Luigi Giussani and apologetics, a personal reflection

The English editions of Giussani’s trilogy, unlike the Italian ones, feature artwork by Paul Klee

In his book, A History of Apologetics (published in 2018), Avery Dulles describes Luigi Giussani’s per corso trilogy as follows:

”For a highly pastoral work reflecting the classical three-stage approach, one may consult Luigi Giussani's trilogy: The Religious Sense, At the Origin of the Christian Claim, and Why the Church? Departing from the scientific methods of metaphysics and history, Giussani uses an experiential and phenomenological approach reminiscent of Augustine and Pascal.”

(341, emphasis added to highlight the book titles)

The classical approach which Dulles refers to is a demonstration of three points, corresponding to the three topics indicated by the titles of Giussani’s trilogy: 1. the possibility of the human person knowing the divine, 2. the person of Jesus as the end of this desire, and 3. the Catholic church as the place where Jesus is decisively known. Now, I haven’t read Dulles’s book through, but I picked it up and looked at it when I happened see it in a parish library which was the site of a local Communion and Liberation (CL) event.

My experience with apologetics

As a young person who entered public school at middle school (age 10), I was intrigued to meet peers who were not Catholic, who were Protestant or non-believers, and who often had misconceptions about Catholic belief. This started a life-long curiosity about and interest in the beliefs of others and my own, and the history of these beliefs. When I was in high school, I was friends with people in Youth for Christ and in my first year or so of college, I was recruited by a group of Protestants who were trying to relive the book of Acts. I was not defensive, but I always knew who I was and what I believed, asking questions and making statements, even ones which were not well-received. Sometime in my first two years of college, I bought a book on apologetics in a used bookstore. It was published in the 1950s and looked like a high school text. It listed every possible objection to Catholicism, ramified by type (atheist, Hindu, etc.), along with a response. I regarded this book as curious and ridiculous in that it sought to rebut all objections without learning anything about the other, without risking oneself. In retrospect, I also see that it presupposed the faith of the person reading it.

When I dropped out of college and lived in Washington, DC, I read a better quality of apologetics. Books by G.K. Chesterton, James Schall, and Peter Kreeft— as well as books like The Drama of Atheist Humanism and Catholicism by Henri de Lubac and various short books by Balthasar, including In the Fullness of Faith: On the Centrality of the Distinctively Catholic (Katholish). In his preface to Balthasar’s Katholish, Henri de Lubac calls the book a work of dialogue, written for friends, that it's not an apologetics treatise, and that his has "no hidden polemical agenda, no attempt to be contemporary." For me, dialogue— even a vigorous and contentious one— was interesting, but polemics were not. I regard polemics as a kind of generic technique which one applies to shut up the human questions and to impose an outcome.

I saw the rise of the new Catholic apologists on the Internet. I was interested in it to a degree, but I felt that faith was always more than what was argued for, broader, more diverse, deeper. When Robert Barron’s video series Catholicism came to PBS, I caught an episode (before PBS Passport, catching programs on PBS was always hit and miss). There was one moment which I found really fascinating. It was when Barron started talking about René Girard’s theory of the scapegoat. I had read about Girard in Balthasar but hadn’t read him yet. Balthasar wrote about Girard as someone who made him see something he had not seen before, someone who enriched the conversation. When I listened to Barron discuss Girard, however, I felt that Barron was citing him not because Girard had moved him, but because Girard made a point in a way that would be received well by Barron’s intended audience. With that whiff of calculation, I lost interest in Barron. Authenticity is what separates Giussani from many who publish works of apologetics.

Giussani’s PerCorso trilogy

Dulles describes Giussani’s trilogy as “highly pastoral,” using “an experiential and phenomenological approach” (341). The works are apologetic in a traditional sense rather than a polemical sense, providing a path (PerCorso) to Catholic faith. What’s fascinating to me is that within CL, the trilogy is rarely regarded as something for the other, for the non-believer. I can’t remember anyone referring to it as apologetics or scheming to convert people with it. Instead, the trilogy is meant for the personal formation of members of CL. This is not presupposing the faith, but proposing it, and makes the follower into a more authentic witness in their ordinary life.

