“There are two types of Catholics in this country,” I remember a British priest telling me in late 1991. “There are the conservative Catholics who think everything John Paul II says about labour and economics is Marxist but adhere fully to his teaching on marriage and family, and liberal Catholics who think everything John Paul II says on marriage and family is outmoded but everything he says about labour and economics is right on the mark.”

I was interviewing for a possible application to the seminary, having recently encountered Christ through the work of Luigi Giussani, the founder of Communion and Liberation, a lay movement that had flowered in Italy in the latter half of the twentieth century and was beginning to spread globally. Giussani’s mission was to open the eyes of youth to “who Christ was in their experience.” One’s Catholicism for Giussani was more than the trite reduction of the faith to categories of liberal and conservative—an influence my priest friend had noticed in me. Instead, it was an all-encompassing belonging to Christ through baptism (whether Catholic or not). Giussani understood that Catholicism had become a fossil to the postwar generation of Italy, and with Marxism becoming an ever more dominant alternative, he felt called to take on a complacent cultural Catholicism in which the name Jesus had no relevance to human life.

I didn’t end up becoming a priest. I had mistakenly believed that ordination was the only method for adhering to Christ, while for Giussani the laity have the same personal relationship with Jesus as priests or formal religious. His educational method is known familiarly in Italian as the PerCorso, or “Path,” distilled in his three seminal texts, culled from his experience in Milan with his students: The Religious Sense, At the Origin of the Christian Claim, and Why the Church? The first of these starts by examining the human heart’s need for truth, justice, love, and beauty, positing that these needs exist in us because we did not create ourselves. The One who created us placed them within us. At the Origin of the Christian Claim is an explication of God’s revelation of himself in history, starting with Israel and culminating in the incarnation as God’s definitive self-revelation, the answer to all human striving for fulfillment. Giussani goes so far as to assert that the method for our salvation, our knowledge of God and our adherence to his offer of fulfillment, is determined by God himself in the incarnation. Further, to deny this offer by whatever means is the fatal flaw in humanity that leaves us again in our towers of Babel, seeking to “create” our own religions, be these political systems, religions, idolatry—in short, any ideological claim that sets itself up as the total answer to human fulfillment. Why the Church? is a detailed explication of how Christ continues to speak to the world through his mystical body present through the baptized regardless of the sordidness or evil within the church herself, since his grace is dependent not on the moral coherence of her ministers but on the objectivity of his presence.

In all this, Giussani never proselytized or imposed Catholic belief. Rather, he always encouraged people who were not part of the Christian faith to go to the bottom of their own beliefs and to explore in depth where their desire for truth might lead.

It worked. Giussani’s meetings and method started to mushroom, spreading like wildfire throughout high schools in Milan and beyond. Once his early students graduated, they took his way of thinking to the universities, creating an entire culture of Catholic believers, whether married or single, priest or nun. The appeal was uncommonly wide: Dominicans and Franciscans followed Giussani’s methodology, as did secular gay cultural figures who were lapsed in faith. Later, even Jews and Muslims, although not converting to Catholicism, saw the attractiveness and truth of Giussani’s proposal and adhered to it as part of their own belief system.

As a young adult, I had built my life around the fact that I no longer bought into all I had been taught about Catholic belief. The repressive trappings of clericalism, or the reliance on form over substance, I felt, squelched the human will to live. Most of my friends were Jewish, gay, atheist, lapsed Catholics, or some combination of the above, and I found in people like this a desire and a depth of human experience that made me flee from my twelve years of Catholic education like somebody who’s been underwater and finally sees air and sky. I had never stopped believing in Jesus; I had only separated the trappings of the church I grew up in from what I believed him to be, and there is both a truth in that and a dangerous falsehood. In high school there were two types of religions running the show: the post-conciliar ex-nun-cum-religion teachers who taught us all about the word “theology,” which in the end was a way of putting us in front of a lot of ideas that threw traditional faith out, and the dogged clerical contingent who found everything around us immoral and sought as Catholic educators to inculcate us as much as they could with pre–Vatican II Catholic morality. Both contingents were mired in a set of rigid beliefs they felt it their duty to reproduce in us, as opposed to providing us with personal witnesses of lives changed by Christ in the way St. Teresa of Calcutta’s has always been to me.

