Fr. Luigi Guissani was the founder of the ecclesial movement known as Communion and Liberation. He was beloved by many, including the last three popes. Pope Benedict once said of him that he was “wounded by the desire for beauty.” For Guissani, the Pope added, Christianity was not simply “an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or moralism. Christianity [was] instead an encounter, a love story; . . . an event.” For Luigi Guissani, Christianity was a love affair with Christ.
Fr. Guissani lived to make Christ real in the lives of others. That meant that he did the work both of an apologist and an evangelist. First, he would clear away the obstacles to Christian faith and practice. Second, he would introduce people to the living presence of Christ in the Church.
For Guisanni, neither task was simply a matter of argument. They were just as much exercises in spiritual direction. Guissani pointed people to Him who is “closer to me than I am to myself.” He would have us wake up to the longing, the yearning for depth and meaning that lies at the heart of all human thought and culture. He would then introduce the answer to which this desire points: “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
Through books and speeches, Guissani’s apologetics work consisted largely in pointing out what everyone already knows. He pointed people to the depths of their own interiority. He wanted to show that God cannot be simply the conclusion to an argument (although he is certainly no less than that), but rather “the total meaning inherent in every aspect of life, that “something” of which all things ultimately are made, to which all things tend, in which all things are fulfilled.” (Guissani, At the Origin of the Christian Claim, 5.)
For Guissani to make the case for Christianity, his approach required a kind of honest introspection on the part of his listener. Guissani would plumb the depths of poetry and myth, music and art, just as much as philosophy and religion. He used these to awaken man to his “dizzying condition,” the condition of having to adhere to something “whose presence I sense but cannot see, measure, or possess.” (OCL, 7) But the subtleties of this method have an obvious pitfall: our sometimes obstinate refusal to look within, the rejection of our own interior life.
Guissani recognized this danger. It is what we call distraction. He wrote once, “If supreme stupidity is to live distracted lives, it is clear that for stupid people these types of problems diminish.” (OCL, 6) Pope Francis (a great fan of Guissani) says something similar in his most recent teaching document. Meaningless noise threatens to draw us away from an authentic life:
The great danger in today’s world, pervaded as it is by consumerism, is the desolation and anguish born of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience. Whenever our interior life becomes caught up in its own interests and concerns, there is no longer room for others, no place for the poor. God’s voice is no longer heard, the quiet joy of his love is no longer felt, and the desire to do good fades. (Evangelii Gaudium)
In the age of social media, the danger of distraction has likely never been greater. But Guissani and his admirer Pope Francis remind us that there is an antidote. It is a kind of awareness that is essential to authentic spiritual life. It consists in more than the recitation of dogmas or of formulae. It is a turn inward, to contemplate those dogmas in the depths of our heart, where they meet our deepest human needs. Catholic tradition calls this turn inward “recollection,” and it is essential to our spiritual life.
The Catholic Encyclopedia describes recollection as “attention to the presence of God in the soul. It includes the withdrawal of the mind from external and earthly affairs in order to attend to God and Divine things.” It requires silence, solitude, and the frequent exercise of the presence of God.
In Guissani’s work, this kind of reflection opens one up to the “religious sense” hidden beneath all cultural phenomena. It predisposes one to realize that our desires are implanted by God and point us in the direction of both communion and liberation. Communion with God and his family the Church; liberation from the tyranny of distraction, of consumerism, of relativism.
I first encountered Guissani through my friends in Communion and Liberation, and only later in his books. I believe that is exactly how Fr. Guissani would have wanted it. We cannot ignore our intellectual nature, our curiosity, or inquisitiveness, but we must realize that these point beyond themselves. We find our true selves not in idle distraction or endless amusement (even the amusement of books), but in a loving communion of persons, founded in an authentic inner life. (For this article, I referenced Robert DePede’s work Luigi Guissani: a Teacher in Dialogue with Modernity.)