Enzo’s friendship, a passion for the person

I am very happy to share this significant Sunday morning with you, because it is a gift to be able to meet to talk about a friend, to look at a friend; a friend who makes us look not back but forward. In fact, we do not live in nostalgia: it is instead a force that grows every day and keeps us going.

This Amistad Group*, which I know now, I think is a beautiful thing. I had seen these nuns in Venezuela (I have this responsibility to visit our communities abroad). Going to Caracas was easy, now with Chavez it’s no longer easy.

Enzo’s sister is in Humocaro, which is at the end of the world, a bad place. There, however, they have a beautiful convent, a convent that was designed by a friend of ours from the movement, an architect, a great architect, a professor of architecture at the University: Bernardo Moncada, a character: he built this beautiful convent, with a truly remarkable modern architecture.

I always say to Bernardo: “You are lucky: this convent that you have built is your salvation, it will spare you a bit of Purgatory, if it were to touch you; you have done this thing so beautiful, intelligent, with the meaning of the divine in the human. The curved, beautiful shapes, which are the divine; the rectangular shapes which are the human. It is a beautiful symbolism. Then there are the spaces for the work of the Trappist nuns and therefore it is a cheerful place.”

This is how it is in Humocaro. ‘There are very poor people. The first time I spoke to them we spoke Spanish and as I spoke I thought that they were such rustic people, so elementary, so peasant, with calluses on their hands and burnt skin, so I was careful about the words I used because I wasn’t sure if they knew how to read. , and therefore I used very simple words. But at the same time I said to myself: what am I doing? The thought of Jesus with the apostles came to me: even the apostles were like these! They were people burned by the sea, burned by the sun of the fishing sea, without culture, without anything. It all started with people like that. This struck me a lot. Then those people discovered Giussani’s charisma, there too, through Sister Chiara Piccinini.

They are a group of nuns, including Mother Cristiana, who was Abbess for twenty-four years in Vitorchiano, then was elected Prioress of the convent of Humocaro. This Mother is in balance with Sister Chiara, who is an “earthquake”. She is the one who holds everything together and keeps it in its right place. They are very centered people – it is not always like this in monasteries, in mission places -.

For Mother Cristiana, the Benedictine “ora et labora” cannot be unbalanced: if you work too much or don’t work, it goes badly; if you work a lot and pray little, it goes badly; while Humocaro is in great balance thanks to the safe guidance of Sister Cristiana. They have built a factory with machines for making pasta, which they sell and distribute there; the distributors ask to produce more pasta, and mother Cristiana says: “No, we make the pasta that is made during working hours, and we work six or seven hours and that’s it. If there were machines that produced more in seven hours, then yes, but we can’t, we don’t want to work more than this. This is our vocation.”

Very balanced people and at the same time people who educated, because the great charity is education. This is this year’s theme. Because these farmers began to do community school, they began to discover that what they did (I insisted a lot) had to serve them. It must serve you, because if it doesn’t serve you, if it serves others, it’s good for others, but it’s not good for you, right? And so they got excited.

I can tell you that what you do, long-distance adoption, I have always struggled to understand well: it seems to me that it is a “strainer” where money can escape from your pockets, because it is little less than uncontrollable. It is usually managed at very high costs, while missionaries do it at very low costs because it is all voluntary work. We’ve seen it, haven’t we? Instead people have lost their brains, such that they are attracted to solidarity and philanthropy, because they do business. I’ll give you an example: just to visit a water well they’ve made, three of them go and sleep in the best hotel, spending a lot of money, while missionaries for the love of Christ do those things there many times in their lives, putting money back out of their pockets. own.

And people are amazed by this solidarity and these volunteers, like Mother Teresa…
Humocaro is like that. In Humocaro, for example, I saw packages prepared for children because many, many parents are drunkards, and so if you give them money they consume it in alcohol in two days; then in Humocaro I saw the parcels being brought so that they truly reach the children without the offerings being squandered or lost.

In this sense I can tell you that charity there is the fruit of an education of people by Sister Chiara, who follows Mother Cristiana, and then by the other nuns (I met Sister Anna, another splendid Italian); in short, a group of Italians from another world who educated and raised the Venezuelan nuns “in a big way”.
This was the first thing I wanted to say to your group: what happens with what you do. So this is how I told you about Sister Chiara and that convent, which is very precious.
The second question: for us all this has a relationship with Enzo. The fact that strikes me most is that what we experience is stronger than death. Enzo lived, he gave his life to Christ, and Christ did not disappoint him: he did not disappoint him, nor did he disappoint his followers.

