2) From reason to truth
> There is a profound link with the theme of last year’’s Meeting, “Reason is the need for the infinite…” This is truth as an event. This nexus of truth has a central point in the themes of civil society, which, after three centuries, is now based on “not truth”–the idea of Hobbes that underpins the modern state, or the idea of law as a compromise of power, or the idea of the common good as individual utility. Today, these three ideas are in crisis, because a civil society that is not based on the quest for and practice of the truth leads only to violence, which could have been avoided.
> When we speak of the truth, everyone expects a definition, but the essential factor is a method. The Journey to Truth Is an Experience stresses the dynamic aspect of our relationship with destiny. The truth as destiny is a challenge as the possibility that I can follow a certain path that will lead me to it. Today, one of the tragic aspects of the state in which we live is the fact that no one seems any longer able to wager on the future, on the fact that there exists a promise that makes the goal attainable.

3) Broadening reason
and demonstrating the truth
> By raising the question of the truth, we enlarge the horizon of rationality. This is a link between Regensburg and this year’’s Meeting. We do not begin by stating what the truth is, but we take the first step by raising the question of the truth. Raising the question of the truth today is in itself a choice that we make. Meeting 2007 as a media event enters the world of communications by raising the question of the truth.
> We always tend to conceive of the truth as an object of intellectual knowledge. But there is a different approach, which we find in Fr. Giussani, who stresses the truth as “being true.” So, raising the question about the truth means opposing an anthropology of human destruction, of man who is no longer true, of human experience that is no longer truthful. This also entails showing what is true–not a demonstration, but the act of showing the truth.
> Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life.” We do not speak of truth for the sake of philosophical pleasure, but because there is one in history, the only one, in whom truth is identified with a person (see the Gospel of John, which presents Jesus as the truth). Bearing witness to the truth does not depend on the fact that we are purer than others, or that we have a greater “concern” for the truth than others, but on the fact that we have encountered the truth made person, made man, in time and in space.

4) The value of Regensburg
> In light of what has been said, an explicit rethinking of Regensburg is essential. Many people have erroneously interpreted Regensburg as a one-time episode, even a serious accident in this papacy. These are the same people who separate the Christ of faith from the Christ of history, and so set up oppositions between truth and history and between truth and charity.
> Attending a Meeting on the truth is interesting in the present context, in which no truth is believed to be possible, with the result that we are completely enslaved by opinion.

5) The challenge: taking
part in an experience in order to communicate it
> The challenging question is this: despite the dictatorship of opinion and interpretation, does humanity still harbor a desire for the truth, a need for the truth? Giving an answer to this question means showing how reason is enlarged in action. It involves a challenge, an appeal to that elementary experience everyone knows, by which, despite the world in which we live, there remains a need that no interpretation is capable of fully satisfying.
Raising the question is in itself a challenge to the reductive use of reason, bearing in mind that only one Person can fully satisfy this need, which involves the whole of the “I.” Without this, we, too, would succumb to interpretations; there must be an event of such a powerful caliber that it unites the whole of the person and attracts it toward the truth, pointing out the path to follow in the future, a path that leads to destiny.
This means that the Meeting challenges the pervasive mentality. But a warning is in order. Whoever goes to Rimini risks being challenged in their elementary experience, despite all the encrustations that may cover it, if it happens that we embody that truth which we are seeking to communicate. We cannot look at reality from the sidelines and teach a lesson to others. Unless the truth is embodied in ourselves, we can utter all the words we like, but we will only communicate an abstraction, not an event. In other words, we cannot present the Meeting without partaking first in an experience that enables us to bear witness to the truth.