The role of the trilogy in CL is roughly analogous to that of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola in the Society of Jesus. Just as the method for the Spiritual Exercises is not reading the notes Ignatius left behind but living them on a guided retreat, so in CL, the method for reading the trilogy is that of reading small sections, comparing them to one’s desire for happiness, and then coming together weekly in a guided discussion in a communal setting. The communal setting goes beyond the meetings to the work or school environment, charitable works, cultural judgements, and even political efforts. The goal of CL is to generate authentic witnesses to Christ and Catholicism in a hostile environment. The method is not by equipping members with extrinsic arguments but by challenging them to test everything by the fundamental desire of their hearts.

Although not his primary focus, Giussani does have recourse to apologetic works to defend the church. For example, in a 1992 supplement to CL-Communion & Liberation Magazine called “An event. It is for this that they hate us,” Giussani refers to Jean Dumont’s apologetic defense of Isabella I of Castile. Isabella I expelled Jewish people who would not convert to Catholicism; in 1991, her canonization process was stopped because of the expulsion of the Jews, but the process has recently been reopened. In a review of Dumont’s book, Marianne Mahn-Lot, a scholar who wrote books on Christopher Columbus and Bartolomé de Las Casas, found Dumont’s arguments in favor of sainthood for Isabella and his defense of her expulsion of the Jews to be unconvincing (Mahn-Lot, Marianne. Revue Historique, vol. 289, no. 1 (585), 1993, pp. 222–24. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40955580. Accessed 23 Feb. 2023). While apologetic history can be valuable in getting a complete picture of historical figures and events, it may include rationalizations to defend the reputation of the church, which damages the authenticity of witness. In the case of Isabella, her actions need to be considered not only from her personal intentions but also from a perspective of solidarity with the Jewish people harmed by her decisions: both the harm of being expelled as well as the harm of conversion under pressure. In the 1992 supplement, Giussani says that “This hatred is against evangelization” (20). I don’t believe that hatred against evangelization can be answered without confronting head-on the messy and violent methods for evangelization in history.

While the trilogy is the main text of CL, the leadership of the movement will sometimes specify other texts. Other texts include, for example, texts of CL annual spiritual exercises, articles by Julián Carrón, or Giussani’s series Is It Possible to Live this Way? (first published in 1994) in which Giussani spoke with people who were seeking to live a life of the evangelical counsels in Memores Domini. The group (also called the Gruppo Adulto) is a related association established by Giussani. In contrast to the PerCorso trilogy, these volumes on faith, hope, and love propose the Christian life in a positive way for those who want to live the Christian experience more deeply.

Limits of an apologetic approach

While I can see the value of this apologetics approach in educating young people who are attracted to it, the prospect of repeating this course through life has its limits. To begin with, the self-awareness of the church, or of Christians, continues to unfold. An apologetic path forged during turbulent years in 20th-century Italy may not be globally applicable in 21st-century environments. The bunker mentality can make it difficult for members to work with non-Catholics or even Catholics with a different background. It certainly makes it difficult to find common cause on social issues when any proposed solution can be rejected out of hand by someone saying that the solution does not correspond to the needs of their heart, and that they want more (I actually saw apply this as a criticism of gun control in the US). In fact, most solutions, whether proposed by those within the church or outside, fall short of the desires of the human heart. For example, both banning divorce entirely and allowing easy access to divorce both seem inadequate, but the law is a blunt instrument. Law will always fall short of ideal justice. The focus on defending the church and means that it’s difficult to criticize the actions of leaders of the church, whether historically, or in the current moment. It can be stagnating to study the same apologetic course over the years— taking up time which could be used reading and deepening one’s sense of history and knowledge of the world.