Anticipating the Rimini Meeting

Who Wants to Be A Protagonist?
The seven days between the opening on August 24th and the closing on the 30th will be packed full of life and “encounters” united by the provocative theme “Either Protagonists or Nobodies.” Herewith, a guided tour of what we’ll see (and experience) in Rimini.

edited by Davide Perillo

The closest thing we have in America to the annual Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples held in Rimini, a resort town in western Italy, is the Aspen Institute’s annual “Aspen Ideas Festival,” held in Colorado every year since 2005, and sponsored by big names like Boeing, Chevron, and J.P. Morgan. In contrast, “the Meeting,” as it is commonly abbreviated, is more a festival of people than ideas.
Aspen seeks to be a “gathering place for leaders from around the globe and across many disciplines to engage in deep and inquisitive discussion of the ideas and issues that both shape our lives and challenge our times.” The Meeting wants “to create points of contact between experiences and people of different faiths and cultures who share a positive desire for knowledge and reciprocal enhancement.” The difference lies in what each would call the fruit of their labors: Aspen wants newer (and truer) ideas and government policies; the Meeting wants to bring an eclectic group together and create a common people, united by a common experience of friendship. Aspen has discussions; the Meeting has encounters. Speakers at Aspen give presentations; at the Meeting, they give testimonies.  
Since its founding 29 years ago, the Meeting has averaged 700,000 people in attendance during the week-long events that take place in the second-half of August. The week includes panel discussions, book launches, musical performances, films, book sales, dance, food (local piadina, Argentine asado, and the American-style “Meet Burger” [sic],  etc.), and even indoor soccer.
Eleven full-time organizers work year-long to invite the testimonies of figures from around the world. Speakers from years past include the Dalai Lama, Pope John Paul II, Mother Teresa, Lech Walesa, the French philosopher Jean Guitton and the Spanish tenor José Carreras, and, among the American guests, Dr. Edmund D. Pellegrino, current Chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics, Peter Beinart, Editor-at-Large of the New Republic, and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. Last year’s Meeting, featuring 400 exhibitions, hosted 5,000 special guests and 850 accredited journalists. This was all made possible only by the contribution of over 3,000 volunteers, mostly young people from Italy but also from places as far away as Kazakhstan. 
The Meeting brings together all aspects of human life under one tent for one intense week. In this dense environment, all the elementary components of our lives become easier to see–what we desire, who we love, how we move forward in life. The Meeting goes to the root of human life, to the things that lie beneath and before an event like Aspen. Most importantly, the Meeting is the work of a people who believe they have encountered the ultimate answer to human life, and this encounter has intensified, not diminished, their desire to know and love the world and all the people in it. (Santiago Ramos)

It’s almost time now. In less than a month, the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples will open its doors. The date is August 24th, the place is the same (the Rimini Convention Center), and the title is the refrain we’ve been hearing for some time now, since it was drawn from Certi di alcune grandi cose (Certain of a Few Great Things)–the book of Fr. Giussani’s Equipes [CL Leaders Meetings], published a year ago–to mark the choices and the program of the 2008 Meeting: “Either Protagonists or Nobodies.” Exhibits, debates, witnesses, performances, all in the light of that provocation, or better, that “positive challenge,” as Emilia Guarnieri, the President of the manifestation, calls it. “Let’s ask ourselves whether today there are people capable of measuring themselves against reality, discovering, risking.”
Well, one person who will be there, at the central encounter with the same title as the Meeting (planned for Wednesday, August 27th, smack-dab in the middle of the week-long event), is Marco Bersanelli, an astrophysicist who teaches at the University of Milan and collaborates with the European Space Agency, working side-by-side with Nobel Prize winner George Smoot.
Isn’t it a strange idea to entrust a topic of this kind to a scientist? Not really. Just put yourself in his shoes and imagine him at work as he observes the universe: what does being a “protagonist” mean for a tiny point called “I,” in the face of the infinite? Or, simply, just listen to him, as we did, as he comes to grips with that “positive challenge.” It’s not a way of getting a preview on what he’ll say at the Rimini encounter, to be sure. But he’s a great point of reference for the itinerary we’ll rough out in these pages, as a little “guided tour” of the Meeting to come.

