Don Luigi Giussani nel cattolicesimo ambrosiano: persistenze e discontinuità

The work highlights Don Luigi Giussani’s legacy of Ambrosian teachings; it underlines significant elements of continuity as well as strong features of discontinuity, which distance the Giussani’s pedagogical intuition from that of the older pedagogical models common among the Italian and Ambrosian catholicism. Through the analysis of published and unpublished sources, the work delineates a certain evolution in Don Giussani’s approach in part stimulated by the historical timeframe itself, which was marked by profound changes. The documentation analyzed pertains to important phases both of Giussani's life and of the GS/CL ecclesiastical movement (the Student Youth movement which later became Communion and Liberation) suggesting an approach to the concept of tradition that echoes with the priest’s distinct "sense of history", which significantly influenced his pedagogical charisma, thereby distancing him from traditionalism, without this meaning a confluence into post-Vatican II progressive Catholicism. The work thus describes Don Giussani dealing not only with issues pertaining the past of ambrosian diocese, but also with current questions, like those posed by its young students and disciples at the time when tradition was being questioned inside and outside of Catholic world in the second half of the Sixties. As a result, one major deviation point between Don Giussani and the new as well as old approaches of Ambrosian Catholicism can be seen in the absence of ideological deviations in his approach, while they were clearly perceivable in the Catholic world on various levels. In any event, the teachings provided by Don Giussani in Ambrosian Catholicism express a unique synergy between tradition and renewal situated in a time of delicate transition, while not leaving to the wayside the more urgent questions of modernity and identifying an approach to Christianity that retrieves its essential traits as it continues to compare itself to historical change.