Luigi Giovanni Giussani was born on October 15, 1922, in Desio, a small town in Brianza, north of Milan, Italy. His parents were Beniamino, an artist and a carpenter, and Angelina, who worked in a textile factory. He was a Socialist; she, a devout Catholic, and their role in the human and religious formation of young Giussani was fundamental. 

Giussani entered the seminary of Venegono at the age of eleven, and was ordained a priest on May 26, 1945, by Cardinal Ildefonso Schuster. During high school, he fell in love with the study of literature, especially the works of the poet Giacomo Leopardi, because his “questions seemed to overshadow all others for me.” So great was his passion that he learned all of Leopardi’s poetry by heart and spend entire periods of time studying only him. 

Faith and Life 

After his priestly ordination, his superiors decided the young Giussani should stay at the seminary to continue his studies and begin teaching. In 1954, he completed his doctorate in Theology. 

During that time, Giussani came to realize that underneath the apparent flourishing of Catholicism in Italy, with churches full and thousands of votes going to the Christian Democrat party, a deep crisis was already brewing: the separation of faith from daily life, the contrast between tradition and current ways of thinking, and morality reduced to moralism. Though they knew the doctrines and dogmas, young people were deep down “ignorant” of the Church and were growing distant. Seeing this, Giussani received permission from his superiors to teach Religion in a public high school. Beginning in 1954, he taught at Liceo Berchet, a high school with a focus on the classics in Milan, where he remained until 1967.

His presence in the school gave new energy to Gioventù Studentesca (GS or “Student Youth” – the name for the activities of Catholic Action in high school) and gave it the contours of a true Movement. 

In 1968, GS was overtaken by the political upheavals of the time, and many of its members joined the Student Movement, abandoning the Christian life. During that same year, Fr. Giussani laid the groundwork for a recovery of the experience at the origin of the Movement. The name “Communion and Liberation” was adopted the following year. 

The Movement Grows

In the early 1970s, Fr. Giussani became directly involved with a group of students at the Catholic University of Milan. Years of great dynamism, they saw the expansion of the Movement into every realm of life: high school, university, in parishes, in factories and in the workplace, often successfully challenging mindsets that were politically or culturally hostile to theirs. Fr. Giussani did not shy away from the risks of such turbulent growth and untiringly called members back to the “true nature” of CL as an experience to mature in faith, continually pointing out the “consequences” of this at the intellectual, organizational and political levels. 

The election of John Paul II in 1978 marked a deepening of the relationship with Karol Wojtyla that Giussani began in Poland in 1971. For a number of years, Fr. Giussani regularly brought groups of young people to visit the Pope at the Vatican or at Castel Gandolfo. 

The World as His Horizon 

As the years passed, Giussani’s early intuitions regarding mission and ecumenism continued to develop. Some GS students moved to Brazil as early as the beginning of the 1970s. At the same time, in part through his friendship with Fr. Romano Scalfi and his organization Russia Cristiana (an association formed to raise awareness about the rich tradition of Russian Orthodoxy), his ties to Eastern Europe and the orthodox world multiplied. Over the course of these years, the Movement continued to grow – primarily in Europe, Latin America and the United States – in part in response to the warm encouragement of John Paul II in 1984 to “go into all the world.” 

A trip to Japan in 1987 opened the door to a deep friendship between Fr. Giussani and Shodo Habukawa, a priest and prominent figure in “Shingon” Buddhism. A special relationship developed with the CL community in Spain, where Giussani periodically made extended visits: he saw the future of the Movement in the deep relationship of affection and shared approach with this community.

Last Messages 

The beginning of the 1990s brought the appearance of the first signs of the illness that would accompany him for over a decade, increasing in severity up until his death. 

In this new millennium, between 2002 and 2004, an extraordinary exchange of letters took place with John Paul II, ending with the letter in which Giussani writes, “Not only did I have no intention of ‘founding’ anything, but I believe that the genius of the Movement that I saw coming to birth lies in having felt the urgency to proclaim the need to return to the elementary aspects of Christianity, that is to say, the passion of the Christian fact as such in its original elements, and nothing more”. 

His last message to the Movement was on October 16, 2004, on the occasion of the pilgrimage to Loreto for the 50th anniversary of CL. The letter opens with the words, “Our Lady, it is you who give certainty to our hope! This is the most important phrase in the whole history of the Church; the whole of Christianity is expressed in it”. 

On February 22, 2005, he died in his home in Milan. 

The funeral Mass was celebrated in the Duomo in Milan by then-Cardinal and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Joseph Ratzinger, serving as the personal representative of John Paul II.He was buried in the Monumentale Cemetery in Milan. His tomb became the destination for a steady stream of pilgrimages from Italy and around the world.

At the end of the Mass celebrated at the Duomo in Milan on the seventh anniversary of Fr. Giussani’s death, on February 22, 2012, Fr. Julián Carrón (elected president of the CL Fraternity in 2005 after the death of Fr. Giussani, who had called him from Spain one year before to share his responsibility for guiding the entire movement) announced that he had submitted the request to open the cause for canonization of the priest from Desio. The petition was accepted by Cardinal Angelo Scola, Archbishop of Milan. Fr. Giussani is Servant of God.