The primitive Church, then, certainly did not think of itself as the place of perfect people. Polemics arose over opinions within the community that truly risked schisms. Mutual hatreds surfaced, people proposed themselves as charismatics, thus disseminating confusion in the group. Pagan vices persisted and people drew away from the apostles' message to follow their own or others' interpretations - all this truly happened in those communities of "saints". But within such a banal human reality, a reality as wretched as the symptoms of it we have listed, there was the certainty of a new humanity, the humanity of Christ capable of transforming any kind of miserable humanity, providing it runs the "race" the apostle described, providing it sets out on a journey, according to its own possibilities, but supported by grace. The certainty is that Jesus Christ can cut through all our powerlessness with his strength and can transform it into an energy that works for the good."

Luigi Giussani, Why the Church?