One Thursday night in New York, at the suggestion of a Franciscan friar I had met, I stumbled into the basement of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and met the Giussani crowd, who had been invited there by John Cardinal O’Connor after he had been impressed by what he had seen personally of Communion and Liberation in Italy. That night the room was filled with people I remain friends with to this day. The meetings drew lawyers, physicians, pregnant mothers, Italian shoe salesmen, nervous single guys in therapy, seminarians, and the occasional Franciscan visitors from the order who pointed me there. We met every Thursday in the basement for our “community school,” where we studied Giussani’s works, comparing everything to our experience, and every Tuesday in the basement crypt of St. Patrick’s for a Mass followed by dinner on Lexington Avenue.

Giussani says that the Christian method starts with an encounter—not a feeling or an emotion, not an intellectual intuition, but an encounter with Christ. This encounter, he insists, is no different from that of John and Andrew in the opening pages of St. John’s Gospel. Transfixed by Jesus’s presence, they ask him where he lives, and he tells them, “Come and see.” If I had to pinch myself to see if what I knew was happening was true, it was only corroborated further in the days, weeks, months following. Week after week somebody would call and propose an outing or a get-together: lunch and an afternoon at Tower Records, a picnic in Central Park, a baby shower even men attended. I understood from the beginning that, through this new experience of community, Christ was taking my life in a way that was definitive for me (and still is).

Giussani’s method of Christianity became an answer, for me, to the British priest’s claims about ideology in the American church: the focus was on encountering Jesus in the here and now. It transcended the false liberal-conservative dichotomy. But the polarization continues to this day. Just as at parishes across the United States, I have friends and acquaintances in my DC parish who are passionate about social justice, feeding the poor, and being kind to others but who cringe when a young priest recites the prayer to St. Michael the Archangel following Mass. And I have other friends there who follow Opus Dei and will receive Holy Communion only on the tongue. Given that the dichotomy the priest observed decades ago remains as vivid at the parish level as it ever has, it’s worth asking: Why has Giussani’s vision not had more of an effect?

The fact is, experience of Giussani’s charism has not been exempt from the forces at work in our public life. The very same ideological polarization within American life has infiltrated Communion and Liberation. While Giussani himself lived only to point people to Christ, a kind of cult has grown up around both Giussani and his successor, and the church has had to step in to cure it of its own version of idolatry. The risk of having made his method a battering ram against other charisms and methods in the church is something Pope Francis has called us out on adamantly (and correctly). In Why the Church? Giussani mentions that the church is a convocatio before it is a congregatio—that is, those of us attracted to his charism are called by the Holy Spirit; it is not we ourselves who choose to belong. But I have often seen many among Communion and Liberation’s adherents behave as if there were a secret code of ethics to follow and to impose on others. Giussani once said of Communion and Liberation that it was “the new heavens and new earth,” something that strikes me as a little too close to utopian ideals like the Puritan city on a hill, which can end up generating witch trials. Hence the need for the church to intervene and set things straight. The battle, however, is still raging, and a very large contingent of people are still digging their heels against the pope’s correction. Ironically, Giussani himself in Why the Church? teaches that obedience to the church comes first.

Nevertheless, Giussani’s work recalls us to conversion every moment of our existence; it is not a request for those interested in his thinking to entrench themselves in a set of beliefs based on his own. He told his early students that he was not there to tell them what to think, but to give them a method through which they could judge all of reality according to the criteria of their hearts (in the biblical—and not sentimental—sense of “heart” as the core of the person). Pharisaism occurs in any religious reality when rules, not a relationship with a living God, become the norm. That leaves us in front of the ultimate question: Did God intervene in history or not, and if so, where can I find him now?