Funeral Mass for Fr Giussani
Apr 06, 2005
United in the grateful and prayerful remembrance of Monsignor Luigi Giussani, founder of “Communion and Liberation”, Milan Cathedral, February 24, 2005.
1. Dear people, in this moment of farewell, I feel the need to express a particular gratitude.
It is gratitude to the Father who once more today, in this Eucharist, has given us his Son Jesus as Saviour and Redeemer and has had us taste the living and grace-bearing presence of his Son, believed in and loved as the most precious good of our life; indeed, the one and highest good.
It is gratitude to Christ the Lord himself , who is the centre and the heart of our whole experience of faith who, with his Body and Blood, continues to be the fount of salvation for the whole of mankind and who dwells in and lets himself be encountered in his Church.
It is gratitude to the Holy Spirit, giver of every good, who incessantly fills the Church and animates mankind with the superabundance of his gifts.
Today we want to thank the Lord, in a most particular way, for the gift of monsignor Luigi Giussani, priest of this Milanese Church, who founded Communion and Liberation and has always been, incessantly, its soul and its valued and sought-after guide.
It is first of all this Ambrosian Church that is happy to thank the Lord, because Fr Giussani was born in this Church as a man and a Christian, and was ordained priest; because here, before anywhere else, he poured out his extraordinary and untiring passion as an educator, above all of the youth, firstly in the Seminary, then at the Berchet High School and in the school environment where he took up the form of apostolate Catholic Action offered him with the name, which he made his own, of “Gioventù Studentesca,” as well as in the Catholic University; because it is here in our Church that, with his limpid and strong faith and with his indomitable apostolic passion, he brought to birth the Movement of Communion and Liberation, which later grew and developed not only in Milan, but also in many other parts of the world.
And with the Ambrosian Church, many other people and realities here present or represented express thei
Funeral Mass for Fr Giussani