Rimini Meeting

What We Saw
The chronicle of what happened this year at the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples held in Rimini from August 25th to 30th: the power of witnesses, the meetings behind the scenes, the amazement of the guests, and, above all, a series of facts able to strike everyone, to the point of provoking a question

by Davide Perillo

How can you recount the Rimini Meeting in a monthly review like Traces? Obviously, you have to think about it first. You imagine, you plan, you calculate the spaces: you know that you won’t be able to tell everything about the conferences, the many exhibitions, the stories, the volunteers, the 700,000 people attending the Fiera, where the Meeting–the most important cultural event in Europe–takes place. Then the Meeting opens. This Meeting. And another story begins–an event: Something that happens, made of things that just happen; and these have never been more striking than this year, for the way the title was translated into flesh: “Either Protagonists or Nobodies.”
You just had to spend a few hours going around the pavilions, with your eyes open to what was going on with Vicky, Fr. Aldo Trento, John Waters, or with the other exhibitions, or watch and listen to Aharon Appelfeld, Mary Ann Glendon, and Joseph Weiler. Yes, it took little to understand that it was better to change the approach, to leave aside the illusion of a complete account and follow another lead: what we saw. The facts. Not in order to stop short at saying, “How lovely,” but so as to understand what they are telling us, and how they question us–in the first place what, or, rather, Who made them possible. We can think what we like, but before facts of this kind, we cannot fail to be astounded and ask ourselves where this new humanity comes from, and who the Protagonist is.
The following pages are an attempt at this. We have chosen to have the witnesses speak for themselves, by means of extracts from their addresses, to recount things that happened, and finally to sketch a thematic account. It is obviously incomplete. There will certainly be things and people left out (the tyranny of space remains) and we excuse ourselves beforehand, but at least we can give an idea. And who knows if you won’t want even more to be at the Meeting next year–or to come back again–as protagonists.

This time, it’s better to begin at the end, Friday evening, the last strains of the Meeting by night. In the theater, the Italian singer Davide Van De Sfroos is playing, but, from the pavilion beyond, other sounds of singing and merriment can be heard. When you get there, something unbelievable meets you eyes. A thousand people in front of the “He Seeks Liberty, Which Is so Dear. To Redeem by Keeping Watch” stand, the exhibition on the prisons. Music and dancing, policemen wearing the inmates’ tee-shirts, the ones with the number and the motto “vale la pena” (“it’s worth it”). And, in the middle of all this, the voice of one of the eleven prisoners who had spent a week here telling about their world and the change they had undergone: “I can’t wait to get back to jail to tell them all what I’ve seen.”

Like John and Andrew
There he is, the accent unmistakable, the sign of a Presence you cannot do away with, without taking us all for madmen. Alberto Savorana, spokesman for CL, takes the microphone and says, “Let’s stop and look. Isn’t it like when John and Andrew went home after their encounter with Christ?” And no one thinks that he is exaggerating. It is the taste of the Christian fact, unexpected, unthinkable, and yet so correspondent to the heart that it evokes the question: Who are you?
Many things happened at this Meeting that were capable of arousing this question, facts great and small, impossible to imagine, much less to create only with the strength of those who were present. It was one continuous surprise. Take Vicky, for example: her account of her story, her sickness, and her resurrection shook everyone (see p. 14). But whoever followed her during those six days she spent at the Meeting, witnessed her meeting with the GS students, watched her at lunch with the volunteers, or face-to-face with the inmates, touched forever by her smile (“I am living a life-sentence, too, with my sickness, but we are free”), or, again, the long, speechless embrace with Fr. Julián Carrón, remained dumbfounded and happy. Just as you would before a miracle.

