Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is one of the nation’s leading Jesuit universities. Professor Rodney Howsare, teaching in the Theology Department, had read Fr. Giussani’s books (TRS and AOCC) and decided to use them in his class. Right before the beginning of the semester, however, Dr. Howsare left the university for another teaching post, and his successor, Dr. Robert Gotcher, decided to use Fr. Giussani’s books. Finally, a faculty observer of Gotcher, Dr. Ralph Del Colle, became familiar with the books and decided to use them in his own course the following semester. Each one of them made a presentation and my task was to respond to them. Since the three of them had summarized Giussani’s thought as a response to the need for a “modern apologetics” (Dr. Del Colle) that reflected the contemporary theological insistence on the vocation of Man to divine life in Christ (reference was made by Howsare to De Lubac, for example), I limited my response to a point raised by Professor Gotcher, who found Fr. Giussani’s books to be way beyond the cultural literacy of the students. This may well be the case, I said, but I asked how students with no college education at all were benefiting from Fr. Giussani’s books in all kinds of cultural environments around the world. The reason, I said, was Fr. Giussani’s paternity as a teacher, and not only as an academic theologian. It was in the context of a human friendship, and the love of the teacher for his student, that Fr. Giussani’s thought was able to open the minds and hearts of the students. This is why a movement, Communion and Liberation, was born as a result of Fr. Giussani’s paternity as a teacher, and why its central weekly activity of study of his thought was called the School of Community.
The professor had said that Fr. Giussani's books are "way beyond the cultural literacy of [college] students," which if you think about it is accurate enough. I got my own taste of cultural breadth as a dropout from college, through the paternity of a friend and through discovering books like Balthasar's which invited me to broaden my cultural literacy. I read the Divine Comedy on my own time, for pleasure. Chesterton, Augustine, Pascal, GM Hopkins, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy. When I returned to college, I chose a Jesuit liberal arts school to deepen my cultural literacy, and so I read Anselm, Chaucer, Milton, Spencer, Donne, modern poetry, etc. My Communications Arts teacher was a bit surprised to see me put what I learned in that class into context with Walker Percy's own investigations of communications theory. When I took my first theology class, Christ in Scriptures, I asked my theology teacher why it was called Christ in Scriptures when Christ was absent from the class. She answered that she did not want to practice theology (faith seeking understanding) in a class that was mandatory for all students with and without faith. But then to her discredit, she did not also sponsor a group outside of classes to seek Christ in the Scriptures, to practice faith seeking understanding — in freedom. Of my teachers, only the English teachers invited students to broaden their cultural literacy. Every one of them mentioned countless books that they weren't currently teaching.
Even so, it wasn't even the English teachers who motivated me to seek out a broader cultural literacy - it was the paternity of a friend and reading challenging books - books that weren't mere collections of ideas and arguments, but books that respected the human experience found in a diversity of art forms and genres. The important thing in life is not a job or making a living, but reflecting on the human experience. College won't give you this, nor any mandatory class. Instead, you need friends. Friends like those I saw this past vacation: who presented on medieval music, Caravaggio, the financial and economic crisis. Friends like those learning about Africa, Latin America, and so much more at the Meeting in Rimini.
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