meeting 2013

WHAT SORT OF PLACE IS THIS?
The Pope’s message, the challenge issued by the press, psalms in Arabic, Russian martyrs, visits to the Chesterton house... Here is an (inevitably incomplete) account of a week that raised many questions, and showed one thing: experience is more powerful than ideology–and it is needed in order to make history.

by Davide Perillo

“What sort of place is this?” The Rimini Meeting has just closed up shop with a prayer recited in one voice in the auditorium at the end of the encounter on Syria, and Riccardo Bicicchi, author of the documentary on the Christians persecuted in Nigeria that was shown in one of the halls, blurts out in amazement, “I’ve been traveling the world for 20 years in search of stories. I’ve seen everything. But I’ve never seen anything like this. What sort of place is this?” Good question. It takes you by surprise even if you are there to work at the Meeting, to lend a hand so that “the biggest cultural event in the world”–with 800,000 participants, 3,000 volunteers, encounters, guests, exhibits, shows–can happen again this year. And it helps not to take the experience for granted, even if this is your 34th Meeting. Just what is the Meeting? What really happens here?
In the end, this is  the same question that we started from on Sunday morning of the opening day. The pavilions were not yet open, there were still volunteers dusting off the signs with the title, “The Human Person: A State of Emergency,” and the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera put an editorial on the front page that issued a challenge, to the Meeting and to the experience from which it is born. Referring to the letter written in 2012 by Fr. Julián Carrón, President of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation, to another Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, Dario di Vico wrote, “Witness, in the Spanish prelate’s text, was contrasted with the pursuit of hegemony, the attraction to power, but we don’t know which of the two is prevalent today. Is it the first or the second?” The editorial substantially said that the week in Rimini would provide an answer to this question.
It was good that the challenge was issued immediately, because the temptation to swell up with pride would have come that same day. It doesn’t often happen that an event opens by collecting, in order, a message from the Pope, an ad hoc interview with the President of the Italian Republic, and a speech by the Prime Minister. Actually, it’s probably never happened–until this year’s Meeting. It was enough to keep the newspaper and TV headlines busy for awhile.

Path of hope. But the Pope put everything back in its proper place, right away: “Without passing through Christ, ...we would understand nothing about the mystery of the human person. Thus, almost inadvertently, we shall be obliged to borrow our criteria for judgment and action from the world... Power fears people who converse with God because this sets them free and prevents them from being assimilated.” The “I” and God: this is what counts. Anything but hegemony! But the two Italian political leaders, each in his own way, also referred to a responsibility, a task that is both personal and collective. “I think of the young people who crowd the large auditorium in Rimini, and I hope that they will make the contribution that we are all awaiting,” says President Giorgio Napolitano in the video interview with Roberto Fontolan. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Enrico Letta, from the auditorium, recalls the journey that began right here two years earlier, with the President’s speech that year: it was there that the essential thread of dialogue between the political forces was taken up again, and “a path of hope began.” In Rimini, things happen that you don’t see elsewhere: unexpected friendships and encounters between people who would have every motive to look at each other sideways. Take Egypt, for example: it’s on the brink of civil war, with the Muslim Brotherhood against the army and the rest of the country. But in Rimini, a supporter of “secular” democracy, Wael Farouq (historically a friend of the Meeting), and a former representative of the Brotherhood, Abdel Fattah Hassan, roam around together. They come from two different worlds, yet they remain friends. “It’s only possible because of what we’ve discovered here,” Wael says (see page 30).
Another friend who has been coming to the Meeting for a long time is Joseph Weiler, a Jewish American and world-renowned scholar of law. In Rimini, he presented a daring topic: a trial of Jesus, in two “audiences” lasting two hours each, in front of thousands of people who hung on to every word. He concluded that the condemnation of Jesus was inevitable, in the light of the Law and of history–but even though, as a Jew, he cannot believe that Jesus was the Messiah, nothing in his tradition would prevent God from sending a sign for the others. Fr. Stefano Alberto concluded, “That which distinguishes us, which profoundly divides us, is also that which profoundly unites us. I don’t think that a lesson like this would be possible in many places in the world, but here it’s possible.”
One evening, Weiler invited around 40 friends that he has met over the years in Rimini to dinner: colleagues, famous people, and students who used to visit him at his home. Amid the quips, dialogues, and analyses at that table in the Grand Hotel, one also heard psalms recited in seven languages, including Arabic. The dinner ended with everyone singing (at Weiler’s request) Povera voce, one of the foundational songs of Communion and Liberation. Thinking back, it was a scene that was both moving and surreal–and yet it happened. Just like another dinner, this one at the conference center, that brought together many of the invited guests who were present at the Meeting in that moment: the priest from the Argentine frontier and the Chinese philosopher; the Orthodox theologian and the Italian entrepreneur, all surprised and amazed by the intersection of universes that usually flow along in ignorance of one another.
The other side of the “state of emergency” is this strange vocation that the Meeting has to encounter anyone and bring all together, while also allowing the human person to emerge as he is, with his precise features–face, culture, tradition–without having to give up anything of himself in order to create bridges; in fact, it’s quite the contrary. In the conference center, there were Anglican theologians like Andrew Davidson (who presented the English edition of Fr. Giussani’s American Protestant Theology), grateful because, “CL helped me to rediscover the Protestantism of my youth,” and students like Nastia, one of the guides of the exhibit on the Russian martyrs, a miracle of ecumenism born of the collaboration between the Meeting, the Catholic University of Milan, Saint Tikhon’s Orthodox University of Moscow, and other cultural organizations.
These are just a few examples, but there are a barrage of others, big and small, because humanity can be seen blossoming again in every corner. There are the kids from Imprevisto (which means “unforeseen”), a community in Pesaro, Italy, established for the rehabilitation of drug addicts, who exhibited their work on Hamlet. And there was the keynote speech in which John Waters took on the title of the Meeting, telling his own story while tackling an epochal theme–the reduction of desire sought by modernity and the tenacious battle with which Christ allows us to throw that desire wide open once more, precisely as happened to Waters. In Rimini, this could be seen continually, along with how this method moves those who come up against it, those who arrive with a preconceived idea and find it demolished by the facts. Take Martin Schulz, (Socialist) President of the European Parliament: after a meeting, a visit to the exhibit on Europe (one of the most popular), and a tour through the pavilions in which he was found in shirtsleeves, dancing with the volunteers (see page 28), he said to those around him, “I thought of this place as the convention of a bloc of conservative Catholics. But I’ve seen that there is everything here, a variety that you wouldn’t expect. It’s something else.” 