This is something that struck me a lot when I came to Bologna.

I met Enzo early because when we came to Italy we always had a rule, which was this – I’ll start by saying that satellites didn’t exist back then and we talked about the “periscope” -: that we must always check and focus with the periscope where there is it’s life, where there is something that moves from which you can learn. We were very predisposed to this type of observation, and so we sent someone to see, to live that experience so that they would come back and tell us about it. And for us Spaniards Enzo was someone who was under observation, because he was someone we could learn from. And then he was a layman, someone who earned his living.

Furthermore, I have told it many times, once I was in Africa, in Kampala, I saw some Europeans who were there to work with the computer. At dinner with them, speaking to one of them, I asked: “And how many doctors are you friends with? How many Africans do you hang out with? Where are your African friends?” And this he told me: “I do my job, I work in the office and when I stop, that’s it. In the movement they taught us that we do things through work and if it happens that I know someone there, that’s fine, otherwise when I stop that’s enough. It’s the work, the work done well.”

I remember that I came to Bologna and then we went together to the Presidential Council. It was a Tuesday. Enzo worked, spent many hours in the operating room and then stopped. He too stopped, and when he stopped he took the car and went to Milan or if he didn’t go to Milan he stayed with the people there; in addition to work it seems that he did other things – Cesana also does her job, but then she also does many things and not just this -.

I remember that car trip with Enzo (it was the beginning of cell phones). He had just finished a surgery that wasn’t finished yet, the last things were missing, he had gone out and in the car was talking on the phone about how his collaborators were finishing it: he wasn’t someone who stopped and didn’t care what might happen. And if I remember correctly he said: “Are you okay? Are the conditions good?” Then he added: “Be careful, if there’s any complication, don’t touch it, guy! For goodness’ sake, don’t touch that guy because he’s incompetent.”

So I remember that trip unforgettably, for this reason.
I remember very well the passion with which he lived his profession, he lived his work. Like everything else, his life was to build Christ. And also the family: because I remember that the family wasn’t a brake, thanks to the wife he had.

I wanted to say that life was fulfilled for these people, because they had wives, and then their children turned out well – this is another constant -. The children turned out well! And we can’t plan children, because there is freedom in between: it’s something that totally escapes you, it’s something uncontrollable. This is part of the hundredfold down here… but now Enzo doesn’t care about the hundredfold down here, because he has it: because “up” has everything now, he participates in the Glory of Christ live.

But he certainly does not abandon us because these are Christ’s interests and there is the intercession of the saints.

I also retain Enzo’s relationship with Giussani, Giussani’s anger.
And so my memories of Enzo are of a very lively person. A person of great passion, of great intelligence.

The thought I had today is that the greatest gift that can happen here this morning, in Bologna, is for what happened to Enzo to happen again. Enzo is great for what he found, he was great for what he found. Finding what Enzo found is the greatest gift that can happen to any of us. Because the problem of life is finding the great thing that fills it. The secret of life is all here! We can do many things in life, but it is not the things we do that can fill our life. Rather it is finding that thing that is the measure of our heart, the measure of our desire. I’ve always had this, I’ve had this thing here as a child, always. Because it was born with man. In my era it was easier because even in school a certain ideal ability was communicated, you saw it in certain characters. I, for example, have had professors who died there for us, their life was our life! As I grew up, I too became a professor and I did many things remembering what some of these characters, these great masters, had done with me.

I was lucky enough to find people like this, who aroused this human stature that is defined by desire. This morning I was thinking that this Amistad Group could be a great thing, but I would be betraying myself if I didn’t communicate what’s behind it. And I think of the community school that we are doing following Giussani’s book, because Giussani was the fortune of our lives: having attended him, having known him, having been his friends, having shared many things with him permanently, every week, has given a totally unique – unfortunately unique, because I wish it weren’t unique – version of Christianity. I always say that faith cannot be lost, because the things that are valuable are not lost. We lose or throw away what we don’t need and therefore, when one lives faith as if it were not for life, he throws it away, abandons it, lets it go.

If Christ has nothing to do with life it is a dualism, it is a faith for the afterlife, he is not in order to live this life better: and therefore he has no interest. We, in finding Giussani, have found someone who made us understand that what screams inside us exists, and that he makes things more beautiful, makes all things more real, makes all things more possible and livable.
Enzo lived this.

