Communion & Liberation’s 1968 and my own history
Interior of St. Francis Xavier church
Someone recently sent my family an article published in Tracce, the Italian-language magazine of Communion and Liberation (CL). The article was an interview with an Italian ethicist who wrote a book on gender issues. What struck me most about the interview was its beginning “Fifty years have passed since 1968, but sexuality continues to be a crucial matter…” Just as the integralists have the French Revolution of 1789 as their historical symbol, so too does CL take 1968 as a symbolic watershed. Although I participated in CL for 20 years, my own history was not wounded as Giussani was by a rejection of history or a felt need to distance from social Catholicism.
1968 is significant for CL because all of the youth initiatives Giussani worked with fell apart in that year. In February 1972, Giussani spoke to leaders of the movement in Milan, and notes from that meeting are published under the title: “The Long March to Maturity.” The notes were published in the English version of Traces in March 2008. Instead of a systematic analysis of the talk, I am looking at this moment as a myth, or explanatory story for the movement. I focus on two aspects of this talk: 1. The limited horizon of 1968 and 2. the minimization of social Catholics by Giussani. I then consider my own history in comparison with these points.
What happened in 1968? A pinhole view of history.
For Giussani, the events of 1968 were two-fold. On the one hand there was a call for greater authenticity, which was a positive sign of human desire for happiness. He says that “The first factor that struck us was the fundamental demand for greater authenticity in life, in public life.” The second factor, which was a revolutionary attitude, described by Giussani as a “lack of interest in the past.” He says that “the proposal fundamentally and globally set itself up as the need to overthrow the past, as enmity with the past, hostility to the past, negation of the past, or, at least– but this is the same thing– forgetfulness of and lack of interest in the past.” For Giussani, this revolution culminated in a new morality:
“it is one of the most symptomatic points in the visualization of the moral stature, the dignity or the moral maturity of a person or of a situation. Naturally, I’m speaking of the judgment, the conception. As conception, the authenticity that was being sought generated licentiousness, a concept of ‘free love’ that has nothing over the lowest and most corrupt moments of bourgeois society, but was nonetheless the fruit of hostility to the past, reaction to the past, fruit of the attitude that said, ‘Get out of the way and let me set things right,’ and, therefore, what I experience, what I feel was the originality, the original purity, the golden age of humanity!” (emphasis added).
So, for Giussani, the culmination of the popular rejection of the past was a concept of authenticity and purity which expressed itself as licentiousness, or free love.
My first question, then, is what conception of history or the past did Giussani express here? What pervades the talk is attention to one’s own history, to the shared history of the movement, to the history of the church, and above all to the memory of the Christian fact. At one point, history is even considered in a broader way: “Christian experience will change the world; however, in order to change the world, the entire trajectory of history is required.” Although he invoked the entirety of history, Giussani typically looked at the history of the Catholic Church from an Italian perspective. He advocated reading Christopher Dawson’s works and Hugo Rahner’s great work Church and State in Early Christianity. He also refers to the time of confraternities. While Giussani always insisted on the importance of history in resisting power, in my experience, advocacy for social attitudes in CL typically doesn’t have much historical awareness beyond the year 1968.
A minimization of social Catholics
Beyond the revolutionary spirit, Giussani felt that the response of Catholics was inadequate. He described Catholic work for justice as:
“an efficientistic, moralistic conception of Christian commitment: before the neediness of the world, there is an analysis of it, the theory to use in responding to it, and the response according to this theory. Everything is played out according to man’s measure, and Christ has nothing to do with it; He has something to do with it only on a level beyond space and time, as a moral inspiration that is beyond space and time– ’transcendental.’”
For Giussani this meant that there was no difference between Catholic and Marxist efforts for relief of poverty or social justice. As a consequence, Giussani distanced CL from the work of the social Catholics which began in the 19th century. A recent article describes these social Catholics.
“These were a loosely connected series of groups and individuals, dotted across Europe during the 19th century, increasingly concerned about modern economic problems, with their apotheosis in the Industrial Revolution. […] The social Catholics saw these economic problems as different than the problems of poverty in the Middle Ages, different because they were inaugurated by new conditions. This is why they called themselves ‘social.’ But they also saw themselves as ‘traditional,’ framed in that particular way that the French Revolution of 1789 and subsequent revolutions imbricated: choosing Catholicism, desiring that it exist and flourish.” (“Against Integralism” by Carpenter and Huff).
Clearly, 1968 was a time of intense crisis for Giussani and CL in the face of a Marxism which became the dominant voice in advocating for the poor and marginalized. Because of what happened with CL in 1968, members are more inclined to education and charity than to social change.
The United States, however, experienced a different history. Catholic immigrants were pivotal in the development of labor unions. In the US, sexual licentiousness was less a rejection of history and more the expression of a bourgeois consumerism, along with drugs and rock and roll. The civil rights movement of the 1960s was rooted in the experience of the Black church. Other Christians including Catholics joined the struggle for the recognition of human rights and dignity.
