An incomplete story: Luigi Giussani and his encounter with modernity

Luigi Giussani (1922–2005) was an Italian Catholic philosopher and educator. He founded the lay movement Comunione e Liberazione and produced a large written body of work, including The Religious Sense. Particularly in that text, he developed a critique of contemporary culture intended to elucidate a religious attitude to reality that is natural to humanity and a range of contingent social conditions that obstruct that attitude. He presented those conditions as limiting the horizons of human possibility and rendering the Catholic proposal obscure. My concern is with Giussani as a figure in confrontation with modernity and liberalism, and this essay builds to an examination of his work as a critique of liberalism. It argues that this critique lacks the specificity and detail to be successful, and that this has serious consequences for his attempts to advance Catholicism as a liveable possibility.