Enzo’s impetus was there. What passed for his temperament, however, was much more: it was a temperament that had found this thing here, that made his life come true. In my opinion this is the most interesting story. While teaching in the community, I was very struck by a phrase – I don’t remember if it was by Newman or by others – which was quoted by Giussani and said: “We are luckier than the first Christians because we have many more elements than them. The first Christians knew only Him, some then knew the Apostles, while we knew Him, we knew the Apostles, but then we knew an immense chain of exceptional people who are the saints.” Because the saints are the fulfillment of human, a fulfilled life. The saint is a fulfilled man. And Enzo is one of these. We met Enzo, who is a fulfilled man.

Enzo didn’t control himself very much, Enzo didn’t pretend that he didn’t have certain limits, certain defects. I remember certain discussions with Vittadini, with Cesana… thank goodness we are “Communion and Liberation” because if we were “Division and Oppression” the discussion would have been deadly. They didn’t pretend they had no flaws, that they had no limits. And this too is a consequence of the meeting with Giussani, because Giussani made us understand that the beauty of Christianity is due to a realistic response to life, to humanity. And so he starts from the point where he said it’s an anthropology.

I lived an experience of self-management, I lived true communism, because true communism is libertarian communism, communism that tries to save freedom, and the pinnacle of this ideal is self-management. I had the experience of self-management in a cooperative of fifty employees where everything belonged to everyone, where even the positions of responsibility were rotated: madness because if someone doesn’t have the ability to be a director, you can appoint him or her director, but it remains a catastrophe.

To avoid the temptation of power we reached that level. And the person who did the parcels there, the warehouse worker, who had two children, earned more than me who was the director at the time and had a university career. And I was happy, because it was something I did voluntarily. There was the fulfillment of Marx’s thought which said: everyone should give according to their ability and receive according to their need. So whoever had more capacity put more into the cauldron and whoever needed more took more from the cauldron. And I agreed so much that I didn’t feel insulted because I was getting less.

Until one day – I was director – I placed an order for items and others arrived. You can be wrong. Another time I had placed an order two months earlier and still nothing had arrived: the warehouseman’s fault. But then what happens? Because here there were neither exploiters nor exploited people, if anything, if there was an exploited person it was me because I had more ability than him and I took less than him. And there my antenna went up and I began to understand. I asked myself: why doesn’t he work? And I made a terrible discovery: I discovered that laziness existed. This guy doesn’t work, not because he’s exploited, but because he’s lazy. Laziness exists.

Or there was another who didn’t let people grow because he was envious. And there I began to understand that Marx and Bakunin had not taken into account anthropology, the anthropological problem: why envy exists, why capitalists exist, envy is within us, hatred is within us . I found Giussani while I was in this profound crisis of my life, and I saw that he had come to terms with this, and in the book “Morality, Memory and Desire” he said: “We can only experience morality as tension, as ‘tension for ‘. Like a diagram that goes up and down, but the important thing is that it is always ascending. It goes up and down but you experience it as tension and we can only experience it like this.”

This is why what defines you is not what you do, but there is an Other who loves you and who embraces you even in the evil you do. This is what made me understand that Giussani is the least hypocritical man I have known in my life. This idea of who we are and how we can live and be moral is not the dream of pretending to be good and being good, but it is one who lives like you, with total freedom.

Enzo was like that. Enzo didn’t pretend he had no limits: when he got angry, he got angry. He had discovered Christ in this modality of Giussani’s charism, which makes you live and which corresponds to the experience whereby you cannot live in another way.
So if someone says “there are saints, but they sinned” they are wrong! Here, except the Madonna, everyone has sinned. I remember that Angelo Scola once said: “I arrived in Venice and went to confess to the major penitentiary – in all the dioceses there is a priest who is the major penitentiary and is the one who has the power to forgive the most serious sins : abortion or murder –.

I go to confession to the major penitentiary and I tell him: “Look, when I think of the saints, those who lived the memory of Christ permanently (from what they tell us), and of San Filippo Neri, I really feel like a worm.” And then the major penitentiary told me: “Patriarch, look, I think that all those things are lies. I don’t think that Saint Philip Neri lived the memory of Christ permanently, excuse me: I think they are lies from biographers. Because here, except the Madonna who was preserved from original sin, everyone, including Saint Joseph, made a great effort!”

And so what Enzo lived was a Christianity like this, a Christianity that allowed you to be yourself and that led you to the fulfillment of the human. Because Enzo’s life goes much further – also thanks to his wife – than just his profession, and this allowed the fulfillment of the human. Saints are this: people who have fulfilled a life. A life that goes beyond, because it includes a hundredfold down here for you and yours.
This is the other thing: whoever thinks of solving his life on his own will have to deal with himself, but whoever deals with the things of Christ – “seek the Kingdom and the rest will be given to you with more” – will have the a hundredfold down here.

