Meeting 2005

The Freedom
of Being Sons
Writers, politicians, journalists, and ecclesiastics testified that freedom is the greatest good, that and it is encounterable

by Carlo Dignola

The first evening, Franco Branciaroli’s interpretation of Don Quixote–split between Laurel and Hardy and Totò and Peppino (an Italian slap-stick comedy duo)–demonstrated immediately what an intricate farce, what a two-edged tragedy is the undertaking of human freedom. The only worthy masked figure, in the end, was she (Dulcinea) who decided to wear the coat of arms of the Impossible. Which does happen, above all, here in Rimini.
On the opening day, Sunday, Senator Pera arrived and said that, in politics as well, a freedom without content is like a hand that grasps at the wind. The State, reduced to a pure formal mechanism, insensitive to any inheritance of ideals, ends up becoming its own worst enemy. The President of the Italian Senate criticized the very political vision to which he belongs, the Liberal Democratic one, when it maintains that the true freedom of man is absolute autonomy. Our political system, affirms Pera, has certainly functioned much better than those preceding it, and yet it has a grave defect: it is too optimistic. It does not consider the possibility of conflict between competing values within a society; questions such as abortion, assisted reproduction, and friction with radical Islam call this to our attention. The limitation of Liberal Democracy is that it “does not consider the existence of evil as an essential and ontological datum.” Rousseau and Adam Smith, listen.

Freedom of science
Science, too, like politics, risks losing its fascination and reducing itself to an anti-human technology if it no longer comprehends the terrain that made possible, as early as the Middle Ages, the emergence of a method of rational knowledge based on observation of reality. The nuclear physicist Peter Hodgson and the mathematician Giorgio Israel explained that without monotheism, without the idea of an order of creation and without the trust typical of the Judeo-Christian culture, in a progressive direction of history a man like Galileo Galilei would never have been born. Putting science and religion at odds, proclaiming the freedom of one in opposition to the chains imposed by the other, means falling into error precisely about this idea. Pope Benedict XVI, in his message to the Meeting, said, in fact, that we live “in a historical and cultural moment in which nothing is so misunderstood as the term freedom.” And the Archbishop of Bologna, Carlo Caffarra, underlined it: the freedom of man today is in chains. It needs to be liberated from insistent skepticism about itself, from the fear of not even being able to exist as such in a world entirely determined by material coordinates, and from a climate of moral indifference that sucks away freedom’s oxygen, from that veneration for Nothingness that Hemingway set in a paradoxical prayer in his Forty-nine Stories: “Our Nada, who art in Nada…”

Free obedience
Julián Carrón also started from the structural weakness of human freedom: “Just ask how many truly free men we know.” Monday afternoon, forty-five minutes before the beginning of the encounter with him, the security guards gradually sent people away, and the other rooms connected by videoconference were also off limits. Recent years have never seen so many people for a session of the Meeting. “Don Julián” is not Fr. Giussani. He hasn’t his vehemence, his hoarse voice, the cutting images, but he was immediately submerged in the same affection: a thundering applause that prevented him from talking for a long time. Patiently drawing plane and logical figures, he cited Kafka and Cesare Pavese, Maria Zambrano and Hannah Arendt, to demonstrate that today–quite unlike what we believe–freedom is “a good that is as precious as it is scarce.” How can this happen–he asked–if our era does nothing other than proclaim in every field its absolute and non-negotiable value? The defect lies in a mistaken idea, which thrives throughout modern culture, that freedom consists of the absence of all bonds. So then, one must forget Kant a bit and remember, instead, the “prodigal son,” who, precisely in order to be free, burned his bridges to his father, ending up, however, becoming a slave. He is the prototype of our errors, the Autonomous Man. Instead, Carrón said, true freedom is “having discovered the good of having a father.” And yet, it is not enough to be the “good son” to avoid falling. The son in the parable who remains at home is basically “a formalist,” a bad little moralist, not at all a good Gospel example. The human drama is all here, in this “free obedience”–which Péguy described in moving terms–so difficult to live because it is so far from the current mentality. Freedom, said Carrón, is not a range of equivalent proposals, but “a determinate experience: we feel free when we see a desire of ours satisfied.” If we don’t understand Leopardi and his finding that “everything is little,” if we don’t feel the mortifying failure of human freedom in front of the real, if we cut out the direct relationship between the “I” and the infinite Mystery that our finite freedom proclaims at every step, there is no avoiding it: not only the atheist, but also the religious man is encaged, because, in the final analysis, freedom is not an abstract concept, but “free man, changed by the encounter with Christ.”
Even the Greeks, who invented the term, conceived of eleutheros, the free subject, much before eleutheria, the idea of freedom. For them, as the historian Marta Sordi reminded us, it wasn’t the individual who was free, but the city as a whole, inasmuch as it distanced itself from barbarians enthralled by tyrants of all kinds. A slave, for the Greeks, is the man who does not belong to the demos, to his own people, and therefore remains abandoned to himself. For the Romans as well, liber was literally the son, who, inasmuch as he depends on the father, enjoys a civic identity.

