30th Rimini meeting

Subjected to Experience
From the “Convicts’ Café” to the lecture on St. Paul, from the exhibition on the Sanità District in Naples to the Nobel Prize winners,  we present a report (unpretentious and incomplete) of the Rimini Meeting 2009 which offered those present the opportunity to take a step forward on the adventurous road to knowledge–knowledge of reality and knowledge of self.

by Davide Perillo

“What are you looking for here?” The question erupted more or less halfway through the Meeting. It was one of the many spontaneous meetings with the convicts from Padua, who last year brought along to Rimini an exhibition showing their experience of work and freedom in the jail, and were here once again this year in the café operated by the Giotto Cooperative, one of the liveliest places in the Exhibition Center. There were three or four of them on the stage, with hundreds of people around them in the ongoing search for encounters, embraces, and witnesses; the endless request to understand better that phrase with which one of them left a mark at the end of last year’s Meeting: “I can’t wait to go back to prison and tell all of them what I have seen.” Then came the question that Nicola Boscoletto, the one in charge of the cooperative, threw out: “These last few days, you have been looking for us, embracing us, almost besieging us. What are you looking for when you come to us?” Then he spoke of what had just happened. Rose, the nurse who started the Meeting Point in Kampala, came to see the prisoners with her unimaginable stories of women sick with AIDS who find life again; firstly Vicky, who shook the people in Rimini last year. “Rose, how is Vicky?” Silence. Then, “If you say your yes, then she is fine.” As if to say, “Either you are interested in the One who fills Vicky’s heart, or you are not interested even in Vicky.”
Recalling these things again, this question and this episode that remained almost hidden in the folds of a week that was fuller than ever (800,000 visitors; 3,800 volunteers; scores of meetings, exhibitions, and witnesses…), one has to admit that they were useful, because they help us to clarify the course of the Meeting 2009, to realize what took place in the pavilions of the Exhibition Center, with the numbers that were already marking the 30th edition of the Meeting in Rimini, making it different from the past, even the recent past. The 2008 Meeting was marked by the immense impact of the witnesses: Vicky and the prisoners, Fr. Aldo, Marcos and Cleuza Zerbini, Archbishop Paolo Pezzi… These faces brought out the presence of Christ in all its grandeur. This year, if it were possible, things went even further and deeper. For those who were there, it was a step forward in knowledge, comparing more closely that Presence with one’s own heart, trying to grasp more its exceptional nature, and desiring that it become an experience more personal, more one’s own.
Put it how you like, but this could be seen everywhere, starting from the witnesses that one year ago had struck everyone for the power of their accounts, and that this year did so even more, if it is possible, for the change in those people, for what has developed over these twelve months. Take Marcos and Cleuza, for example. This year, they brought 40 or so of their friends to the Meeting, the vanguard of those 120,000 Sem Terra (landless people) from São Paulo, who, thanks to them, have built houses and futures for themselves, and who, by following them–and their encounter with CL–have come to know the deep meaning of that whole journey. Sitting at the Brazil stand, in a pause between one witness and another, it was Cleuza herself who said that everything seemed “bigger and more mature. Compared with last year, there are more people, it’s nicer, and then here people ask questions so as to learn.” She was not speaking about the Meeting, but about herself at the Meeting. This was evident when she gave a public talk: “You have changed my life; it was here that I learned that gaze with which I look at those 120,000 people. It is this look, full of tenderness, that makes me strong. Each one of you is the presence of Christ for me.” Then Marcos, immediately after, spoke of the friendship that has marked this year: “Fr. Aldo and Fr. Carrón are witnesses for me; every friend who truly lives is a witness for me. What does this mean? That I am moved along with them; that it’s nice, and that’s it? No. Witness means that I want to learn to be free like Carrón. I want to look at him and learn to be free like him; I want to look at Fr. Aldo and learn to love as he does, to learn to believe as he believes that I am You who make me.”

