Oslo - At the heart of modernity there remains a question that refuses to be dispersed by intellectual fashions or domesticated by institutional frameworks: whether faith still retains the stature of a human event, recognisable, verifiable, capable of shaping life. In recent days, travelling through snow-covered landscapes and spending time among communities in which faith takes on forms surprisingly different from our own, I carried with me a book received as a gift from a friend. Leafing through it, I encountered the voice of a priest, fr. Luigi Giussani, and his essential question: how can the contemporary man believe that Jesus Christ is God, present in time?
Giussani never responded to this question by defending a system. On the contrary, he chose to expose faith to the risk of reality. For this reason, in the lectures collected in Qui e ora (1984–1985), faith is never treated as a possession, but as an event that happens. Something that breaks into life and forces it to take a stand.
The decisive point is not adherence to a religious idea, but the encounter with a contemporary Presence. “Christ,” Gius used to say, “is risen, that is, He is contemporary with history.” And if He is contemporary, then He must be capable of being encountered, seen, touched. Not vaguely, but within the concrete fabric of existence. From here arises the statement as simple as it is revolutionary: the presence of Christ coincides with a visible and human phenomenon, the company of believers. This statement, if taken seriously, dismantles many reassurances. Because it does not allow one to take refuge either in interiorism or in nostalgia. Faith does not live in the memory of a past nor in the projection of an ideal future. It lives in the present, within real relationships, within faces, within a concrete history that can also disappoint. And it is precisely there that its truth is at stake.
Giussani does not hesitate to say it: the Church, if it is not perceived as adhering to everyday life, remains an abstraction. It is not enough to name it; it must be experienced as a companionship that accompanies work, study, love, solitude. A companionship that does not anaesthetise questions, but sharpens them. For this reason, one of the most radical passages of Qui e ora concerns the overcoming of group logic. Not because the Christian experience is individualistic, but because faith cannot rest on collective dynamics. “Even if everyone were to leave,” Giussani explains, “those who have a personal conscience generated by faith can only begin again.” It is a sentence that took my breath away, as through the train window the severe stillness of snow-covered landscapes passed by and, in the depths of consciousness, the psalmist’s question began to vibrate once more: “What is man that you remember him, the son of man that you care for him?” An assertion of such gravity does not pass without leaving a mark: it weighs with specific force upon the present, especially in a time in which the impulse to seek shelter in consensus, to measure oneself by numbers, to rely on the architectures of structures has become almost irresistible.
In the words of this priest there emerges a conception of the self far removed both from modern self-sufficiency and from irresponsibility. The self, for fr. Giussani, is not something that is constructed, but something that is discovered as belonging. Belonging not as a form of dependence, but as the recognition of an origin. “The essence of the self is belonging to an Other,” he states. And without this belonging, man ends up belonging to what dominates him: power, opinion, fear. These are not sophisms. Already in the 1980s Giussani discerned the early signs of a form of servitude more imperceptible than the merely political one: a mental and psychological subjection, insinuating, capable of drying up the very taste for existence. Words which, decades later, resonate with an almost prophetic clarity. The bleeding out of the human, in fact, rarely takes the form of a sudden rupture; it proceeds rather by slow corrosion, by daily wear, until what once seemed essential becomes opaque and what was alive fades. In this context, faith manifests itself in its most proper nature: as a principle of regeneration of the human, capable of restoring density, taste and destination to life. It opens up a new intelligence of reality, a light that does not evade the complexity of things but passes through it. “I live, no longer I, but an Other lives in me”: not a devout formula to be repeated, but a verifiable criterion, recognisable in the traits of an existence that, though exposed to all its vulnerabilities, discovers itself to be more true, more free, more joyful.
The Christian who emerges from the words of father Giussani does not coincide with the figure of the militant, nor with that of the “functionary of the sacred,” to use an expression dear to Pope Francis. He is rather a wounded man and, precisely for this reason, an awakened one: someone who, having encountered something greater than himself, learns to look at everything from a new angle. Pain, failure, even the erosion of time cease to be merely waste or threats and become places in which the truth of life asks to be recognised.
Perhaps here lies the most arduous, and at the same time most inescapable, feature of Giussani’s legacy: faith does not demand to be protected, but to be inhabited. It does not ask for champions; it asks for witnesses. And it asks this in the present, without comfortable delays, without alibis, without reduction to vocabulary or tactic. Because what does not become experience, what does not leave a concrete mark on life, does not endure the test of days. And so the question burns, like a fertile wound: is Christ truly present today? If He is, His presence must be able to shape things, to leave a mark, to bring about a turning point in the concrete fabric of existence. If, instead, nothing changes, the problem rarely lies with Him: it lies in the way we have reduced Him to a harmless, domesticated, inoffensive idea.
Giussani does not hand over a comforting answer. He hands over a criterion. And he entrusts to each person the responsibility of putting it to the test, here and now.
fr. S.A.
Silere non possum