01-09-2008 - Traces, n. 8

Rimini Meeting

The Primacy
of Facts

The Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples in Rimini from an American  perspective. Texan theologians and Samizdat editions. The New World meets the Ever New

by Santiago Ramos

Earlier this year, Julián Carrón made the following statement at the Fraternity Exercises:
“We’re here now not because we’ve had a vision, because of a figment of our imagination, or for something abstract, but because of the encounter with a fact so exceptional that it “blocked” us, magnetized us.”
He continued, naming some of those facts. The facts are witnesses:
“The saints, that is, the witnesses, those among us who block us from reducing Christ to our measure: we see them, we touch them. Who didn’t feel powerfully called in seeing Cleuza speak yesterday? Who didn’t see Him, perceive Him through the witness of our friend Vicky in Uganda? Or looking at the Cometa exhibit last summer? They are facts!”
These facts were present this year in at the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples in Rimini, Italy, as well: Vicky spoke about her vocation in Uganda, and the newlyweds Cleuza and Marcos each gave an account of their witness, and how that witness was transformed after their encounter with Communion and Liberation. Anyone drawn to the Meeting this summer who chose to ask themselves, “What really has brought me to Rimini?” would have to appeal to such facts for an answer.
For an American, born and educated within our democratic culture, this appeal to facts is both attractive and problematic. On the one hand, the method that Carrón outlines is so empirical–“He doesn’t respond to our difficulties with a line of reasoning, but with a fact”–that it appeals to our American sensibility for the practical over the theoretical. On the other hand, the most widely used metaphor for a free society in the United States is that of a “marketplace of ideas,” a marketplace where ideas of different value and worth compete against each other. But where does truth fit into this competition? How can we be sure it will always win out? The yearly American gathering that is most comparable to the Meeting bills itself as a place for the exchange of ideas–the Aspen Ideas Festival. This is different from the Meeting, which bills itself as a collective of people who have been changed by the encounter with the Fact that Carrón speaks about, and who become facts themselves–that is, witnesses.

“Don’t do it”
One of the American guests at this year’s “edition” of the Meeting was the renowned theologian Stanley Hauerwas, Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University. This was his second visit to the Meeting, and he was scheduled to present a paper for a panel discussion titled “Desire or Desires?” led by Professor Carmine di Martino of the Universita degli Studi of Milan, and co-presenting with another American, Professor Carter Snead of Notre Dame. Before his talk, he spoke with Traces about the Meeting. “I am always impressed by the energy here,” he said.
He found one analogous phenomenon in the United States, a Protestant campus association called Intervarsity. “You [i.e., the Meeting] are like a Catholic Intervarsity,” he said. “The difference is that Intervarsity, being Protestant, eventually ends up becoming its own church, while that is impossible for the Meeting, because you have your Church already.”
When asked about the possibility of starting an event like the Meeting in the United States, Hauerwas said it would be difficult, for two reasons. One is the American understanding of protagonist, which was the key word in this year’s theme. The other is the American conception of the “marketplace of ideas.”
“To Americans, a ‘protagonist’ is someone who gets in your face, who is starting trouble, a rabble-rouser. It is very different from what Giussani was talking about, which is that of a true Christian experience of giving to others what has been given to you–a very beautiful way to think about being a protagonist.”
And about the “marketplace:” “That is the rhetoric that is used. Ideas are only worth anything if they have ‘value,’ and this value is linked closely to economic worth. Don’t go along with that definition. Don’t do it.”
Among the other Americans who presented at the Meeting was Alonso Mendoza, a lawyer from Miami and expert on fundraising, who spoke on subsidiarity and the American dream; and Joseph H. H. Weiler, Professor of Law at New York University, who spoke about human rights with Mary Ann Glendon, Ambassador of the United States to the Holy See.
Not all of the Americans who attend the Meeting are “VIPs.” A notable contingent of students and seminarians visit the event every year. Some of them, like Amy Sapenoff, graduate student in Political Theory at Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, even chose to work as a volunteer after her first visit (as an undergraduate) to the Meeting.
“What struck me about the Meeting,” she says, “is that unlike other cultural gatherings, like you would have in the States, which are all focused on the subject at hand, at the Meeting you get a sense that every particular cultural exhibition and presentation has, at its root, a fascination with the human person, and also that it points to something greater, something beyond. Because of this, I might be interested even in the exhibitions that I normally would not visit.”
Sapenoff was also struck by the people she met who run the Meeting. “I met Emilia [Guarnieri, President of the Meeting], and she treated me just like anyone else. There are many important guests at the Meeting but, with Emilia, I felt that this wasn’t about power and prestige, that it was something more, that the bond of unity rested on something more profound.”  It rests on facts.

The Samizdat
As for me–if the reporter may be permitted to become a commentator–the fact that most moved me in all of the Meeting was a physical object. I only had a few minutes to explore the exhibition “Living without Lies,” devoted to the life of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the legendary Russian writer who passed away not a month before. The exhibition was tragically timely; Solzhenitsyn himself had helped the organizers with comments on how it should be set up.
Whizzing through the photographs and objects on display, one thing forced me to stop. It was the typewritten samizdat edition of The Gulag Archipelago, a neatly collected pile of yellowing paper lying under a glass display case. I thought immediately about the human hands that, for hours, typed up the manuscript; about the Soviet regime, which made those hands tremble and which must have seemed, at the time of typing, indomitable. Where is that person today? And could that person ever imagine that, years later, this manuscript would be displayed, triumphantly, in a festival of true freedom, of protagonists, as a sign that hope does not disappoint, that reality never betrays?
This is what the Meeting claims for itself: that it presents facts that are signs that stand out in any cultural context–signs that can be understood by any Italian, Russian, or American.


shodo habukawa Special Appointment Professor at the Koyasan University, Japan
“The center of the thought of Fr. Giussani is ecumenism, based on the desire
to elevate the human personality through knowledge and the assimilation
of other cultures, which elevates and extends the level of the “I.”
If personal knowledge is extended to the whole world at the same time,
it becomes possible to reach an even more profound level of being.”