TOWARD 2013

human urgency
The Meeting, with its final press release, takes stock of 2012 edition, presenting the theme and the title of the next one.

Ninety-eight encounters with 271 speakers, 9 exhibitions, 21 spectacles, and 800,000 people present from 40 different countries. The experience in these days, the facts that have occurred, the population of the Meeting, have shown that it is possible to live this dimension of human existence, giving testimony to this “relation to the infinite” for which each man yearns. This is not a question of spiritualism for insiders or “pious” people but an essential factor in living every aspect of life with truth.
“Nothing is trivial or meaningless in the path of life and of the world. Man is made for an infinite God who was made flesh and that took our humanity to raise it to the heights of His divine nature,” wrote Benedict XVI. An infinite that became flesh, present in all circumstances of life: this is why everything interests us, this is why we confronted ourselves with institutional personalities and with men of other cultures and other religions, such as the Lebanese company protagonist of the opening spectacle. This is why we proposed a new lecture on Dostoevsky and a new way to look at rock ’n’ roll, as took place at two of the most visited exhibitions during this Meeting. Then we have the exhibition, The Unforeseeable Instant. Young Protagonists for Development: young people that have said to thousands and thousands of people that it is possible to not be broken down by circumstances but to be reborn and build in every moment, discovering again the profound nature of our own “I” as insuppressible desire for good.
This is our path. This is the journey that we want to keep walking: testifying to that which we have encountered and to that which generates what we have witnessed in recent days.
In the society that we live in there is an urgent need to redefine a clear identity to our “I,” the protagonist of life and builder of history. For this reason, the title of the 34th edition of the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples – which will take place from the 18th to 24th of August, 2013 – will be: “Human Urgency.”