The companionship of Fr. Giussani with the Meeting

I would like us to make emerge the factors determining the adult face of this phenomenon that has given rise to the biggest manifestation we have done in thirty years: the Meeting of Rimini. The biggest, not merely quantitatively, but also from the point of view of impact on public opinion.
a. On the one hand, people passionate about the life of the Movement. What does it mean to be passionate about life? An adult cannot help but be passionate about a life, otherwise he is either an old man or a child. The adult is serious about life: the seriousness in life is the passion for meaning. The adult is a person for whom the Meeting is a vehicle, or place of encounter, with the meaning of his own existence, his own person.
b. In the second place, friends among themselves because of circumstances that enabled them to be such. So then, a passion for life that makes them capable of friendship. And friendship is facing needs “together.”
Now then, what is the particular accent that makes you understand the maturity of these people? It is that, living in a certain situation (Rimini in the summer), they noted the absolute, total lack of Christian presence. How many years has Rimini been a seaside resort of this type? It is very beautiful and tragic that people asked themselves at a certain point, suddenly or finally, “There is no Christian presence here.”
c. Third issue: so then, the ideal of life they have within, made organic by friendship and therefore made courageous by friendship, commits, changes. A true ideal perception does not exist unless it becomes energy of change, that is, affection, energy for mobilizing time, space, and reality in function of the ideal. Therefore, they moved to realize this presence.
This is the story of the adult. Serious in life, who acknowledges the ideal, and therefore eminently social in temperament, in features. This is the ideal that unites: it is the response to the need of living that unites people, that creates society. Friendship: companionship guided to destiny, as I always define it with the kids. Perception of a situation as absence of your own ideal, and thus engagement, so that this may be so, so that the presence of the ideal may happen.
So the new event begins, the generation of the adult starts, the adult generates. They created a place where a subject was encountered. This is the presence: a place. The generation of the adult, who makes present his own life outside himself, is a place where a subject is encountered. A subject, a person, a humanity, who had something to say; a humanity with a message. This is the true son! A father is not a father because he permits a woman to expel a fetus. He is truly father if he creates a person who can be encountered as place of a message, when he creates a person who has a message within.