ARTICLES

Personalism and Pizza

Local Chapter of Communion and Liberation Hosts Luminary

BY ANNA KRESTYN

San Diego's School of Community, a branch of the international ecclesial movement Communion and Liberation, hosted special guest Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete at their weekly meeting on February 2, 2006 at Saint Brigid's in Pacific Beach. National director of Communion and Liberation and a former friend of the group's founder, Father Luigi Giussani, as well as of Pope John Paul II, Albacete was a professor at the John Paul II Institute for Studies in Marriage and Family and at Saint Joseph's Seminary in New York. He is author of the book God at the Ritz: Attraction to Infinity and is currently a columnist for the New York Times.

After the usual hour-long meeting, which entails a reading and discussion of an excerpt from one of Giussani's books, the group of about twenty moved from Saint Brigid's to Filippi's Pizza Grotto on Garnet Avenue. The evening was dominated by the warmth and humor of the guest's personality; particularly captivating were his booming Puerto Rican-accented voice and expressive manners. Between bites he answered my questions on the theology behind the Communion and Liberation movement and the Holy Father's vision for the future of the Church.

You've made it known that the writings of the present Pope have had a profound effect on your own thinking. In particular you've cited his claim that "Christianity is not convincing." What do you think he means by that?

"I think he means that the accusation against Christianity is that it is an enemy or an obstacle to one's full human development, one's human impulses toward freedom, one's desire to know, to experience new and wonderful things. It is seen as a restrictive force -- that is the accusation of the modern age against Christianity. And therefore the way of rebuttal is to show otherwise. And you must be prepared to show this in your life, so that you provoke surprise by the way you live, but a pleasant surprise, not a repulsive surprise, but one that makes people want to know, 'Is it really possible to live like this? Can this really make you happy?

The teachings of the Church, especially in the controverted areas, like human sexuality, and the life teachings, and all that, can they really make you happy? Because they seem to stand in the way, and force you to live lives of great pain and suffering when there are possibilities to do something about it.' He says the only way you can answer that is by showing it. Because when you use words, the culture has already defined those words in a given way.

So, in terms of words, Christianity doesn't convince anymore because words have lost a lot of their meaning. If Christianity wants to convince, it has to give witness. And he believes that the Church has to find ways in which it becomes a way of witnessing the Christian faith.

That's why he talks about the order of created minorities. In Saint Benedict's time, this was manifested as the emergence of the monks. Whatever it might be, these minorities have to come together and live a life that is provocatively attractive. Otherwise, if it is not based on that kind of experience, Christianity doesn't have the power to convince because wisdom and intelligence are today skeptical.... What really convinces is a witness: 'This has happened to me, I have this personal relationship... I may be bad, but this is joy."

Do you think it's because of the impor tance of this witness that the Holy Father has chosen love, and particularly human love manifested in acts of charity, as the topic of his first encyclical?

He is laying hold of the ground.... And it's a very provocative (encyclical) because the debate today is about love. Amazingly, after this disastrous century of secularism, atheist human ism has not prevailed. Religion was not destroyed. It was severely weakened in many parts but it quickly captured ground, in the former Soviet Union, for example... in many of those places our movement is growing like mad.

Marxism came and tried to wipe the whole religious thing out. It didn't succeed, it collapsed. But now, in the new century, suddenly the most serious threat to human survival is religion -- fanatical Islam. And once again, the secularists are saying, 'You see how religion is inherently violent, inherently intolerant, it cannot be allowed..."

Here the Pope is challenging that claim. He's saying, "The Christian religion -- the God we worship -- is love. And a God who is love will never destroy your humanity, your freedom. We don't seek to impose any belief on anyone, but to give witness to it. It will impose itself by its attraction. Because that's how Christ works." That is not to say that we should not speak the truth as well, but in the end, you have to show, by living the life you say is true, that it is not one that diminishes your humanity in any way.

Do you think that the Communion and Liberation movement is helping to bring back this way of evangelization?

