“That is the religious experience,” exclaimed Jorge Bergoglio “the astonishment of meeting Someone who has been waiting for you all along.”

Recalling Luigi Giussani’s Passion for Christ

by Regis Martin

Se ieri non sapevo, oggi ho incontrato Te…

(I did not know my longing, till I encountered You…)

Il Disegno (The Design)

It all began on a train with a group of students, a young priest, in a shared compartment. What took place was a conversation about faith, a subject upon which the students, for all that they had been baptized and catechized, were completely clueless.

It wasn’t that they didn’t have any faith; or that they had formally rejected the Church that first introduced them to it. They were not apostates. It was simply that none of it seemed to matter very much. It had no real or immediate relevance to their lives; it awakened no sense of urgency in their hearts. No fire in the belly.

The year was 1954, and the young priest, a wonderfully exuberant Italian by the name of Luigi Giussani, never got over the experience. “I found them so unaware of the most elementary things,” he was to write years later, “and so indifferent to them, that I felt an uncontrollable desire to share my experience with them. I wanted them to have, as I had had, the experience of the ‘beautiful day.’”

That journey on the train changed his life. Also the lives of countless young people for whom he would harness all that he had to offer in order to bring Christ to their world. To enable them to experience the beautiful day that had first enraptured him. Passion for Christ having become the transformative experience of his life, he was determined to infuse the lives of others, especially the young, with that same passion. “I would like to share with you,” he told them, “the stunning wonder (the Italian word is stupore) which, vibrating at the heart of my existence, has made it possible for me to grasp the profound rationality which moved me as a man to take up the study and pursuit of God.” And so, soon after the incident on the train, Fr. Giussani left his post at the seminary, where conditions could hardly have been more congenial, and plunging into the maelstrom of secondary school education, began teaching teenagers all about God.

“Do you really believe in Christ?” he would ask the students, and even the most outwardly Catholic, those who wore the badge of Catholic Action and whose lives appeared decent and upright, would invariably respond as though addressing an alien. “They would look at me dumbfounded and I don’t remember if even one of them answered ‘Yes’ with the spontaneity of someone who has a true root of faith inside him.”

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