CLOSE-UP
THE NATURE OF THE "I"

THE VANISHING POINT
In these pages, you will find a journey amid the countless (and unforeseeable) instants of the Rimini Week, where “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”–the international guests, the life of the volunteers, the exhibits, the comments, and the “behind the scenes” workings. This year’s adventure witnessed that religiosity “is not a virtual world.” It is so concrete that every power tries to reduce it. Here are some traces of that life that strives to be free from “false infinites.”

by Ubaldo Casotto

Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, President of the United Nations General Assembly, visited the exhibit entitled, “The Unforeseeable Instant, Young People for Growth.” The volunteer who was to be his guide greeted him in Arabic. This was the first surprise for Al-Nasser. His wonder at the witness of the young people was transformed into emotion at the reading of Pirandello’s text that concludes the exhibit, Ciaula Discovers the Moon. Eugenio Mazzarella is a philosopher and politician, he brought his wife and daughter to the Meeting. He wanted to meet his fellow journalist for a few minutes, while he drank an arancino at the Alcamo Bar. As he was speaking of the people he met, political analysis alternated with astounded silences during which he felt his voice sticking in his throat. Luis is a Mexican, pursuing doctoral studies in seismic engineering in Pavia. He came to the Meeting on the invitation of a colleague, who asked him, “Te ha gustado?” (“Did you like it?”) He replied, “I was struck by the variety of the arguments: music, philosophy, history, politics, science, economics... all quite different from each other. Here, instead, I discovered that there is a profound unity.” You see them and you listen to them; you think over this highly concentrated program (the conferences with 271 speakers, the 9 exhibits, the 21 shows, the 4,000 volunteers, the 800,000 in attendance), and you think that after all the heart is just as Luis said: “a profound unity.”
“All the guests agree that the Meeting is not just the sum of what is to be seen,” Emilia Guarnieri, President of the week-long event, tells us. “From the Bishop of Malta to the archeologist Giorgio Buccellati; from the Canadian Minister to the Lebanese dancers, they all say the same: ‘Here, there is something different.’” Okay, the whole is more than just the sum, but what if I were to ask you to specify the “something more”? “First, the volunteers, then the openness that is found, regarding both themes and interlocutors, and the beauty of it all... In all this, they perceive a possible good for themselves. Many of them would like to organize it in their own countries.”

“It’s the most concrete thing there is.” Fr. Julián Carrón, the leader of CL, explained this interest to the Daily Meeting (the event’s own newspaper). “The infinite is not an abstraction, but something very concrete that concerns the way each person relates to reality. If we don’t understand that the religious sense has to do with everything, we reduce religiosity to a virtual world. But it is the most concrete thing there is.”
It is so concrete that every power that aims at hegemony tries to do away with the religious sense. This is explained in the two exhibits happily located beside each other. The first examines the religious drama of rock music, the most vital musical experience of the ’90s, while the second reconstructs the tragedy of a country, Albania, from which religiosity was violently driven out. Both exhibits bring to the surface something that was kept in the dark. For the Albanians, the exhibit brought to the fore the Christian roots of the people and of the nation, summed up in a massive, moving photograph of Mother Teresa of Calcutta in her youth. In her own words, “I am Albanian by blood, Indian by citizenship, Catholic by faith. As for my vocation, I belong to the world.”

The first impact. John Waters, an Irish journalist and curator of the exhibit on rock music, wanted to throw light on the fundamental experience of those who listen to rock, which is the cry of the one who wrote it. “Music is born as a cry from man’s heart, and rock music, in its best expression, continues to offer an outlet for this cry, which becomes heart-to-heart communication.” Of course, then there is business, the star system, narcissism, and degeneration. Waters is no fool; he knows what he is talking about. “We wanted to demonstrate that this reduction was not successful, that heart-to-heart communication resists, that within rock music, the Cry is preserved and nourished.” Thus, in Water’s freedom, faced with the complexity, the cultural, economic, and political force of the musically hegemonic phenomenon of our times, there is all the decisive choice that, behind the scenes, flowed as a challange through out the Meeting: presence as hegemony or as witness.
 Alberto Savorana, CL spokesman, said he came to the Meeting with “a certain anxiety that some factors would ruin the week: allusions, polemics... In the Exhibition Center, the first person I met was Waters and, when I saw him, all my worries melted away. He was free from all the commonplaces about rock music, from all the prejudices; he exposed himself by expressing publicly the experience of his encounter with those personalities. This was the first impact I had. One guest said of his exhibit, ‘You think that it is the least religious; for me it’s the most religious.’ Then the personally signed message from the Pope arrived, and it made me re-live the Meeting’s title, which could have remained an empty phrase.”
The Pope’s message; here a quotation is enough: “We must not be afraid of what God asks of us through life’s circumstances...” because they come to mind when we listen to one of the witnesses in the exhibit about young people and the crisis that struck the Prime Minister, Mario Monti. Giovanni Muscara stutters, but he overcame his handicap, studied hard, entered the world of international finance, and then left it in order to found a school in London for stutterers, which has developed an innovative technique. He said that the first sponsors were members of his own family. “When I was seven years old, I asked my mother on the beach, ‘Why should this stuttering happen to me?’ I imagine how she must have felt. She could have hugged me, but she did much more. She told me, ‘Giovanni, don’t dare complain any more about the way God made you.’”
Giorgio Vittadini, President of the Foundation for Subsidiarity, also believes that “living the circumstances” is decisive in the choice between hegemony and witness. “The alternative is a life on the run. In the face of the crisis, ideological and political positions have not held up. The exhibit speaks instead of the ‘unforeseeable instant,’ in which a man moves and generates a wealth that no historical antecedent can explain. At the Meeting, we have tried not to analyze, but to recount these countless ‘unforeseeable instants.’ And the most distant people have understood, have felt the same wonder as we do.”
Those who visited the Companionship of Works exhibit on Milan Cathedral were impressed with the historical accounts demonstrating that the cathedrals were the work of a people and not of rich businessmen. The donation by Giangaleazzo Visconti (Duke of Milan at the time) covered only 16% of the costs; the rest was made up of the small offerings from many others (merchants, prostitutes, elderly people, etc.).

