May 14, 1999, only a few days before dying in a car crash (on May 26th), Enzo Piccinini was invited by the Archbishop of Ferrara, Carlo Caffarra, to give the closing conference of a cycle of meetings proposed for the youth of the Emilian city. He was given the theme, “Living the Church: Culture, Charity, and Mission.” We offer here some ample excerpts from notes of that testimony, because the details are important for remembering him.

The Christian position is the human position in the true sense of the word; outside Christianity, the human is not fulfilled. The Christian experience is the human experience and the Church is the teacher of humanity. This is the theme of this evening, precisely through the usual things, those that seem relegated to the sacristies or to those who have a few extra religious problems.
What I’m talking about is for the life of all men, of every man, precisely because the human experience requires, in order to be itself, the Christian proposal. Christ is everything for the life of man. Everything. Nothing in a man’s life–if he loves to the core and with sincerity his own humanity–nothing can exempt him from the relationship with Christ, because it is the heart of the life of every man.
I wouldn’t remain in the Christian experience if it weren’t for this. I would rebel even at the thought that being Christian means being (as so many think) a bit less of a man than others, or with a few problems more. If I have chosen to remain in the Christian experience, it is because here I find all of myself, that which I have always sought.
Now, that Christ is everything for the life and the heart of man has to coincide with what the Lord said in Deuteronomy: “Man was made for happiness.” For this word, that marks the life of each of us–we wake up in the morning to be happy, we have done everything to be happy, we’ll continue to do so to our last breath–precisely for this happiness Christ sets Himself as the answer for man: for the happiness of each of us.

What’s it got to do with life?
Let’s look around ourselves. I see, for example, my life, my colleagues, the university environment, the students, etc. What surprises me is that most of these people are baptized (and Baptism is the introduction to the Christian experience). But where is Christ? If you ask, “But hey, if you’re baptized and you’re inside the Christian tradition, what’s all this got to do with what you do?”–they’ll look at you as if you were saying something really weird. And if you sit in front of kids and ask them, “Do you believe in God?”, you’d rarely find one who’d say “yes” with the naturalness of someone who adheres to a true reality.
How come? I invite you to run an experiment. Take some children who’ve never heard about Christ and tell them about Christ. If you tell these same children that coming home one day you saw, on the curb near your house, your apartment block neighbor who had taken it upon himself to clean the windows and take care of the chimney pots for everybody in the building, they’d look at you laughing, asking you for the punch line of the joke. Telling them about Christ isn’t any less strange, but they don’t rebel. Why? Because it corresponds, naturally.
But now, what has happened? Why is it that the facts and the episodes that describe and introduce the Christian experience, as such, don’t have anything to do with life anymore? I believe it’s because Christianity is no longer an event. Christianity is either an event, or it has no impact on life. What is Christianity? A series of rites to participate in, a series of moral precepts, a way, a certain standard of behavior to measure ourselves against, is this it? If this is what it is, we’ll lose the battle, because a lot of others talk better or seem to do better (above all if they’re in power). Then it’s got to be something else, it’s evidently something else, because to the degree that it’s reduced to rites, rules, behavioral standards, good manners, duties, and participations, it no longer matters. Christianity is an event, something unforeseen and unforeseeable, unthinkable and unimaginable, that happened 2,000 years ago. The Mystery, through which everything was made, suddenly comes to meet man and becomes a possible experience.

He has to be seen
But if God who became Christ–the possibility for man to encounter, to experience Mystery, and the answer for life–has to be seen, He can’t remain a series of intentions of some intensely pensive person who enters the convent or has had youthful disappointments. He has to be seen in the Fiat factory worker, in the great intellectual, in the street sweeper, in the psychologically troubled guy, in the hero of our national sport. There is a verification: He has to be seen.
So here, then, is the problem. You have to be able to see Him and you need to try to understand just where it is that you truly see Him. How does the Christian fact (that is, an event that surprises us) determine a change in man, by which man is truly man, by which man is the humanity that he has desired to be?
Two things are necessary for a true verification:
1) A totalizing educational commitment to the proposal that is Christ. This unity and experience of belonging, of friendship, is the Church. You need a life wholly committed to the proposal that Christ is.
2) You need to accept the proposal in the terms of the proposal itself. In the relationship with an object, the object must determine the method of the relationship. If I had a bottle of Tocai white wine from Friuli (the best wine in the world), uncorked it, stuck my finger inside, took it out, and then said, “Hey, it’s dry!”, you’d say I was nuts. I “tried” the wine, but I was the one who chose the method, and so I changed the relationship. Wine has to be drunk because your tastebuds aren’t in your fingers. This is a fundamental truth that applies to my research and my work, so why shouldn’t it be true with Christ as well? If He is a presence (as He is a presence) and if He is a fact (as He is a fact), if He is an event (as He is an event) that surprised everyone and continues to surprise everyone, then He is the One who says how we relate with Him, not us. And He said, a reality of men He chose, who are involved with each other, make Him present. Not our tortuous roads, but adherence to reality. So then the issue is to accept the method Christ placed in the world.