Well, I'm bothered by 'Communion and Liberation.' I mean, I'm not bothered, I can see it.... I am no more bothered than Father Giussani was bothered, because Father Giussani's biggest fear was that the movement would become an end in itself -- what he calls formal ism. He was not responding to any desire to start a movement, he was responding to the same awareness that this Pope and Pope John Paul II were responding to -- that Christianity was no longer a powerful presence in the shaping of this world.

Would you say that Communion and Liberation's emphasis on the personal encounter with Christ brings an approach to the secular world that is particularly appropriate in the face of the individualism that characterizes our society?

But you see, you don't have to invent the method. It already exists. All we have to do is go back and see what it is. It is God who has invented the method. So, when you look back at early Christianity, you say, 'What happened?' What happened is, these people kept meeting this man."

Fr. Giussani uses a particular language in his writings regarding the encounter with Christ. A key word is "event", spoken of in the context of "encountering the event of Christ." Can you explain what he means by this terminology?

The Pope, when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, said that the key to Father Giussani's contribution to the life of the Church was precisely his insistence that at the origin of the Christian faith is an event. Not an idea, or a discourse ... let me give you an example. If you're from Pluto and you land on earth, and say 'Let's take a look at this Christianity thing,' and you open up to the New Testament, and you have not been corrupted by ... biblical scholars, you can read this as historic -- the very first person to enter the scene is this woman, and something amazing happens to her, you don't understand it, you don't know what angels are, you don't under stand a word of what the angel says to her, she doesn't even seem to understand it all, but you realize that whatever it is, this woman says yes to it, and then, life goes on until presumably she realizes she's pregnant.

So Christianity begins with the pregnancy of a young Jewish woman. Everything else that Christianity is going to be, begins with a woman becoming pregnant. Still, though, that's just her. Right now, there's only one Christian. Then she tells Joseph, and there are two Christians. It grows slowly. You can count a number of Christians by the end of the nativity narrative. Flash ahead to John and Andrew when they first see Jesus, and something happens to them, though they don't know what. How do you know something happens to them? Because they start following him. And he turns around, and here is the mystery about to speak, and he is finally about to say a few human words. What does he say? He says, do you want?' They hadn't even thought of the answer. They just said, 'We want to be where you are.' Not, 'We want to learn your teachings', just 'We want to be where you are.' And that was the public beginning of Christianity.

Suppose you were given an assignment to teach Egyptian to some kids from the Bronx. Well, you'd have to be a pretty darn good teacher. What Jesus wanted these people to know surpassed even that. He was God. So what delicate method was used? It's a school, the following of Christ is a school. He shapes their hearts, he shapes the way they look at the world, so they can start looking and being the right way, so he can project the unimaginable. If you follow this, you find one thing, again and again. They don't get it. They get it, they lose it. They get it, they lose it. At one dramatic point, when Jesus is out of control talking about being the Bread of Life, and everybody is leaving, He says to his disciples, "Will you leave, too?" Now the answer of Peter is not exactly the creed. 'Where else would we go, Lord? Suggest something else, and we'll take it!'But really, when you say "Credo in unum Deo," what you are saying is what Peter is saying. Only you are saying it in a much later version, in a vocabulary which may have obscured the experience behind it. They're saying, "Look, we're stuck with you, we don't understand a word, but you and our destiny are inseparable." That's what the words of eternal life mean.

How is that reconciled with the experience of joy you were speaking about earlier? For many, the Christian life is spent feeling the way that Peter felt: 'To whom would I go, Lord?'

Well, Peter saying 'Show us someone else and we'll go, because you're impossible to understand,' isn't incompatible with saying that moving them is an experience of a joy they cannot even describe, because, you see, it is a joy that is there as a note that will not go away. In spite of every confusion and pain, it just will not go away. It's like going to buy an expensive pair of shoes, and finding that only a pair that is far from your first choice, fits. This is exactly what Peter said to Jesus. "Younot exactly what we would have designed -- I don't understand a darn thing of what you say -- but there is one thing. You fit. You fit our hearts."

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