A Personal adventure. People had true and deep experiences, like the prisoners who said that this year was “more than last year,” or like Franco, one of them, who recounted (in words and gestures–you just had to see them together) the journey of the unimaginable friendship that happened with Vicky. There was also the Neapolitan from the Sanità District, all keen to tell about their experience in the exhibition that drew long lines and attention from the start, but that had an upturn when Fr. Carrón came to visit, just before his lecture on St. Paul which, along with that of Carmine di Martino, was the very heart of the Meeting. “He told us, ‘Look, the exhibition itself is not so important. What is important is that it be an opportunity for each one of you.’”
Here is the right path. An adventure for oneself, a journey of knowledge to make your own, and to travel yourself, exactly as happened to other guests, people who had already been at the Meeting, perhaps last year, and upon coming back told us–directly or indirectly–that they were on that journey, that they were drawing a comparison between their own hearts and what they were seeing. Examples? Mary Ann Glendon, former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, Harvard lecturer and outstanding jurist, who held a conference on “Elementary Experience and Natural Law” in which the impact of Fr. Giussani’s thought and the friendship with the Movement (deepened over the past months) were evident. Enrico Morricone, the composer, who after his concert stayed on until two in the morning talking with a section of the public. The politicians who went around the stands out of their own interest and not out of formal obligation (one of them, from the “left,” had wandered away from his escort. “I am at the Reducciones [exhibit on Paraguay], and then I am going to Galileo; leave me alone…).” Franco Frattini, Italian Foreign Minister, after the opening meeting on Africa (four African leaders concretely discussing the possibility for peace), proposed holding a similar meeting every year on hot topics in global politics. But even Tatiana Kasatkina, the great Dostoevsky scholar who had already met CL some months ago, after visiting the whole Meeting, made an observation that says a lot about this journey: “Usually the individual gets lost in the mass, but here he is valued–whether it’s someone who explains the exhibitions or someone who waits at tables, everyone proposes what he has discovered as precious for himself.”
True. At the Meeting, this discovery was possible for everyone: guests and organizers, VIPs and volunteers, and even for those who were doing the humblest jobs, like Francesco, a parking lot attendant, who had eight-hour shifts under the hot sun–the best he could expect was arguing with people who didn’t want to move their cars. “No gratification and a lot of tiredness, and yet, I am happy–and this makes me ask myself how it’s possible.” In other words, it sets me off along a road, on a journey to the end, without stopping, continuously comparing the facts with my heart, the Presence, and the correspondence. Among the chance encounters at the Meeting was when Rose met some girls from the Imprevisto Social Cooperative that helps young drug addicts. One of them said, “Everything I need is there.” Rose answered, “You mustn’t be satisfied, not even with your friends working for you. They are not the meaning of your life; I am not the meaning of the life of my women at the Meeting Point. A person cannot fail to feel that it’s not enough.”
 There, if there is another factor that marks the Meeting, it is this tendency to make the journey together, not taking anything for granted, at times without letting up, even in relationships already begun that have shown the promise of truth for oneself–and this is already an event. This tendency involves both those who organize the Meeting and those who come to visit. Otherwise, it would be difficult to explain the wonder expressed by Mario Draghi, the Governor of the Bank of Italy, who was so struck by the cafè and the stories told by the convicts from Padua (he asked, “Are they real convicts?”) that he thanked the organizers “for having insisted on showing me around the Meeting before my lecture.” Then there was Tony Blair’s press secretary who, while his boss was giving his talk, went to get a supply of cakes at the prisoners’ stand. James Murdoch, the heir of the media mogul Rupert, kept firing questions at his escort: “How do you manage to organize all this? Why don’t you do it elsewhere?” Without this shared tendency, it would be impossible to explain the evident journey made by Harry Wu, the Chinese dissident who survived 19 years in the concentration camps. Slim and hardened, he found it almost difficult to give the reasons for his hope during his talk on Sunday, but he was moved and open at the end of the Meeting, as if he had perceived in those five days some real hope for himself and his friends (“Please write to me,” he asked the priests of the St. Charles Fraternity based in Taiwan). And it wouldn’t be possible to explain the comment of John Mather, Nobel Prize winner in Physics, on coming out of the exhibition on Naples: “This exhibition touches the heart more than all the explanations that I could give.” Or the striking depth of Hossam Mikawy, a judge from Cairo, who first of all joked with a friend, “How old am I? Thirty-five. But it is like being three days old, because since I came here I have been reborn,” going on to explain to the Daily Meeting his encounter with Fr. Giussani. “The Religious Sense opened my eyes. I have understood that in order to judge a person, I cannot limit myself to reading files. It is the opposite of what I learned when I was studying law: the judge must live in an ivory tower if he wants to be impartial…”
Draw up the balance and you realize what is meant by saying that knowledge is an event, an encounter that happens and that changes you, revolutionizes the way you look at yourself and reality, just as happened to St. Paul, as Julián Carrón explained to us, or to the Unnamed in Manzoni’s book, The Betrothed, that Di Martino quoted: “I know myself now. I understand who I am.” This is what the people who went to the Meeting were looking for.