The letter and the choice. Bernhard Scholz, President of the Companionship of Works, says the day-by-day struggle needs this spirit, “full of realism and great daring.” “This is the atmosphere you could breathe in Rimini. I met a lot of people who took on the crisis without complaining, with great understanding of the difficulties, and above all, looking creatively for a way out. Among many, I was struck by a businessman who was in huge difficulties. At the end of the week, he told me, ‘I’ve found hope again, for facing up to the situation.’ This means that the title of the Meeting is already an experience and therefore a signal for the country.”
Is this what is meant by CL’s “religious option” that many would like to see implemented following Fr. Carrón’s letter last May? In this letter he says, “Only this way will we be able to be a different presence in the world, as many among us already testify in their workplaces, in the universities, in the life of society and in politics, or with friends, through the desire that faith not be reduced to the private sphere.” An Italian journalist expresses her wish: “It would have been nice to hold a public meeting on Fr. Carrón’s letter.” But the Meeting was actually a huge public meeting on Fr. Carrón’s letter.

A cry to free us. Closing the conference on “Homo Religiosus” with Cardinal Julien Ries and the Buddhist monk Shodo Habukawa, Fr. Stefano Alberto also recalled “the unforeseeable instant in which man comes into contact with an event that reveals to him the transcendent.” He added, citing John Paul II’s words to the people of CL in 1982, “You are without a homeland.... The novelty Christ brought makes this relationship with the Mystery definitive and those who live it irreducible to any project. This is why those who speak of ‘CL’s religious option’ are persecuting us.” If there was a choice, Carrón repeated in Rimini, it was in accepting Benedict XVI’s invitation “not to succumb to ‘false infinites’ that imprison us and do not let us breathe. My letter was a cry to free us from these false infinites so as to live with all the breath for which we were made.”
The problem, as explained in the pivotal conference by the theologian Javier Prades (see page 14), is if this novelty in the relationship with the infinite that Christianity claims to be (taking up again and re-launching the nostalgia for it even in contemporary culture) is able to resist the challenge of the conquests of science and naturalistic thought that confine the religious fact to the private sphere. A 14-year-old student commented on Prades’ conference: “It was difficult, but I understood two things. I was glad that he quoted a pop group (Los Secretos); it means that he doesn’t live shut up in church. And then he raised the question of the ‘vanishing point’: before, it was in the beyond, but now it has entered into my experience. This is really interesting.” Prades cited Fr. Giussani: “The Risen Christ is the first and fundamental event in which the vanishing point has become human experience,” and he asked himself if this Christianity “is really convenient for all men”–even for those who from their ivory towers of science explain that we are only “a heap of neurons” and not unique, unrepeatable, and inviolable beings, “creatures,” as the Pope says in his message, in “essential reference to something else or, rather, Someone else–who cannot be managed by man.”
Whoever wandered among the panels of the exhibit on Jérôme Lejeune, or managed to enter the hall where Elvira Parravicini gave her witness on neonatology in New York, knows that Prades’ words are anything but abstract. Lejeune is the geneticist who discovered the chromosome that causes Down’s Syndrome, and when he saw what he feared happening–the use of his discovery for the selection, not the treatment, of Down children, he challenged the scientific community: “To kill or not to kill: this is the problem... Our task is not that of passing a sentence, but to relieve suffering.” The evening of that conference in San Francisco, in August 1969, he wrote to his wife: “Today I lost the Nobel Prize.” And so it was.

No conclusions. When Elvira Parravicini explains the result of pre-natal diagnosis, she doesn’t offer options like abortion, but therapeutic help. “It’s not true the there is nothing more to do. The newborn child needs to be welcomed, kept warm; it must not suffer cold and hunger, and must not feel pain.” She meets the parents of children she knows will not live more than a few hours and asks them, “Is it a boy or a girl? Have you chosen a name?” In this way, “they know I am waiting for their baby. Then begins a competition for affection, because there are parents who do not understand that there is someone who loves their child more than they do.” A teacher turns to her neighbor and says, “It’s the same for my students; I cannot consider them with other criteria. Many parents look at their kids in a different way when they see the interest I have in them.”
This report could go on for many pages more; many notes have been left in the files. Conclusions? No conclusions. An article finishes when you put the last period, but life doesn’t, and the Meeting is life.