At home. For many, it is another home–even to the point of surprising or embarrassing you (in a good way) in front of the unexpected. One of the most eagerly awaited–and most surprised–guests at the Meeting said to a friend at a certain point, “I was so warmly welcomed here, that I felt like I was with family. But now I feel the need to return to my world.” While among the pots, pans, and hearth of the Chesterton house (reconstructed for one of the most beautiful exhibits), veteran reporter Mario Luzzato Fegiz, who “returned to the faith of my youth because I rediscovered the Church as a mother,” said that he felt “a sword that penetrates you to the core: that exhibit put uncontrollable mechanisms in motion.”
In short, the Meeting raised some questions–another common experience among many of the guests. And in many cases–from the Rector of Saint Tikhon’s Orthodox University to the Provost of the University of Notre Dame–they converged, in the end, on one question: “How do you bring so many young people here? How do you educate them?” In fact, it is a reformulation of the question that Fr. Carrón has been insistently asking for a while, ever since the last Exercises of the Fraternity of CL: “How can one live?”
Organization is not enough to explain a hundredth of what happens here. Above all, it doesn’t explain the faces of those kids out there, in the parking lots, who spend eight hours under the blazing sun sorting out the cars and the frenzy. They will see very little of the Meeting, but they are smiling, at everyone, and reminding each other that it is all worthwhile because “God became a servant.”
This happiness that cannot be explained with ideology does not come from power, but it is there nonetheless. It’s striking to hear a journalist, who has been coming to the Meeting for years, confide to a friend, “I’ve always lived by leaning on strong values. Then, in time, I saw them collapse. You, instead, have remained. Why? I’m starting to think it’s because you have a method: experience.”
Experience, following what happens, looking at reality and learning from it, not from ideas–this is the method; this is Christianity. It is catholic, that is, universal–it welcomes everyone. And it is stronger than ideas and prejudices. “This Meeting was the victory of experience above and beyond every ideology,” said Emilia Guarnieri, President of the Meeting. And it is true. There is only one doubt that can remain, so subtle that sometimes we have a difficult time confessing it, though it nudges us insistently: Is this enough? Are facts like this enough to make a mark on reality, to deal with the winds of war in Syria, a government that wavers, or the thousands of emergencies in history? It’s interesting that this question is tackled by someone “external” to the CL Movement: Eugenio Mazzarella, philosopher and former representative of the Partito Democratico (Democratic Party, on the political center-left), in the newspaper Unità: “I would not want the experience of the Meeting to be read as comforting, made of more emotional personal experiences.... In reality, what goes onstage in Rimini, even just from the perspective of Italian life, is a provocation that is all ‘political.’” Witness is not a retreat into self-reflection. It is a way to construct history.

Watering the plants. What comes to mind is Václav Havel’s greengrocer (another topic addressed at the convention center), with his humble and simple gesture, which causes a crisis for the powers that be. Then you realize that you’ve just seen it again, in flesh and blood. Among the volunteers, there was one whose only task was to water the plants. Some of his friends ran into him at the end of the week, and amid greetings and hugs, one of them teased, “Hey, where were you at this Meeting?” His answer was like a lightning bolt, because it had everything contained within it: “Don’t you see the grass growing? That’s me.”