desire to show them the reasonableness of faith; that is, that their free adhesion to the Christian proclamation was demanded by their discovery of the correspondence of what I was saying with the needs of their hearts, as implied by the definition of reasonableness. Only this dynamic of recognition makes whoever adheres to our movement creative and a protagonist, and not simply one who repeats formulas and things they have heard. For this reason, it seems to me, a charism generates a social phenomenon not as something planned, but as a movement of persons who have been changed by an encounter, who tentatively make the world, the environment, and the circumstances that they encounter more human. The memory of Christ when it is lived tends inevitably to generate a presence in society, above and beyond any planned result.”

Of course these high school students went to college/university, and then they entered into the adult world, and they continued to follow the “method” Msgr. Giussani taught them, of looking at the experiences of their own lives in order to recognize Jesus’ presence. Part of this method was to meet weekly for “School of Community,” which aims at being a true school which, through the reading and discussion of texts indicated by the Movement’s Center, shapes in its participants a clearer understanding of the nature of the Christian fact and illuminates their life. Since 1954, Communion and Liberation has grown into an international association of the faithful.

I “met the Movement” three years ago. As the regular readers of this blog know, the first couple years of my priesthood was “different.” A few months after my ordination I was diagnosed with cancer. Oh, it was a very easy to treat cancer, and I have been cancer-free for four years now, but it was still pretty scary to be told that you have cancer. And for most of the first year of my priesthood I felt crappy as I was being treated. I really felt as if I had been robbed of the “honeymoon” of being a newly ordained. Then, just after I was told by my doctor that all my “numbers” were where they wanted them, my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He died two months later.

After my father’s death I felt very dry spiritually. I desired a way to rediscover my priestly zeal. A priest friend of mine, in another State, casually mentioned CL. I did not know what it was, so I Googled it. As I read about the Movement, something within me stirred. I thought, “This might be what I am looking for spiritually.” I saw that there was a local contact, and one month after my father’s death I was in a coffee shop in Princeton meeting with Luca and Daniel. After that meeting I really did not have any better idea of what CL was, but something about them made be want to follow. In CL language, in them I found a correspondence with what my heart was truly desiring.

We started to meet weekly for SoC, and I found my zeal and joy. My faith became less intellectual and abstract, and more alive with my own experience. After sponsor a lecture series at my parish, others joined our SoC. It was not a huge group, but that group helped me to grow as a person, a Christian, and a priest. They continue to meet each week. But now I am over an hour away, and it is just too difficult for me to block out what is essentially 3-4 hours each week to travel there for SoC.

Of course I am still involved with CL. I formally joined the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation this year. I attend the yearly Priest Retreat, and try to attend the yearly Fraternity Exercises. I read Traces, the monthly magazine of the Movement. And the parishioners here at my new assignment often hear me talk about CL. Several have become interested in learning more, and I would not be surprised if we form a SoC here in the future (forming friendship is first, then the desire to do SoC).

Yet, I still miss reading from the designated text and discussing it in SoC (not in an abstract way, but in terms of how it corresponds with my own experience). They had been reading, Is it Possible to Live This Way? An Unusual Approach to Christian Existence, Vol. 1 – Faith, and I had only gotten through the first third when I was transferred. Since then Vol. 2 – Hope, has been released and is the current text for SoC. Both are available from Amazon.

It is my intention to do a kind of “virtual SoC” on this blog. It will help me discipline myself to reading the text, and reflect on it. It might also give some of my parishioners more of an introduction to CL. In the original Italian, Is it Possible to Live This Way? An Unusual Approach to Christian Existence, is a single volume with the three parts being “Faith, Hope, and Love”, but I they are translating it into English as 3 books. It is really a series of conferences that Msgr. Giussani gave over a course of a year or so, to a group of women and men who were consecrating their lives to the service of the Church, in the charism of CL, in a secular institute called Memores Domini. Since it is basically the transcript of those talks, the book(s) have a bit of an unusual style, especially to American readers. But it is also very accessible because it has a lot of examples. What I hope to do is a few times a week give a summary of the section I have read, and then my own reflections on the section. I welcome comments from readers, but try to remember to avoid abstraction and speak from your heart, your experience. I will start with the first volume, Faith, just because I hate not finishing a book, but if I read and post several times a week, I should be able to finish the first book quickly and then get in sync with Vol. 2, Hope.

Please, do not think of this as real SoC. That really is about developing community, friendship, companionship. But maybe this will help spark an interest in CL in others, who can look to join a SoC near them, or start one.