On Prayer, Fr. Giussani

The desperate outcry of Pastor Brand, the character who gives his name to Ibsen’s play, (“Answer me, O God, in the hour in which death swallows me: is not the whole will of a man sufficient to achieve a single shred of salvation?”) is answered by the humble positiveness of Saint Teresa of the Child Jesus, who writes: “When I am charitable it is Jesus alone who acts in me”.

All that means that man’s freedom, always enfolded by the Mystery, has as supreme, unassailable expression, prayer. That is why freedom presents itself, according to all its true nature, as request to belong to Being, therefore to Christ.

Msgr. Luigi Giussani before John Paul II, Rome, Saint Peter’s Square, 30 May 1998