What is School of Community?

The constitutive factors of the School of Community. At the beginning of work on a new School of Community text, Why the Church?, we offer here some synthetic notes from a conversation with Fr Giussani.

The beginning of an experience is the encounter with a human reality that is different. A School of Community that is detached from this would be an ideology or an abstraction.

In the School of Community, certainly we must talk about life, but in the light of the new experience that we have encountered. Otherwise we talk of life as we conceive it, how we feel about it, how it makes us react in natural terms, and in any case following a criterion that is not belonging. The School of Community is the main instrument of the new life, of the new way of pursuing the aim of the new “I”.

The Leader

Everything depends on the one who leads the School of Community. If the one who leads is a presence, then intelligence and affectivity are moved in a different way. It’s the novelty that leads. If he gives a lesson, then he is not a presence, he doesn’t move. At best what he moves is a dialectic, a discussion, a series of thoughts. The following morning all of that line of thoughts is irrelevant to life.

1. The sign that the School of Community is led is that you come away from it changed.
2. The School of Community must be a development of the encounter. In it the whole life of the Movement is continually taken up again and surpassed.
3. Without existentiality (the link between the word and the reality of life) there is no School of Community. Only with this link is it the expression of an experience. If it doesn’t bring you to notice something that must change and, therefore, to desire to bring about this change, it is not School of Community.

How is the School of Community Done ?

As prayer. Since the School of Community must reassume the phenomenon of the Movement in its development, remember that there is no search for the truth about Destiny without prayer. So the meeting must begin with prayer.

We need to pray during the meeting, as an attitude of the mind in the one who asks questions and in the one who answers-an attitude of humility, happy and sure of what it brings. Prayer becomes the discovery of the need for the sacraments, in which the initial event once again becomes a presence.

How is the School of Community Organized?

First of all it is a school-a place and a method in which you learn.

Learning means increasing your awareness of reality.

Learning implies understanding the text and what it means, that is to say in its relationship to reality and in the reasons that it gives for making us understand how it is linked with reality.

Inevitably in order to understand you need to repeat (ripetere = petere ad = tending toward)-to increase your attention. Repeating with attention is the same thing as seeing. When is it that you understand? In so far as you feel that the words you read and hear correspond with what you live.

In this way, reality, in so far as you face up to it, becomes an epiphany, a revelation of your awareness of belonging.

Four Points To Work On

1. An intelligent reading of the text, attentive to the way it relates to things, to the judgments it generates, to the reasons it gives.
2. Communication of your experience (everything can be brought in), in comparison with the text.
3. A culture that develops. Your motivations and criteria must spring up from within the nature of the experience and not from outside. The more you penetrate into the event that has made us grow, and the more you follow, the more intelligent you become.
4. The synthesis made by the leader. He communicates how his experience has developed during the event that is the School of Community.

The Result Communicative

The School of Community conceived and lived in this way gives rise to an affective impulse to communicate that has three aspects:

1. Witness and mission.
2. Attention to people’s needs, charity that expresses itself in an organic consistency of works.
3. Culture: the affective impulse to communicate inspires creativity, progress in judgment, logical discoveries, with all the necessary instruments that spring from these.