A deep friendship
You might come across Shodo Habukawa, the Buddhist monk who meets you amongst the stands after the conference on The Religious Sense, Fr. Luigi Giussani’s masterpiece, translated into Japanese. There too was Etsuro Sotoo, the sculptor of the Sagrada Familia Basilica in Barcelona, and in greeting pulls out of his bag the picture he showed to everyone during the conference, the cover of the February issue of Traces with the close-up of Fr. Giussani. This tells you how deep their friendship was. Or you might bump into Cardinal Bagnasco, President of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, his curiosity aroused, as he visited the exhibition on Christian Cyprus under Turkish occupation, and who, in the end, blessed the exhibit stand and the Orthodox Christians there on the invitation of the Archimandrite Chrysostomos. This makes you realize what ecumenism really is: an effective brotherhood. Soon after, His Eminence visited the exhibition on the prisons. He paused a long time to watch the film of the inmates telling of their re-birth through an encounter. His escort insisted, letting him know it was time to move on, but he was fixed to his seat. When he crossed the barrier to go and greet the inmates, he was visibly moved.
He wasn’t the only one. Many true and presumed VIPs pass by that stand: politicians, businessmen, journalists, and, in incognito, the former Red-Brigades terrorist with 26 years of jail behind him, who had written one of the letters pinned up there. He embraced Nicola Boscoletto, the head of the Giotto Cooperative who organized the whole thing, and was reduced to tears. There was Chiara, who is consigned to a wheelchair by her sickness; when she left, she sent a text message: “Thank you. It was a chance to taste what prison is like, even the prison of my wheelchair.” It was striking, too, to see the Minister of Justice, Angelino Alfano, who was taking notes as he passed by the exhibition, or Giulio Tremonti, the Economy Minister who signed tee-shirts and caps for the inmates. And there were other members of the Italian Government: Franco Frattini and Gianni Letta.
All these form a long chain with the right-hand-man of the minister who tells us that, next year, “I’ll stay for the whole week,” and the former university rector who has been coming here for years, and, after the meeting with Vicky, tells his friend in CL, “Perhaps it’s time we were on first-name terms.” An opposition politician, upon arrival, raised an eyebrow, saying, “The conferences about faith are to be avoided like the plague.” The following day, he confessed to his hostess, “Now, if you tell me to, I’m ready to help unload a truck-full of chairs, just because of what I’ve seen here.”

Magistrates,
Kazakhs and police
“What I’ve seen here….” These are more or less the same words used by the famous journalist, Giampaolo Panza, adding, “It left me astounded,” full of admiration, or Antonio Polito, the Editor of the daily Riformista, “amazed by the volunteers.” I believe it. How can you fail to be amazed by young people who have come from Kazakhstan to clean the toilets, or a group of magistrates who close themselves in a room at 5:00 am to prepare the press review, or the policeman who until last year came with Raffaele Vignali (former President of the Companionship of Works and now new Deputy) as his armed escort. He is surprised to find him this year, going around the stands. “What are you doing here?” “I am peeling potatoes in one of the restaurants; it’s too good to miss.”
It’s true. It is too enjoyable to hear Mary Ann Glendon, a polished lawyer and United States Ambassador to the Holy See, tell how she enjoyed dinner with Carrón and a group of friends where “we spoke of the heart, starting off from our own hearts.” Then there was the Protestant theologian Stanley Hauerwas who, when asked what struck him, answered: “Energy. Here, there is the will to challenge the world” and to embrace it, as the GS students do at their stand as they engage with Joseph Weiler, the Jewish jurist who by now is at home at the Meeting. More songs, more festivities, more questions. The last question is Weiler’s, surprised by joy: “Who arranged for us to meet?” That’s the point: who?

NUGGETS FROM THE MEETING

GIANCARLO CESANA Professor of General Hygiene, Bicocca–Milan University
“The first aspect of emerging from solitude is the recognition that we are dependent. It is the physical aspect, the most basic and perhaps for this reason the most neglected. To live, we need air, we need to be looked after; we are dependent.
We did not make ourselves on our own and we do not make ourselves on our own. We need to drink, we need to eat... we need a contribution external to ourselves.”

etsuro sotoo Sculptor of the Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona
“The Religious Sense, Fr. Luigi Giussani’s masterpiece, helped me greatly. Everything was already prepared, placed ready within the text to give me what I was looking for. A question is posed, then another one grows out of it… This process is art, science. It seems that things are split, separate, but in reality they aren’t. A question is born, and you find an answer. After this answer, another question arises. This is our path.”

mary ann GLENDON U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See
“There are two options: either one recognizes the priority of creative reason, which is the principle of all things, or one recognizes the priority of the irrational, which would mean accepting that everything honored, everything in our life (even reason itself) is only accidental. The great option of Christianity, said the Pope, is the priority of reason. What an extraordinary statement!”

joseph WEILER Professor of International Law, New York University
“In a culture of human rights which is not closely connected with a culture of duty and human responsibility, we are not protagonists, we are ‘nobodies.’ In a universal culture of values which is not contextualized in a community which we feel is such, with reciprocal responsibilities because this is my neighbor, here again we are not protagonists, we are ‘nobodies.’”

emmanuele silanos Missionary of the Fraternity of Saint Charles at Taipei
“The greatest gift I have been given in recent months is to be able to share the gaze with which God looks at man. It is the gift of participating in what God feels, experiences, in looking at us. Besides this, there is the gift of sharing His method: patience–patience, made up of personal encounters, one by one. Christ does not meet a mass of people and convert them. Christ changes the lives of each one of us.”

JOHN WATERS Irish Times columnist
“We believe that we create everything, we are all-powerful, but we have no hope. But, from time to time, I see in the eyes of others or in the words of others a correspondence with my own desire. I have the sense that the technological arena that we have created, the public square, is perhaps ten years behind the human heart. And only in moments of ‘blurting out’ do we recognize the truth.”