I have many times thought that this was important, that I was interested in living life like this, because there are two difficulties in life and difficulties in life.
The first: being able to keep alive the great desire of life, the great drive of life, that is, that everything is little for me. I wanted to finish my studies in philosophy or sociology: I did, but it melted like a piece of ice in the sun. That wasn’t enough for me!
Everything is little for you. If anyone is satisfied he is dead! If one is satisfied with what he has, with what he possesses, and no longer experiences this drive, even if he had the whole world and everything that is in it, he is dead. As Dostojevski said: “Everything in this world is little to me.”

This is the first thing. And the second thing in life is finding what fills this heart. Because there are two important things in life: the first is having a heart like this, a desire like this and the second is finding the one who fulfills this desire. And this is the meeting: I have found something, I have found One who is this red thread that unites all things.

The problem of life is finding God, it’s that for you what we do here now has to do with your child, it has to do with the work you will do tomorrow, with holidays and with everything – in fact you enjoy holidays when you like to work, when you have the meaning of work –.
Christ is this. Christ is the red thread. Saints are this. Enzo found this: he found One who united life, who was the meaning of life. And he made you experience everything with this passion. With this passion, with this creativity.

And then with a capacity for preference for people. And that’s the other question, I’ll end with this. One cannot be a great educator, nor a great builder without the capacity for preference. But a capacity for preference that is like this in all fields. Think of those who go to watch young children’s football matches, those who go to identify children who can become champions and tell one of them: you come to play with the Real Madrid youth team. It’s a preference!

The thing that impresses me about Giussani is that this unity with which he lived life is the consequence of the verification that life works like this. That is: it is not like this because we are Christians. It’s by choice.

My wife is a physiotherapist, she did physiotherapy for Don Giussani. For a man of this caliber to dedicate an hour of his day to physiotherapy, he must be very certain of the benefit, otherwise he wouldn’t do it. And so he asked a lot of questions. He asked about everything, he asked about all things. “And this why? And this? And what does this have to do with anything? You’re going back here and this goes there. Why do you do this?” And then he would say to her: “Wow, that’s fascinating! Because you see that the truth works the same way in everyone the fields. The truth is all-encompassing! This is actually the point: you are fascinated because it is like that.”
And preference is like this, in all fields: you rebuild a life from nothing, it’s someone who has a preference for someone.

Preference is part of God’s method in history. God wanted to save us by preferring Abraham, then Moses and then Isaiah, the prophets. He sent the Son and the Son chose the twelve, didn’t he?

Enzo was like that, he was someone who had preference, he was capable of preference. I remember the first time I went to Bogota: there was a strange guy, but lively. They had cut off one of his ears. He worked with emeralds. Iano was one who was Enzo’s “preference”. He had problems with emerald traffickers, so I said to Enzo: “He’s at risk! They cut off his ear, which in mafia language is a little message.” He replies: “That one over there is good, I’ll call him, I’ll make him come”. Enzo didn’t abandon anyone. Lano had gone there, but Enzo was interested in his life and for Lano Enzo was a paternity.

Enzo experienced this preference on himself with Giussani. Giussani was very, very fascinated by his personality and his heart, by his family and by everything that was of him and of him. Life is built with people like this.

Each of us can help these people of Humocaro and I tell you that what you do is a lot for me. I’ve been there and seen it: it’s well run and it’s educationally managed. It’s not just charity, it’s fatherhood.

You can see that they are people who feel loved, it’s not just a building, it’s not just walls, but there is a person who takes care of that thing there. The most important thing is not the money we can give: the most important thing is to discover the thing that generated Enzo and that Enzo generates. This is the most important thing! This is the greatest gift.

What fills our heart is the greatest thing that can happen to us. What unites all the things in life, the good things and the bad things: that red thread that has a name for us, is a Presence.

Notes not revised by the author

* The Amistad Group was born at the beginning of the year 2000 on the intuition of Sister Anna Minghetti, who proposed to some families to adopt children from the Humocaro area in Venezuela – where one of Enzo’s sisters lives as a nun – to bear witness with a gesture the memory of the immense gift of friendship received from him. In addition to adoptions, the Group contributed to the activity of the “Angel de la Guarda” pediatric medical center, part of an AVSI project which includes an educational center and a dental clinic.