The occasion for this collection work is the twentieth anniversary of the pontifical recognition of the Fraternity—for this anniversary, John Paul II, in a letter to Fr. Giussani that is quoted in the opening pages, reviews “the significant steps in the ecclesial itinerary of the Movement” and thanks God “for what He has wrought through your initiative, Reverend Monsignor, and that of those who have joined hands with you over the years.” Punctually echoing the Pope’s letter, Fr. Giussani asks all friends of the Fraternity to “ask for a great clarity in the face of our responsibility” and to pray to Our Lady “for our miseries and those of the world.”
The book is divided into five parts.

1. The Idea of Fraternity—Fr. Luigi Giussani’s reflections during a CL President’s Council in 1993

As Fr. Giussani recounts, the first idea of Fraternity dates back to the early Seventies—before 250 leaders of the movement, he was struck by the idea that they were all grown up humanly and professionally, and they were responsible for families, offices, shops, but it was not yet made clear that each should “feel maturely responsible for their own holiness.” However, the response to this need for correction could no longer stand in the forms appropriate to students or college students—“taken care of like babies, organized like children, or set in motion like college students”—but had to be understood and assumed by each one freely; moreover, this work could not preclude the fundamental characteristic of the Christian method, namely, communionality. So, people were suggested to join together freely, forming a group, not a huge one, whose value and purpose was to increase each other’s faith through prayer, School of Community and mutual charity. To encourage people to cling to these two founding ideas, two necessary gestures were proposed—enrolling in the Fraternity and a monthly offering to the Common Fund.

2. The Origin and Purpose—Various interventions by Fr. Luigi Giussani regarding the Fraternity from 1969 to 1992

Groups of Communion, Confraternities, and Fraternity are names used for the same phenomenon envisioned, desired and experienced firsthand by Fr. Giussani; these variants and declinations share, in fact, the origin and purpose, and that is that the group—as already said in 1969—is not a refuge, but a locus of personal conversion, hard work and passion for the Movement. Ten years later, as regards confraternities, it is stressed that it is all about a reality of friendship and communion in which adults, as baptized persons, take their responsibility for the call to a total dedication to Christ. With the pontifical recognition of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation—on February 11, 1982—the goodness of the experience of Communion and Liberation becomes definitively and publicly explicit; the certainty, given by the pontifical recognition, that the Fraternity is for the edification of the Church—so that the whole world may know the Lord—makes the experience of the Fraternity coincide with the search for one’s own face and therefore with the work to live one’s relationship with God, with one’s own destiny—conversion is the realization of the truth of ourselves. After setting this main issue, it becomes clear that following, in the sense of ultimately depending on the one who leads the Fraternity, coincides with my true expediency, with the expediency of Christ—it coincides with the passage from the world’s esteem to the esteem of Christ. A decisive point of the enactment in life of this new expediency is rule, understood as a companionship guided towards destiny, especially to the extent that it can be identified in precise and established facts—the rule is a companionship in that it establishes certain shining points of recognition, “like a roof rests on its pillars, and in which examples resonate that, in their gratuitousness, constitute an edification, an edifying stimulus.” The companionship is thus called to become memory of Christ, that is, recognition of His presence in a lasting way. In this regard, the Gospel episode of the disciples of Emmaus is cited as the “passage [that] could have been written for the Fraternity”—“Were not our hearts burning within us while He was talking to us on the road, while He was opening the Scriptures to us?” From this moved awareness comes our missionary thrust, “Tell the others,” whereby we take up responsibility towards the Kingdom of God.

3. The Work of the Fraternity Is the Movement—A lesson from the Spiritual Exercises of the Fraternity, May 1982

In this lesson, noting that we can easily get distracted from the fundamental purpose of the Movement, Fr. Giussani suggests that our life should be grounded in Christ in a sudden burst, without the mediation of interpretation. Christ as the reason for human existence and creativity is at the heart of the Movement’s experience; the purpose of the Fraternity therefore turns out to be a call to this original purity, a call for each one to walk before Christ. Then, considering the Movement for what it really is, the institution of the Fraternity makes its identity explicit in a call to total purity in the commitment to the Movement. In front of such magnanimous correction, a communal embrace bursts forth, a possibility of forgiveness and understanding, and not least an agility and freedom also in the organization. Therefore, the Fraternities are not subordinate to the local Movement, to leaders or to possible works or organizations, but the only form of authority within the Fraternity, in the freedom of adhering initially, is the central Diaconia, as clearly described in the Statutes of the Fraternity.

4. Assemblies and Dialogues.
Exercises of the Fraternity 1982

Fr. Giussani opens this assembly by explaining its meaning, which is “letting ourselves be corrected by the experience of the other”; he then reads four letters that outline the figure of the subject the Fraternity needs. The many contributions that follow are motivated by a desire to better understand how you can live your life wide open to Christ, with no intimism or formalism—attitudes, positions, symptoms, more or less consonant with the Fraternity’s purpose, are evaluated. But it is in Fr. Giussani’s concise judgment that these contributions and questions can find an answer, “If we ask for faith and if we ask Christ to demonstrate, to manifest His victory, which He has already enacted and imparted to our flesh through Baptism, it will manifest itself: faith will become luminous, communicative, creative, poetic, and He will manifest Himself in our life before everyone’s eyes. This is the certainty by which the Christian man walks, as Saint Paul said, spe erectus, upright in hope, as Abraham walked, hoping against all hope—upright in hope, against the evidence of our mortal frailty.” 

Exercises of the Fraternity 1983

This assembly is opened by the speech of Giancarlo Cesana who, after recalling his early concerns about the rise of the Fraternity, explicitly asks two questions; the first relates to the temptation to escape from the Fraternity being a law for life, and the second relates to the temptation to fall into a religious choice by replacing the Movement’s original missionary impulse with intimism. Fr. Luigi Giussani takes up these two insights—he reiterates that the Fraternity merely calls for what is beautiful and good in the Movement to become the rule for an adult person who has experienced the correspondence of the Movement, and he assures that faith has been given to us, not for retreating from society, but for a capacity to be present. On these two directives, faith and witness, several questions arise about memory, the rule, obedience, freedom, abandonment, belonging, and they are followed by their answers. But it is in the call to make my faith coincide with my life that questions about action find their proper dimension because, either a little or a lot, it will modulate my action and will change it, His memory determines what I am.

Exercises of the Fraternity 1985 (first and second sessions)

A crucial turning point of these two assemblies is the word vocation, that is the impact of the cosmos, of reality, of the history of one’s own “I”; vocation coincides with that maturity of faith, that journey of ascesis that is the Fraternity. Indeed, no sphere of the Fraternity can consciously miss the closest sphere of family, friends, work and society, “Faith hurls me into reality.” This attention to reality, however, cannot be measured by the fact that a Fraternity helps us solve our problems but by the certainty of our goal, “From the purpose comes the light which illumines and gives more precise shape to our actions.” Thus, human change is not a fundamental condition for belonging but the gratuitous consequence of Christ’s victory over evil, “Christ’s resurrection [...] becomes definitive evidence, in the real change in something, in something substantial in terms of value.” It is in the missionary impulse that, normally, life’s problems and difficulties find their proper dimension and are resolved—in other words, “life fills with gladness if destiny enters into it, i.e., if Christ comes in.” If we are not aware that “Christ gives eternal life and the hundredfold here below” we die bogged down in the swamp of our usual things. In this horizon, the only responsibility left for man is this cry, this prayer to Christ, “Christ, have mercy on me, come!” We have to beg, immersing ourselves in the word of God and the liturgy as we are supported by that guidance that is authority.