Communion & Liberation: A Friendship With Christ

The Communion and Liberation community in Cambridge reflects on the movement’s origins, its growth and the friendship with Christ at the heart of its life.

The Catholic movement of Communion and Liberation (CL) began in Italy in the 1950s with an intuition of the young priest Luigi Giussani. After his ordination in 1945, Giussani began a doctorate in theology and taught at the seminary. During these years, he noticed that beneath the apparent flourishing of Catholicism in Italy, with churches full, Catholic associations active and Christianity still deeply woven into public life, a deep crisis was already taking shape.

Faith was becoming separated from daily life, tradition seemed increasingly at odds with modern ways of thinking, and Christian morality risked being reduced to moralism. Young people might know the doctrines and dogmas, but Christianity was no longer necessarily something they experienced as relevant to the questions and desires at the heart of their humanity.

In 1954, Giussani received permission from his superiors to teach Religious Education in a state high school in Milan. His educational adventure began. His proposal was simple and radical. As he wrote towards the end of his life in a letter to John Paul II: “Not only did I have no intention of ‘founding’ anything, but I believe 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” (Giussani, 2004).

Giussani had a particular passion for beauty and an extraordinary attentiveness to ordinary life. He wanted his students to encounter Christianity as something alive and relevant to their experience. Literature, music, friendship, sport, study, food and conversation could all become places where the human heart was awakened to wonder and to the question of meaning.

The encounter with Christ could happen through a human presence and become a companionship along the journey of life. For Giussani, this companionship was not simply about being together: it was a place where Christ could become recognisable and experienced, a presence that gave substance to life and became a source of hope.

His presence gave new energy to Gioventù Studentesca (GS, or “Student Youth”, the name given to the Catholic Action activities in high schools) and gradually transformed it into something more like a genuine movement. Young people ate, sang, talked and simply spent time together. These ordinary experiences became places where they discovered a different way of living. The faith they had received began to colour their friendships, studies and everyday choices. Essentially, it was a friendship, with Christ inside it.

Out of this experience grew the School of Community, which became one of the characteristic forms of life of the movement: a regular gathering where people read and discussed a text by Giussani but, above all, learnt to share and judge their own lives together in the light of faith.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the experience spread beyond the schools. It reached universities, parishes and workplaces, and eventually extended well beyond Italy. The name Communion and Liberation came to express a central conviction of Giussani’s proposal: that communion in Christ with others could become a source of genuine freedom.

The movement continued to grow internationally, particularly in Europe, Latin America and the United States, and gradually took root in Britain. From the 1980s, students belonging to the movement, mostly, though not exclusively, Italian, came to Britain for university and, through friendships in churches and university chaplaincies, began meeting with other students for School of Community. Communities grew in Cambridge, London and York. What began as a companionship among students gradually became a stable community as people settled, married and continued to live their faith together.

Even after Giussani’s death in 2005, his charism remains very much alive. We continue to be fascinated by the experience of life that has grown from his proposal: a way of living the faith together that continues to generate friendship, questions, discovery and joy.

Today, the CL community in Britain includes families, as well as Memores Domini – lay people who dedicate their lives to Christ while living and working in the world – and priests. The first Memores Domini house in England opened in Ealing, London, and became a point of reference for the growing community. Since 2017, there has also been a house of missionary priests from the Fraternity of St Charles Borromeo in Eastleigh, Hampshire, who live their priesthood through missionary work and community life.

There are some specific proposals and tools that characterise our life as part of the movement of Communion and Liberation: the School of Community, charitable work and the Common Fund.

The fundamental educational tool is the School of Community. It consists of personal meditation on a text, typically written by Fr Luigi Giussani or drawn from the Church’s Magisterium, followed by weekly community meetings. The work of School of Community is conceived just like a school: its method consists of comparing the Christian proposal with our own lives in order to verify how faith responds to human needs in every aspect of reality.

To educate ourselves in charity as an essential attitude to life, we are invited to engage in charitable work, devoting some of our free time to the service of those in need. This can take many forms, from assisting disabled and elderly people to supporting families in poverty, homeless people, immigrants and prisoners. It is not understood simply as social activism or volunteering, but as a way of learning gratuitousness: loving others without expecting anything in return, just as Christ loves humanity.

The Common Fund is a monthly, free and personal contribution to support the activities of the movement. Its purpose is to educate us in poverty and in the missionary dimension of life. What matters is not the amount given, but the seriousness with which one remains faithful to the commitment.

The movement also holds Spiritual Exercises each year, particularly at significant moments of the liturgical year, such as Advent and Lent, as well as assemblies where members come together to discuss and judge aspects of their personal and community life.

In the end, what distinguishes Communion and Liberation is not a particular programme or set of activities, but a way of looking at life. Community is a companionship that helps people face ordinary reality more deeply, discovering Christ not individually, but through relationships with people who walk the same path and share the same desire to live the faith in everyday life.

Perhaps this is what we mean when we speak of Communion and Liberation: a friendship in which Christ is present and a companionship that helps us recognise Him at work in our lives.

Come and join us!

References

Giussani, L. (2004) “Letter to the Holy Father John Paul II on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of Communion and Liberation.” Communion and Liberation, 26 January 2004, www.clonline.org/en/luigi-giussani

Young, M. (2020) ‘“Chance” encounters?’, Communion and Liberation United Kingdom, 9 December 2020. Available at: https://uk.clonline.org/en/current-events/articles/2020-12-09chance-encounters

‘Christian life as communion’ Communion and Liberation. Available at: https://www.clonline.org/en/cl/life-in-the-movement

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