Culture, charity, mission
What do these two conditions determine? “Those who follow me will have eternal life and a hundredfold here on earth.” This is Christ’s promise. He says, “Those who follow me.” Christ always starts out from an affective aspect, because if there’s a crime in the Christian life, it’s thinking that to go to Heaven it’s enough to observe the Ten Commandments. Instead, Christ said, “Those who love Me will obey My law,” not vice-versa. There’s an aspect of affection to be discovered, otherwise it’s a disaster, because mechanicalness has never comprehended man and it never will. Instead, the surprise of an affection is what makes you feel that everything that comes from there you want for yourself.
And how is this promise described? By the three dimensions that measure the Christian experience: culture, charity, and mission. Let’s have a look at them.
1. Culture. If Christ is a fact and a presence, then He is a presence that determines the relationship with everything. From this derives a critical and systematic consciousness of your own human existence, that translates into a different manipulation of things, in a different use of yourself. Think of when you were little and you did something in secret; suddenly your mother or your father appeared and you realized immediately what you were doing. A presence determines a new consciousness of yourself.
2. Charity. Everyone thinks of almsgiving and being good, but no! Charity is the presence of Christ and thus it is imitating Him. He is the answer to life. Charity comes from the Greek charis: free, gratuitous. It is the supreme form of loving expression, because it implies the absence of “what’s in it for me” calculations; free.
3. Mission. It’s like the warmth that a live body can’t help but emanate. It’s never an initiative, but instead is the modality of life that is born of how you are changing now, because of what is happening to you.

What are you doing for Vietnam?
When I converted, at the beginning there were various problems because my friends from before (who were fairly tenacious and tough; it was the period of the Vietnam War) persecuted me. And the tone was, “You’ve cut out your little corner, huh? You even go to pray. But what are you doing for Vietnam? Doesn’t your conscience bother you?” I felt a bit blackmailed; I couldn’t understand. Once there had been a protest, and as I came out of the university cafeteria they surrounded me and began a really nasty invective. They saw I was weak in my reasons. I felt terrible, I couldn’t respond, but at a certain point an idea came to me and I told them, “For Vietnam, I’m building the Church, here.” I’ll never forget it; this is the truth of the question. Today when they see me they’re ashamed, because they’re all in the professions that they didn’t want to do, and all that remains of their “leftism” is their trips to the Orient, their environmentalism or their scuba-diving and exchanging photos or walking the dog. This is what’s left. Me, instead, I’m still going strong! Sometimes I ask one of them, “What are you doing for Vietnam?” There’s a fantastic part in Eliot’s Choruses from ‘The Rock’–“Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.” Without the presence of the Mystery who loves us, there’s no place for humanity. This is why it’s necessary to build the Church.

Building the Church
An authentic religious dimension is what saves man. These days, whether we are ugly or good, we want to build the Church where we are, because this is the true humanity, building the Christian community everywhere. But how does this happen? We build the Church through our presence: being a presence is our final, decisive indication and category; being a presence, whatever temperament you have. It doesn’t matter what gifts you have, you need faith and faith alone. Presence means the way of being within a situation, because you don’t live in thin air, but within the relationship with your girlfriend, your parents, friends, work, university studies, within the cultural and political moment... within everything. Being a presence in a situation means being there so as to perturb it; if not, you aren’t a presence. Christ came into the world upsetting the womb of a woman, upsetting a great man called Joseph, and putting the pettifoggers of Israel in a critical position (He didn’t say, “May I come in?”). He placed Himself for what He was. Being a presence in a situation means being there in a way that perturbs it, so that if you weren’t there, everyone would notice, because it would be different; not because you do big things, but because you are yourself. Being a presence means being inside a situation taking Christ as an event in our person. It isn’t a matter of big discourses (it leaves things as they are). Our true proclamation happens through what Christ has perturbed in our life. It is a humble and sure boldness; it’s a paradox, humble and sure, that is not founded on ourselves but on the grace that has been given us by a Presence that will never fail (“I’ll be with you, even to the end of time”). A boldness, a certainty for the future...