The Heart of the Gospel

36. All revealed truths derive from the same divine source and are to be believed with the same faith, yet some of them are more important for giving direct expression to the heart of the Gospel. In this basic core, what shines forth is the beauty of the saving love of God made manifest in Jesus Christ who died and rose from the dead. In this sense, the Second Vatican Council explained, "in Catholic doctrine there exists an order or a 'hierarchy' of truths, since they vary in their relation to the foundation of the Christian faith." This holds true as much for the dogmas of faith as for the whole corpus of the Church's teaching, including her moral teaching. 

The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis, par. 36, p. 19

Jesus Christ, Door to the Sheepfold and Master of Dogma

John 20:19 "On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them: Peace be with you." 

Man never has the whole truth at his disposal; a portion of it always remains with God. In all communication of truth, there is a kind of reservatio mentalis. This reserving , however, is not done by us, but by God. When arranging matters as we think best, we must always say: assuming that God does not arrange things otherwise. For man to make use of reservatio mentalis is all right provided he reserves something not for his own advantage, but for God's advantage. In belief, the reservatio of truth occurs on the part of God, who perhaps holds it back for communication to us at a later time. In belief there is a foregoing of complete understanding of truth, an abdicatio of truth, which is based on the recognition that everything we know and love has, in God, the form of the ever-greater. 

But this foregoing does not apply in the case of dogma. Here, nothing is relativized. Dogma is the door that is closed against everything non-Christian outside of it. As directed to the outside, the dogmas are rigid and uncompromising. We must regard the door that the Lord closes behind him as closed for as long a he does not instruct us to do otherwise. And he himself does not open the door anymore , but goers right through the closed door. For him, the rigid closedness does not exist, for him every truth is open. But for  us the closing must be regarded as final, as absolute. If we were able to add something to the Lord's truth by our own thought, the everything would be repeated called into question, including within the confines of the Church. Then, however, the door would not longer be the Lord, but rather, man and his truth.The Lord alone has the freedom to enter, from the outside to the inside, through the closed doors. What is closed for us is open for him. In heaven there will no longer be any unclosed doors because there will no longer be any unbelief. 

Dogmas are securings of belief against outside dangers, not closures for the sake of closure. Dogma has a basis of immovable truth , but it opens itself out from that basis into the unlimitedness of living, inexhaustible truth in God. Objectively, it has an absolute point of departure; but it is also relative in each person who subjectively assimilates it, because here absolute truth is grasped only partially and imperfectly, and exists within an open movement of belief toward the Lord. The framework of the dogmatic truth is unshakable, but within its confines, the infinite truth of the Lord moves in sovereign freedom. God's truth is infinite, and is therefore always just outlined and suggested in dogmatic precepts. The measure of dogmatic truth remains the Lord himself; and the Lord can see everything differently, and infinitely more fully than any particular believer can see it. Neither individual believers nor the Church as a whole have any authority to make changes in dogma; but they are also not allowed to do so, because it is the Lord alone who comprises the truth of dogma. 

From the way that the absolute and relative are intertwined, we can see that whereas man may regard himself personally as the greatest sinner, he nevertheless has no right to regard someone else as more guilty than himself. Another person could, perhaps, by citing different reasons, prove to him that he is wrong; an he too, in a certain respect, could be right. But in the end, both would be wrong, because the Lord alone holds in his hand the measuring stick of sin. All human judgments must, in the end, yield before his exclusive judgments. Similarly, the Lord remains the master of dogma, whose entire depths, which men do not plumb, are his own depths, which he avails himself of in freedom.

Adrienne von Speyr John vol.4, pp. 200, 201

Christ's Conception of Life.

"Jesus Christ did not come into the world as a substitute for human effort, for human freedom, or to eliminate human trial - the existential condition of freedom. He came into the world to call man back to the depths of all questions, to his own fundamental structure, and to his own real situation. If certain human values are not safeguarded, all the problems man is called to resolve in the trial of life do not dissolve, but rather become more complicated. Jesus Christ came to call man back to true religiosity, without which every claim to a solution of those problems is a lie. The problem of the knowledge of the meaning of things (truth), making use of things (work), human awareness (love), human co-existence (society and politics), lack a proper formulation, and so, to the extent that religiosity is not at the foundation of the search for their solution, they generate ever greater confusion in the history of the individual and humanity as a whole."

At the Origin of the Christian Claim, Luigi Giussani, p. 97

The Value of the Person

"....The whole world is not as worthy as the most insignificant human person. Nothing in the entire universe can compare with a person, from the first instant of his conception until the last step of his decrepit old age. Every person possesses within himself a principle by which he depends on no one, a foundation of inalienable rights, a font of values....

     Christian religiosity  does not spring from a taste for philosophy, but from the dogged insistence of Jesus Christ, who saw in that unique relationship with God the only possibility of safeguarding the value of he individual. Christian religiosity arises as the one and only condition for being human. This is man's choice: either he conceives himself free from the whole universe and dependent only on God, or free from God and therefore the slave of every circumstance..."

At the Origin of the Christian Claim, Luigi Giussani, pp.84, 86

Giussani: Christ and Man

 " ........nothing is more important than the question of man's true situation. It would be impossible to become fully aware of what Jesus Christ means if one did not first become fully aware of the nature of that dynamism which makes man human. Christ proposes Himself as the answer to what "I" am and only an attentive, tender, and impassioned awareness of my own self can make me open and lead me to acknowledge, admire, thank and live, Christ. Without this awareness, even Jesus Christ becomes just a name." 

At the Origin of the Christian Claim,  p.6

Question: Is this why human formation has to be the basis of spiritual formation, why sound Anthropology is such a great help to true Spirituality, why Reason undergirds Faith, why Theology needs an adequate Philosophy underneath it? The dizzy heights human nature reaches to, the Omega that disorients it, cannot even be grasped at unless I undertake "an attentive, tender, and impassioned awareness" of my own self in relation to Him.

Prayer: Sainthood for Fr. Giussani

O Merciful Father, we thank You for having given your Church and the world the Servant of God, Fr. Luigi Giussani. He, with his life lived with passion, taught us to know and love Jesus Christ present here and now, to ask Him with humble certainty that "the beginning of every day be a yes to the Lord who embraces us and makes fruitful the soil of our heart for the accomplishment of His work in the world, which is the victory over death and evil."

 Grant, O Father, through the intercession of Fr. Giussani, according to your will, the grace we implore, in the hope that he will soon be numbered among your saints.

 Through Christ, our Lord. Amen

                                                                                                            Veni Sancte Spiritus. 

                                                                                                             Veni per Mariam

Peguy on Grace

      "Grace is even more mysterious and more profound than beauty. Grace is even more arbitrary, more free, more sovereign, more perfectly illogical (outside the realm of logic, without reasons, beyond the scope of every calculation); it is also disturbing,  as is everything that is given gratuitously, (that which is given gratuitously is disturbing because it calls our attention to something we had not thought of, that we would never think of, that above all we would not want to think of). The powerfulness of grace.  The eternal powerfulness of the eternal Blood, of an eternal Blood, the Blood of Jesus Christ."  

quoted by Luigi Giussani, in He is if He Changes,  pp.31,32

Amazing! Wonderful! Could never have been written by the hand of man except under the inspiration of grace!