New York Encounter

Father Giussani: If abstraction is to blame, then it is only the concrete that can threaten the supremacy of abstraction. The concrete is a presence that is different. A different presence expresses itself in words; in words, however, that show a glimpse of continuity. Not words that “define,” in the way this world “defines everything,” that is to say puts everything in the grave, turns everything to a dead body. They must, therefore, be words that express a lively content, namely a presence. I am not able to find another indicator of hope than the fact that these persons who are a presence get multiplied. It is an inevitable sympathy or, and now I am about to say a brutal thing, a new “unionism” between these persons, just as it is expressed in the term we often use: recognition. Beyond this, the path is poor and the human is banished. It is as if the beggars of a city would have to fight the power that commands the city.