In distancing us from ourselves, we distance ourselves from Christ

The first way we distance ourselves from Christ is by distancing ourselves from our very selves. In that text from the Exercises twenty years ago, Father Giussani quoted a phrase from Pope John Paul II that is still decisive for us today: "there will be no faithfulness... if a question isn't found in man's heart to which only God... is the answer." He doesn't say there will be no faithfulness if we're not good, if we're not coherent, if we lack the energy. No. There will be no faithfulness -- in other words, in the end Christ will not matter to us -- without a question to which only He is the answer. If this question is not rooted in the depths of our I, and if we are not loyal to it, sooner or later Christ will not matter to us anymore. Like many others, we too will go away. For this reason, our first loyalty is to our humanity, to our cry, to the urgent need of our heart.

Fr. Julian Carron, Exercises of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation, Rimini, 2007, pp. 8-9 (English transl, Fr. William Vouk et al.).