From the beginning:
Sarco: "What is Communion and Liberation, really—a social project, a culture, an educational strategy, or something else entirely?"
Giussani: "Communion and Liberation is only an insight of Christianity as an event of life, and so as a history. From the beginnings of the Movement, it was always stressed that an idea, something valuable that is intuited, develops in a method of facing reality, which in its turn effects a change in all the relationships that one lives. In the same way, the Christian insight develops in a method of judgment and of living.
"I believe that the history and the development that the Movement has had [to] depend more than anything else on the focused authenticity of the original insight, that is, on the point of view that we started from in order to commit ourselves to the Christian fact. Remembering how this insight began in me awakens one of the most beautiful memories of my life. To be sure, the first insight that the horizon of existence is God’s love began to shine in a spiritual situation that had been prepared by a family education and was then deepened in seminary life; but it really blossomed and reached awareness when I read and understood with real intelligence for the first time the beginning of the Gospel of John: 'The Word was made flesh.' I remember how my seminary professor, Father Gaetano Corti (who I think is now teaching the history of Christianity at the University of Trieste), used to explain this passage to us boys, saying that the cornerstone of reality and the center of the life of the person and of the world had become in Christ a presence that could be met by each one of us."
Thanks to Fred for pointing this out to me during our telephonic SofC this afternoon.