Free men
Free men were seen in abundance at this year’s Meeting. And with people of this kind, nothing is ever taken for granted. Thus, Giuliano Ferrara, in his “pontifical white” suit, heated the crowd in the auditorium, proclaiming–he, the super laicist, and even ex-Communist–that he wanted to defend the embryo, heterosexual marriage, and even the idea of sin against the ideology of the equiparación of all moral systems. He was not ashamed to say that the battle in defense of Law 40 impassioned him in a way that hadn’t happened to him for years, and that he was happy to have won together with Catholics. “In the end, it went this way: reality got revenge on jargon/terminology.” He cried to his ex-companions in struggle and in government that what set up the barricades in these months “is not laicism, but barbaric positivism,” confessing that he had never found “as much passion for freedom in the liberal world, nor in the Communist world, as I have found in the obscurantist Catholic world.” Another free man is Giancarlo Cesana, at the podium several times this year, this time simply as a physician. Another layman is Giorgio Vittadini, who had attacked the “country of unearned income” frontally, extending his hand, instead, to Giulio Tremonti, with whom he had engaged in more than one conflict over banking foundations. A free man is the Afghan Foreign Affairs Minister, Abdullah Abdullah, who, almost moved, thanked the public that he, a Muslim, should have “the great privilege of meeting here in Rimini pious, erudite men, religious and political exponents” who attentively follow the problems of his country. Or the Supreme Knight of Columbus, Carl A. Anderson, dignified figure of a Catholicism always observed with attention in America, who at the Meeting said he “felt at home” right away, and wanted to bring the young people of his association so they could see that Christianity is not a boring thing of the past. Tony Hendra is free. The famous English comic actor told how his life of sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll (he defined himself an “irreverent satyr”) was miraculously kept together over the years by a relationship of friendship with the Benedictine Fr. Joe, that his existence as a “prodigal son” would have been in a prison if he had not realized at a certain point that “forgiveness is always possible,” and that mercy is precisely what keeps man’s freedom open.

Everything about “Fr. Gius”
And Fr. Giussani? As the sculptor, Manfredi Quartana, said today–but it was also true yesterday–“You can see that there is a father, in the fact that there are brothers. The fraternity one encounters here at the Meeting is the sign that there is a father, and that he is here present.” In Rimini, you could understand it in every corner of the place, from the babysitting to the way the computer technicians worked, from the acrobatic pizza makers to the young people who rap danced at the final party, and even in all the people who–no offense intended to the journalists–didn’t care a bit about the “heritage of the founder,” who were there for something here and now. The title of the Meeting 2006, anyway, will be all “Fr. Gius” for the first time. “Reason is the need for the infinite and culminates in the sigh and the presentiment that this infinite be manifested.” Again.