GUARESCHI/ Christ smiles even on the Cross, but to see him you need Don Camillo
Today, Don Camillo, Peppone, and their Guareschi friends are returning to the Meeting. They'll talk to us about the Crucifix that smiles. Even when we don't notice.
Don Camillo, Peppone and the Smiling Crucifix , this is the title of the speech dedicated to Giovannino Guareschi, scheduled in Conai room A4, at 5 pm on Tuesday 26 August, at Meeting 2025. The team is always the same, in Rimini for quite a few years: Enrico Beruschi, Eugenio Martani, Corrado Medioli, Gianni Govi, "our" Don Camillo (aka Don Giancarlo Plessi) and the undersigned Egidio Bandini.
The idea that Christ on the cross could smile would have been considered madness a few centuries ago (and perhaps even in years not so long ago). But to Giovannino Guareschi, who invented the dialogue between Don Camillo and Jesus, this seemed not only normal, but even logical, inevitable, considering the Creator's relationship with his creatures .
Yes, it seems strange, but Don Camillo's Crucifix smiles, and it does so more often than one might think: and it is a disarming smile, an absolute smile. The smile of God, sung by a great Italian poet, Roberto Vecchioni, in Chiamami ancora amore ( Call Me Again, Love) from 2011: “[…] call me love again, always call me love, in this desperate dream between silence and thunder, defend this humanity even if only one man remains, call me love again, always call me love. Because ideas are like butterflies whose wings you cannot take away, because ideas are like stars that storms cannot extinguish, because ideas are the voices of a mother we thought we had lost, and they are like God's smile in this tiny speck of the universe.”
And again, Father Gianni Fanzolato: "How heartily God laughs. At our obsessions, at passing fads, at devotees of the ephemeral, how he smiles at accumulated money and cluttered hearts, at tear-jerking and invented stories, at beauty contests and idols and extravagances. He smiles because he knows that everything crumbles to dust. But then, looking down here, he remembers that we are his children, and turning a blind eye for love, he continues to smile at us, and life never ends, because, after all, man is God's true smile."
This is why the Crucifix on the high altar in the church of Brescello smiles at its priest, in those dialogues we have compiled in the volume In Dialogue with Christ. Don Camillo's Lesson , which will not only feature in our meeting, but will also be presented in Rome, at the Chamber of Deputies, on September 16th.
This too, if we allow ourselves a small sin of presumption, is a smile of Christ, which rewards us for our small and great labors and, as with Don Camillo, comforts us in sad moments. And Giovannino Guareschi understood this very well. The only question that remains is whether we still know how to seek it and see it, this smile of God, of Jesus who, from the height of the Cross, expresses, with a smile, his infinite mercy.
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