“Desired by the One for Whom we yearn”
The Rimini Meeting began with the message from Benedict XVI, sent to the Bishop of Rimini. Here are extracts from the text.

The theme chosen for the 2011 Meeting: “And Existence Becomes an Immense Certainty” gives rise to various and profound questions: What is existence? What is certainty? And especially: what is the foundation of certainty without which the human being cannot live? ...
Let us start with the Latin etymology of the term “existence”: ex esistere, which will take us straight to the essential. Heidegger highlighted the dynamic character of human life, interpreting it as “not enduring.” However ex esistere evokes two other meanings, even more descriptive of the human experience of living and which, in a certain sense, are at the root of the same dynamism that Heidegger analyzed. The particle ex makes us think of a provenance and, at the same time, of detachment. Hence, existence would be “being, having come from,” and at the same time, “moving beyond,” almost “transcending,” which defines “being” itself in a permanent way. Here the most original level of human life is tangible: its creatural essence, its being, structurally dependent on a beginning, its existence desired by someone for whom, almost unconsciously, it yearns.
The late Msgr. Luigi Giussani, who, with his fruitful charism, founded the Rimini event, insisted on various occasions on this fundamental dimension of the human being. And rightly, for the certainty with which human beings face life stems precisely from their awareness of it. The recognition of their origins and the “closeness” of these very origins in all the stages of life are the prerequisites for the authentic development of the human personality, for a positive gaze to the future, and for a fruitful impact on history.
This is anthropologically ascertainable in daily experience: a child is all the more certain and sure of himself the more he experiences the closeness of his parents. However, precisely by keeping the example of the child, we understand that the mere recognition of one’s origins and, consequently of one’s own structural dependence does not suffice. On the contrary, it might appear–as history has amply shown–as a burden of which to rid oneself.
What makes a child “strong” is the certainty of his parents’ love. It is thus necessary to enter into the love of those who wanted us to be able to experience the positiveness of existence. ... Man cannot live without being certain of his destiny. “Only when the future is certain as a positive reality does it become possible to live the present as well” (Benedict XVI, Encyclical Spe Salvi, no. 2). However on what certainty can man reasonably found his own life? What, ultimately, is the hope that does not disappoint? With the coming of Christ the promise that nourished the hope of the People of Israel reaches fulfillment and acquires a personal face. In Jesus Christ man’s destiny was plucked once and for all from the nebulosity in which it had been immersed. ...
The risen Christ, present in His Church, in the sacraments and with His Spirit, is the ultimate and definitive foundation of existence, the certainty of our hope. He is the eschaton already present, the one who makes existence itself a positive event, a history of salvation in which every circumstance reveals its true meaning in relation to eternity. If this awareness is missing, it is easy to fall into the risks of actualism, into emotional sensationalism in which everything is reduced to a phenomenon, or to desperation in which every circumstance seems senseless. Then, existence becomes a frantic search for events, for transient novelties which, in the end, prove disappointing. Only the certainty that is born from faith enables human beings to live the present intensely and, at the same time, to transcend it, seeing in it the reflections of eternity whose time is ordained. Only the recognized presence of Christ, the source of life and the destiny of human beings, can reawaken within us the longing for Heaven and thus the ability to project ourselves with trust, without fear, and without false illusions to the future.
Today, especially, we Christians are called to account for the hope that is in us, to witness in the world to that “beyond,” without which everything remains incomprehensible. However, to do this it is necessary to be “reborn,” as Jesus told Nicodemus, to let ourselves be regenerated by the sacraments and by prayer, to rediscover in them the matrix of every kind of authentic certainty. The Church, making present in time the mystery of God’s eternity, is the vehicle of this certainty. In the ecclesial community, the pro-existence of the Son of God reaches us: the eternal life, to which the whole of life is destined, becomes in it something we can experience already, at this moment.
“The expansion of a friendship,” Fr. Festugière said at the beginning of the past century, “is one of the characteristics of Christian immortality.” What, in fact, is Heaven other than the definitive fulfillment of friendship with Christ and with each other? In this perspective, the French religious continued, “it matters little subsequently where we may be. Heaven is in truth where Christ is. Thus the heart that loves desires no other joy than that of always living with the Beloved.” Life, therefore, is not a blind process but means going to meet the person who loves us. Let us therefore know where we are going, towards whom we are directed, and may this orientate the whole of our existence... .
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone,
Secretary of State