I bet on freedom

“I cannot forget my youthful climbs in the Grigna via the Segantini Ridge... I believe that the Church’s path today is a narrow one: I would call it the ridgeway.” The cardinal’s perspective as he recounts his life, the Church, and Italy in a profound and surprising conversation with Luigi Geninazzi is lucid and aware, yet full of hope: from rediscovering the Christian choice during adolescence to involvement in Communion and Liberation, in fruitful dialogue with Don Giussani’s “educational genius,” and from misunderstandings with certain Milanese ecclesiastical authorities to his friendship with John Paul II, who appointed him bishop at just forty-nine. Personal and collective memories are also included, from the ordeal of a long illness and the experience of psychoanalysis to the transition from the papacy of Ratzinger, with whom he has been bound by an intense intellectual friendship since the adventure of “Communio,” to that of Bergoglio, described as “a salutary blow to the stomach for the Churches of Europe.” At the center of this rich tapestry of anecdotes and reflections stands a crucial question: where does the Church stand today? Between those who reduce Christianity to a simple civil religion and those who propose a pure return to the Gospel, the cardinal points to a “third way”: that of the implications of the mysteries of faith. And of the believers’ active commitment to contributing, beginning from faith, to the “birth of a new Europe, inevitably mixed but not for that reason without an identity of its own.” Author: Cardinal Angelo Scola with Luigi Geninazzi