| Introduction by Lorenzo Albacete On November 12, 2003, I stood at the pulpit of an old Baptist Church in Liberty, MO, a suburb of outside Kansas City, ready to address an audience of Baptist theologians, academicians, and students at the William Jewell College, a prestigious Baptist College that surrounded the old Church. I had been invited to speak about the roles of faith and reason in a Christian education. The text that had provoked the discussion was Msgr. Luigi Giussani's The Risk of Education. I was there to present the book and answer questions about it. The man who had made this possible was Major David Jones, an officer of the US Army in charge of recruitment in that area of the country. Major Jones' story is summarized in the following pages. As you will see, he has adhered to every major religion on the surface of the planet, but had finally come home to the Catholic Church after encountering Msgr. Giussani's charism. My own religious history has been less dramatic. I have always been a Catholic. I was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in a Latin-American Catholic environment with a very heavy dosage of Spanish Catholicism. (The Spanish National Anthem was played during the Mass at the elevation of the consecrated host and wine. I have served Mass for the celebration of a feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary as the highest-ranking officer of the Spanish Armed Forces.) My first exposure to a non-Catholic environment was in 1959 when I went to study at The Catholic University of America in Washington DC. Back then, however, Catholic U. wasn't exactly a place of encounter with the dominant culture! On the contrary, I found strange the need to affirm and defend the Catholic identity that seemed to be such a great concern of the University. The "Index" of forbidden books still existed and permission from your professor was needed to access the books in it. It was not until I graduated and went to work for a Government laboratory in the area of "space science and applied physics" that I found myself in a non-Catholic atmosphere. I was, in fact, the only Catholic in our research team. For my part, I experienced absolutely no contradiction between my Catholic faith and my scientific work. I did not feel alienated from my environment. My friends, however, seemed to be surprised that a Catholic would feel at home in such a secular environment. We would spend a lot of time discussing contemporary events (the 60's had begun!), and although some of my opinions differed from theirs, all of us appealed to reason to explain and defend our convictions. My companions were interested in the Second Vatican Council, which was taking place in Rome at the time. One of the announced purposes of the Council was precisely to heal the modern split between faith and culture, so I followed avidly the discussions hoping to find ways to reply to my friends' questions. This was to be my quest from that time until the day in 1995 in which I met Msgr. Giussani. From those days at the government laboratories until then I had pursued this quest as a philosophical and theological problem. By the time I met Don Giussani I had more or less found a philosophical and theological position that could help me build a bridge between my world of faith and the secular humanism of my scientist friends. Even though I had long left that world, it was always the point of reference for much of my intellectual life. I had read and liked some of Fr. Giussani's books, and had friends in the Communion and Liberation Movement, but I could not see myself as a "member" of what I thought was too tied to its historical Italian cultural origins. I wondered what an "American" Communion and Liberation - type movement would be like. A friend who knew my concerns suggested I talk with Fr. Giussani about this directly and arranged the meeting within us. At the end of the meeting, after I had told my story to Fr. Giussani, he told me that he had been praying regularly to Our Lady to send him someone from the United States that could help the Movement sink its roots in the soil of the American experience and emerge, not as a "transplant," but as an American reality. It turned out that Fr. Giussani was very familiar with the religious history and landscape of the United States. He had lived here and done research for a dissertation on the great trends in the history of American Protestantism, a history he regarded with sympathy and admiration. This history, the said, had created a country with a particular openness to the Christian faith that had slowed the process of de-Christianization and the consequent nihilism that had practically destroyed the Christian memory of Europe. As a result, he said, the American people were still a people of hope who believed in life and reality as something ultimately positive. Moreover, the United States was beyond doubt the greatest power on earth, what "Rome" was to the early Christians. He believed that the Movement should penetrate into the American culture just as the early Christians had penetrated into the culture of the Roman Empire and built a new civilization. Hearing my concerns had convinced him that I could be of help, and he asked me whether I was willing to do it. What could I say, since even the Blessed Virgin seemed to have been involved? With great excitement I said yes, and Don Giuss sent me home to wait. A few weeks later, Jonathan Fields, the responsible for the Movement in the USA and Giorgio Vittadini, the Visitor on behalf of Fr. Giussani, came to see me at home and the adventure had begun. Slowly, I began to realize that my involvement with the Movement was not really something that I did as an "added" responsibility to the others in my life. It was becoming rather the way I wanted to live my life and my work. It was not something to do, a vision to spread, or a program of evangelization to promote. It was the way my Christian faith moved my life in all its dimensions. It was not a theory, a particular philosophical and theological synthesis. Rather it was an experience, the experience of an encounter that had become the point of departure for my interests and desires. It was the experience of what the Catholic faith is. My belonging to the Movement was not a narrowing of perspective as I had feared. It was the opposite. It allowed me to embrace infinity. Nothing human was foreign to this experience. I had found what I began to look for when I met my friends at the Laboratory thirty years before. The Christian faith is not a religion or a theology that guides human life; it was that life itself lived in all its possibilities. There was no split between faith and life, faith and experience, faith and love, faith and work. Instead, faith was life itself. I thought about all of this on that night last year at the Baptist College. In a way I had never felt before, I realized that in my presence there, Father Giussani had arrived at a place close to the heart of American Protestantism, of the faith that had sustained this country's hopes in "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." I felt totally inadequate to the task of representing him at such a dramatic moment in which a priest from the Church of Rome was to speak to American Baptists about reason and faith. I though about our first meeting and all he said about American Protestantism. I knew I could only do it because of what I had learned from Father Giussani. So I put aside my prepared notes and spoke from the heart. It was not a lecture; it was not a philosophical or theological address. All I wanted to do is bring to them the profound respect and warm embrace of Luigi Giussani by sharing the experience of reasoning in the light of the encounter with Christ as an opening, not an obstacle, to faith. This book is a story made up of such experiences. The seed is being planted up and down the land. Under Mary's maternal care, it will grow everywhere, and the fruits will be a hundred-fold. Lorenzo Albacete |
| Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete Theologian, Columnist, Author |
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