COMMUNION & LIBERATION
“Life is hunger, thirst and passion for an ultimate object, which looms over the horizon, and yet always lies beyond it. When this is discovered, man becomes a tireless searcher.”
- Luigi Giussani
Communion and Liberation (CL), in its essence, is a proposal for education in the Catholic faith. It is an education that doesn’t end at a certain age, but lasts a lifetime because it is always being renewed and deepened. The same is true of the Gospel, which reveals new discoveries even after we’ve heard it a thousand times. The same is true in the experience of love, of artistic creativity, and even in the simplicity of everyday life. The search for what is true, beautiful, and good, and for happiness is never-ending. This is Christianity: the adventure of life, not a kind of training for life.
Communion and Liberation was started in Milan, Italy, in the 1950s by Fr. Luigi Giussani. CL is a lay movement in the Catholic Church. It was based on the premise that faith, lived out in communion, is the foundation of the true liberation of man. Today, CL has spread to ninety countries.
Where does an experience like CL come from, and why? This is what Fr. Giussani wrote to John Paul II in 2004: "Not only did I have no intention of 'founding' anything, but I belive that the genius of the Movement that I saw coming to birth lies in having felt the urgency to proclaim the need to return to the elementary aspects of Christianity, that is to say, the passion of the Christian fact as such in its original elements, and nothing more. Perhaps it was precisely this that awoke the unforseeable possibility of encouter with personalities of the Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Protestant, and Orthodox worlds, from the United States to Russia, in an impetus of embrace and appreciation of all that remains of truth, of beauty, of good and of right in whoever lives a sense of belonging."