GIUSSANI/ Battista: As a nonbeliever, I learned what Christianity was from him

The passage of time has never contradicted what Luigi Giussani said, prophetically, back in 1975, after an audience of the ecclesial movements with Paul VI: "As we mature, we become a spectacle for ourselves and, God willing, even for others, a spectacle of limits and betrayal, and therefore of humiliation, and at the same time inexhaustible safety in the Grace that we are given and that is renewed every morning". Giussani’s idea of safety has deeply fascinated even those who are not believers. This is the case of Pigi Battista, a columnist for the Corriere, who met Don Giussani in 1996 during a service that La Stampa, the newspaper that Battista was working on then, was doing on the priest and founder of CL. "I met him at the airport. In a place full of passengers” Battista jokes, "I was impressed by his ability to go to the essential, the non-passing”.

“He understood that Christianity is not an intellectual system, a packet of dogmas, a moralism” Cardinal Ratzinger said of Giussani at his funeral, “rather an encounter, a love story; it is an event”. Is this the “essence” of Giussani?
I would say yes. I have to establish, however, a fundamental premise. I am not a believer and what I say I can say only based on my own human and cultural experience, and not on the level of faith. What struck me about Giussani’s ability to go to the essentials is that there was nothing "manic" about it. He was not like the people who reduce everything to one thing. On the contrary, he was very attentive to the multiplicity of history. He caught and put the human manifestation of the divinity at the center of this irreducible diversity, if I may say it like that.

Have you changed your view of Christianity?
I realized that Christianity could be many things, like charity, for example, but that these things would not make sense if they were not anchored to that one thing that Giussani insisted on, which was the presence of Jesus Christ in history. As a non-Christian, I can definitely say that this emphasis, as part of the overall picture of reality and the hierarchy of interests that Christianity gives, has a revolutionary value.

Did you ask yourself what it was about Giussani that attracted so many young people?
My impression was that his was a very human way, not at all preachy or hieratic, to create that centrality.

There was an interview that came out entitled "Let us pray for Italy in danger" and it was widely read even later because Giussani touched on the issues of Catholics, politics, and a nation in crisis.