Meeting

“Either Protagonists or Nobodies”
Final press release of the 28th Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples. Rimini, Italy, August 25, 2007

The Meeting 2007 confirmed its uniqueness in the international panorama by its wealth of events and high-attendance figures. At a time when it seems to have become so difficult to arouse an attraction among people, the Meeting is an event that awakens an interest in reason and freedom. The innumerable meetings, exhibitions, and performances lend a voice to a human experience by which the search for truth becomes the content of an exciting and at the same time dramatic route, which is “realizing the deepest vocation of man: to be a seeker of the truth and thus a seeker of God,” as Benedict XVI said in his welcome during the Angelus on Sunday, August 19th.
The Meeting meant participation in an event that made it possible to testify to the truth, which in our lives took on the face of a man in flesh and blood, Jesus of Nazareth, who identified Himself with the truth. This is the origin and the secret of the cultural identity of the Meeting: 1) the discovery of faith as a new criterion of judgment and action, as a meaning that creates relationships between things; and 2) the education necessary to ensure that a “genuine ideal concern,” which Fr. Giussani embodied all through his life, can be communicated ever more widely.
For those who took part, the surprise of the Meeting was the encounter with religious figures, men and women representing culture, science, economics, and politics, desirous of making the reasonable journey toward the truth. In spite of the wave of skepticism that renders people indifferent to reality, as if there were nothing even remotely capable of arousing an attachment, and in spite of the tendency of many to judge things as if from the grandstand of their self–sufficiency, the over 700,000 people attending the Meeting encountered the question of the truth, embracing the appeal to enlarge reason launched a year ago in Regensburg. The exploration of the title of the Meeting, “The Truth Is the Destiny for which We Have Been Made,” made it possible to take a step further away from the nihilism that makes man ever more lonely and confused in the face of his desires. As Cardinal Bertone said, “One sometimes has the impression that in the atmosphere of relativism and skepticism which pervades our civilization, we have even reached the point of proclaiming radical distrust in the possibility of knowing the truth.”
In Rimini, we were able to see how existence, invested by the truth of the Christian meeting, becomes charged with an immense certainty and enables us to be at home with everyone. It revealed a real interest in other people’s positions, at a time when indifference–masked by tolerance–seems to be the measure of human relationships.
So Rimini saw Jews, Catholics, and Muslims dialoguing in a climate of esteem and respect, scientists and theologians speaking of the harmony between faith and reason, businessmen and politicians laboriously seeking the way to the common good beyond parties, international figures testifying to a desire for peace, which is the name of the truth in relations between the peoples. The sufferings and hopes of lands like Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Basque Country, Venezuela, or Burundi found the Meeting a place where the other is not above all someone to fight, but a help in discovering the truth that meets the deepest needs of man’s heart.
Yielding to the attraction of the truth makes every man, even the most fragile and incoherent, a new protagonist on the stage of history.