Spirto Gentil: An Invitation to Listen to Great Music with Luigi Giussani

When he was a young seminarian, the teacher in Luigi Giussani's singing class played a recording of an aria from a Donizetti opera, "Spirto gentil" ("Gentle spirit, you once shone in my dreams, but after, I lost you forever. . . ."). At that moment, Giussani "understood for the first time that God existed, and thus that nothing could exist without a meaning; that the heart could not exist unless the heart's goal existed: happiness."

Many years later, after founding Communion and Liberation-a...