ROME — The ecclesial movement Communion and Liberation, which began in Italy in 1954 to educate its followers toward Christian maturity and to collaborate in the Church's mission in all walks of life, recently published in Italian the second volume of its history.

La Ripresa (The Revival, St. Paul Editions), which covers the years 1969-76, will soon appear in other languages.

The author, Msgr. Massimo Camisasca, is former vice president of the John Paul II Pontifical Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family in Rome and founder and general superior of the St. Charles Borromeo Priestly Fraternity of Missionaries.

In the following Zenit interview, Msgr. Camisasca describes the latest volume and the path of the movement's rebirth under the guidance of its founder, Msgr. Luigi Giussani, and its definitive affirmation in the Church in an Italian society marked by upheaval and shaken by bombs and attacks.

If you were to use an image to describe this second stage of the history of the Communion and Liberation movement, which would you choose?

If I were to express with one image the path described in this volume, I would choose the wandering in the desert.

We think of the people of Israel: The years spent between Egypt and the Promised Land, under the guidance of Moses, allowed its formation and represented also the definitive discovery of its vocation in the world. Years marked by adversity but also by many gifts. And by no few rebellions against their leader.

At times the Jewish people had the impression that it would all end there; then the journey resumed as if a miracle. The years 1969-76, only seven, represent under the guidance of Don Gius -sani the path of the movement's rebirth after a period of crisis in which its numbers were reduced to the minimum.

What were the most interesting and demanding challenges posed by those terrible years? And how did the Communion and Liberation position fit in with the Church and the world?

First of all, one question shook the Church in those years: From whom will salvation come? Much of Italian Catholicism, although necessarily without denying in theory that Christ is the Savior, trusted concretely in the Marxist analysis as a path to liberation, when not in the revolutionary praxis.

Here lies the center of the teaching of Don Giussani — the reply to the question: Who is the Savior, who can free us from evil?

In those years there was confrontation on the one hand between human wisdom and human morality, intensely and at times violently proposed by those who preached salvation through revolution, and on the other, Christian communion lived as an absolutely original way of understanding human existence, which comes from on high, is born of faith and from faith draws its vision of men and the world, constituting a unique rule of life.

For Giussani it remains supremely true that “God is everything and is within the human” because the eternal has become the modality of life for the human. “The great Christian word is the Incarnation, but what this God, who is within all things, brings to the surface is not human wisdom, it is lived communion.”

In these years he struggles for “a new city which must be born.” But the city is an absolute gift, a gift born of conversion. These are the terms of the tremendous question, a question of life or death for Christianity, which poses itself in those years.

For Don Gi us sani the decision is absolutely not ideological or partisan. Again in those years he said: “The decision we must make is to be within the one Christian tension we know, tension between cross and resurrection.” Immanence in the world, then, but immanence of Christian communion, presence of man conscious of the novelty he carries.

In that period, what answer does Don Giussani suggest for the question of evil, violence and injustice in the world?

The problem of evil and how to face it was the central problem of those years. It is also today. Here lies, in fact, the profound present-day importance of this volume.

Today, as 30 years ago, men, in the face of injustice, poverty, discrimination, ask themselves: Is war and violence all we have left? In March 1969, Don Giussani said: “We are vexed, inevitably wounded by evil, in its most clamorous version, the social, which is injustice. But we must not forget another type of evil, which is structural to our life, such as, for example, death, disease, betrayal. How is the problem of evil usually faced? With analysis and historical action. We feel the need to analyze situations and structures and then to act, we come together because alone we can do little or nothing, and what we cannot do together will be done by history and posterity.”

But Don Gi us sani adds: “I see that all the positions as sumed by man with the will to eliminate evil in the world start out from the presupposition that evil is in the structures, they are unilateral, they are forced to affirm themselves to forget or renounce something, and one violence is followed by another.”

Evil is in the man of today and alone he cannot free himself: This was the cry of Don Giussani in those times and the heart of his educational method. Evil has its roots in human liberty. [He says:] “The concept of original sin is at the basis of all this and clarifies it. Evil in me can be won only by another, by another who is like me but greater than me, by God made man, who died and is risen.”

Only when Jesus comes again will evil be completely taken away. But the life of the Church, at the same time, is an anticipation of this liberation from evil. In this life, continuity of the Risen Christ, man is granted to live in time the experience of life finally and definitively liberated.