My father was moved by the words of John F. Kennedy, who invited citizens to “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” And when President Johnson began his war on poverty, my father attended training. After working to help people find jobs, he realized that he would have the most impact on poverty as a high school teacher, where he belonged to the union and went on strike for better conditions. Working a part-time job at a dry cleaners, he met a cobbler who had survived the Holocaust, and he made sure that I met him and talked with him about what happened to him and his family in the death camps.
For 18 years, he and my mother were part of the Christian Family Movement (CFM). They followed the method of “observe, judge, act” in responding to various social and economic events impacting families. Growing up, I had opportunities to help out with projects like helping to winterize a house for a family whose father was in prison. When the AIDS epidemic hit in the 1980s, my father had his students read about it in the classroom magazine, so that they would be aware of the dangers and protect themselves.
Growing up, I saw various impacts of cultural shifts. My family knew women divorced by their husbands and left with nothing, or women that lived in hiding from abusive spouses. We also knew a couple where the wife had married a husband she knew was gay, but who later divorced. The husband was a friend of the family. I also watched as many priests left the priesthood and as religious sisters stopped teaching grade school for free as they returned to the spirit of their founders. Some things I didn’t see. For example, I never knew growing up that the teenager across the street hated the Catholic Church because he had been sexually abused by the priests at my parish before he was a teenager.
As I became an adult, I had other experiences. I helped out when the AIDS Memorial Quilt came to town. I spent a year with L’Arche in Washington, DC, living and working with mentally handicapped adults. When the AIDS Quilt came to the National Mall, I accompanied a core member to mourn the dead. One of the dead was a priest I knew before going to L’Arche. His mother gave him a discreet funeral in his town where he was born, but his congregation in the city made him a piece of the quilt. The impact of AIDS on priests was reported on by the Kansas City Star and the Dallas Morning News a few years later. I learned that the president of my college had also died of AIDS. To deepen my memory of my own history, I recently read Hidden Mercy: AIDS, Catholics, and the Untold Stories of Compassion in the Face of Fear by Michael O’Laughlin. In that book, O’Laughlin recounts the experience of Catholics who worked with people suffering with AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s and who witnessed the deep personal love of men for their partners in sickness and in (the worst) health, at a time when gay people had no access to shared health plans through marriage or domestic partnerships.
My love of the church and the history of the church predates my involvement with CL. When I was 20, I read Henri de Lubac’s magnificent book Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man. In that book, I discovered a profound integration of sacramental faith with social Catholicism which I haven’t seen since.
I’ve been reading a lot of history lately. I read Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes, 1125–1325 by Augustine Thompson. I just finished reading Nothing Gained Is Eternal: A Theology of Tradition by Anne Carpenter, which takes its title from poet Charles Péguy. I’m currently reading How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning of the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith and Afro-Atlantic Catholics: America’s First Black Christians by Jeroen Dewulf. On deck is The History of Black Catholics in the United States by Cyprian Davis and The 1619 Project. Far from rejecting the past and hating history— or using a single year as the explanatory hypothesis for diverse social developments— I am interested in engaging with the past, in order to better understand the present.
When I remember my own history and I think of that of CL in Italy, I have a lot of questions. Why was Marxism able to dominate in social issues in Italy, so that the church remained an impotent echo? Why does CL tend to ignore a broader history of sexuality which would go beyond the attitudes of some hippies in 1968? Although I cannot answer these questions, I do know that the solutions proposed are alien to my own history, and as a result, do not satisfy me.
While writing this post, I came across another summary of Giussani and 1968 by Jason Blakely. Blakely’s summary gives more of the historic context of the CL collapse of 1968 than I do here, but he also extends Giussani’s criticism of formalism to current political attempts at Christian nationalism. The following passage critiques the identity politics of Christian nationalists:
“Today there is great spiritual and political energy gathering around a restorationist movement to install Christian formalism via the state and other disciplinary actions. This is often through a nationalist narrative—that you are not really Russian, British, American, Italian, unless you are also formally Christian. This generates various xenophobias and increasingly violent suspicion of religious and ethnic outsiders. Frequently today the narrative is subtly racialized. Western Civilization and White Christianity are cloaked in power and the state.”
This passage demonstrates an awareness of history which goes beyond church history to include the history of racism and colonialism. It also corrects a typically one-sided critique of identity politics I’ve seen which focuses on minority identities while ignoring white (and other majority) identity politics.
Update 2/20/2023: In his article Religious Awareness and Modern Man (translation published in Communio: International Catholic Review Volume XXV Number One, Spring 1998, page 104-140. A speech Giussani gave at some European universities and originally published as a supplement to 30 Giorni), Giussani (drawing on a 1955 speech by Henri Daniel-Rops) traces the modern attitude as a rationalism dividing God from human problems, which arose in the (Italian) Renaissance, and “after the French Revolution, through political force.” With the impact on the young people Giussani worked with, 1968 must have felt something like a resurgence of the French Revolution.