Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Loreto (Fides Service) - On Saturday 16 October the church movement Communion and Liberation made a pilgrimage to Loreto on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its foundation. At least 45,000 members of CL from all over Italy took part. The central moment was a Concelebration of Mass presided by Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples who focused his homily on the significance of pilgrimage for Christians. It was the founder of the movement Mons Luigi Giussani himself who suggested the pilgrimage.
“You have made this pilgrimage to thank the Lord of history for the beginning of a new history, the history of Communion and Liberation lived as part of the great history of salvation in which two thousand years ago God chose became part of human life and experience. You chose the form of “pilgrimage” for a precise reason: to live existentially the human condition of being perennially on a journey, the “homo viator” moving amidst a thousand difficulties towards a safe haven, the promised land. Christian pilgrimage is not vagabonding on the roads of the world in perennial search of adventure or insipid curiosities, or the nonsense of things, dragged by the flow of rivers and currents which have neither beginning and nor end. On the contrary your pilgrimage is moved by something more, or better, by Someone who you have met and who has called you to make the pilgrimage to a well known destination.”
Pilgrimage, the Cardinal said, “is a concrete and correct metaphor of our Christian life; it is the discovery and re-discovery of our belonging to the Christ and to his Church. It is our identity which becomes dynamically history in the history of Christ. The same history which the Church has lived for two thousand years at the side of humanity to announce the presence of Christ.”
Tracing the history of Communion and Liberation, Cardinal Sepe emphasised the “the fecundity of an educational method which encounters, fascinates and changes people of different cultures and origins”: “As Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples on many occasions I have seen personally the power of the Movement’s proposal and the impact of its method even in recently evangelised countries”.
Lastly the Cardinal quoted Pope John Paul II in the Novo millennio ineunte: “we shall not be saved by a formula but by a Person, and the assurance which he gives us: I am with you!”, and he continued: “This is the heart of the passion for education and communication of the Christian experience as it is lived and proposed by the Movement. How often when Christ is proclaimed this essential truth is taken for granted and reduced to merely moral and social consequences, or relativised in confused religiosity due to a wrong conception of respect for the position of others.”
At the end of his homily Cardinal Sepe said he hoped the Movement would “continue to announce to all the beauty and the joy of the encounter with the Redeemer of mankind and to vigorously proclaim divine mercy and remind humanity, at times dispirited, that there is nothing to fear because Christ is our future ”. (Agenzia Fides 18/10/2004; Righe 40 - Parole 515)