What did you think when you heard, for the first time, that expression of Fr. Giussani: “Either protagonists or nobodies?”
That it’s truly a “Giussanian” expression, revealing his veneration for the freedom of the individual person, the urgency of the defense of the “I” typical of Fr. Giussani. When I heard that expression, I imagined the way he would have said it, the fire in his eyes, the tenderness of his gesture. Fr. Giussani lived as a great protagonist and gave the chance to many people to become protagonists of their own lives–not in the usual sense, according to the image of the Hollywood diva in the spotlight of success or the man of power, but in the sense of people who are free and glad, decisive, desirous to build. At first, the expression might seem a bit exaggerated, categorical, but if you stop and think a minute you understand that it’s simply true. If you don’t live your own present deep down, what’s the value of time?

 Why do you think it was chosen as the title of the Meeting? Whence the historical urgency to face this theme as the guiding thought of an event of this kind?
The opening of the third millennium was overshadowed by global risks, terrorism, the energy crisis, global warming... But there’s a global risk that is even more insidious: the risk of the emptying of the person, of the disappearance of the “I.” It’s increasingly rare to find people who perceive the sense of their own irreducibility, of the uniqueness of each human existence. People are increasingly inundated with solicitations at a growing rate, and increasingly more is asked of us in terms of speed of response. In scientific work, as well, there’s the risk of a great deal of scurrying and very little creating . As Benedict XVI said, today man is threatened by an imbalance between the possibilities he has and the weakness of judgment of the heart. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with the Internet and cell phones. I’m just saying that hyper-communication certainly will not be the thing that makes us protagonists of our lives. In an infinite sea of equivalent possibilities, we’re apparently freer, but in the lack of an invitation to the person, in reality we’re more confused than ever. The person is humiliated, doesn’t perceive a purpose, to the point that in order to feel he exists, he believes he has to sacrifice himself for a few ounces of the power and fame that some fortunate people have by the ton.

Regarding the aspiration to “be protagonists,” at least in words, everyone is in agreement–but not about what it means. Generally, it’s taken for fame, power, and success, or, at best, for the famous “five minutes of celebrity.” Here, instead, it seems that it’s a matter of a much more radical desire... Who is the protagonist spoken of in Rimini?
The protagonist is the free man, aware of himself in the relationship with reality. It means discovering in your own experience something irreducible, an expectation, a capacity for the infinite that breaks through all sociological or pseudo-scientific reductions, and that makes us rebel against any set framework that claims to define the person. But this consciousness of self isn’t the fruit of intelligent reasoning or a moral effort; it is re-awakened by something that happens outside ourselves, by an encounter. What makes us find ourselves again is a love encountered, a presence we run up against that gratuitously affirms our being. Christianity is this unexpected invitation that changes your life; it’s the encounter with one who looks at you and tells you: “Even the hairs of your head are counted.” This makes you say “I” with inconceivable tenderness and dignity. A person who feels herself looked at in this way becomes an untiring subject, a protagonist of positivity, and will strive to build pieces of a better world in the circumstances she lives, maybe even without realizing it. As Fr. Giussani once said, the forces that change history are the same ones that change the human heart.

What’s the relationship between being protagonists and being, in some way, acknowledged by others?
In effect,  a protagonist is someone who can be acknowledged by others as meaningful. But one can be acknowledged for a power exercised over others, or for a “something more” of humanity, for something irresistible and positive expressed in one’s life. This holds at any level: in politics, in academia, in ecclesiastical power, even among us. One can be acknowledged as a wielder of power, or as a witness to an enviable humanity, but only one of these two modalities is a source of true satisfaction.

Another striking aspect is the sharp alternative in the Meeting title: “…or nobodies.” What do you think it means?
We see it well in our society: where liberty has been lost, where there is denial of the Mystery who makes the face of man unique and unrepeatable, the value of the individual person tends toward zero. For that matter, if man isn’t relationship with the Infinite, what remains of him? Nothing. He, too, is a pebble rolling about, a handful of matter at the mercy of the forces of nature. What are we in the universe? If there’s one thing modern science makes us see clearly and dramatically, it’s the abyss of the vastness of the world, the power of its forces, the immensity of space and time within which a human being is a ridiculously brief instant, an invisible point. Is there something in the individual person that can stand up to the comparison with the universe? People like Pascal or Leopardi or Dostoevsky understood very well that every man has an incommensurable greatness “of another order” that overcomes every finite measure, and this is precisely his irreducible and direct relationship with the Mystery who creates him. Take this away, and tell me how one can rationally defend oneself against the commercialization of bodies and souls.

Could you give us a suggestion for how to approach the Meeting?
The Meeting is a splendid example of that strange way of being protagonists of history that is the opposite of presumption or demanding, because it is born of gratitude for something that one has received. There’s only one way to enjoy it: experiencing it as a protagonist.