Meeting 2004 Passionately Human by Emiliano Ronzoni August 22-28, 2004. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Meeting era, the fiftieth anniversary of the CL era–the announcements are repeated almost obsessively at every event. For this writer, the Meeting began with a small note of disappointment, much earlier than the last week of August–as early as the announcement of the title. “Our progress does not consist in presuming we have arrived, but in constantly striving for our goal.” Ah, they don’t make them like they used to, those great titles, those beautiful, vaguely mysterious triads, or those citations charged with a fascination that was always a bit beyond comprehension and never attainable. No, here’s a flat title that means exactly what it says, with a little touch, a vague concession to the myth of the road, of Kerouac-style going, going, going. Isn’t that the way it is? No, it’s not the way it is. That it wasn’t so became clearer bit by bit over the course of the seven days, to the extent that by the end, this Meeting could be seen as extraordinary in the intensity of the various encounters. It wasn’t a Meeting of going, going, going, but a Meeting, in soccer terminology, of the “re-start,” of beginning always and ever-anew, because a beginning has already been given. Or, to use Cesana’s words from the simple and beautiful meeting on Monday, August 23rd, in which he recounted the story of the Meeting: “In order that this experience last another 25 years, it must be done again, not applied like a pre-cut format.” Beyond Euclid The Meeting is the place that proves that geometry is not an exact science. It may be that somewhere else, like on the evening political talk shows, straight lines intersect in infinity and all that, and even when they meet, nobody cares a fig anyway, because the point is infinitely far away. Here at the Meeting, opposites meet, but not in infinity–in the present. Monday, August 23rd: opposites meet. Francesca Mambro and Nadia Mantovani are on the stage, a right-wing ex-terrorist and a left-wing ex-terrorist, according to the flyer. They offer themselves for what they are, modestly grateful because life has given them a chance to change life. The public is touched and moved. Outside, where Euclidean geometry prevails, the President of the “Victims of Bologna” Association speaks about a “shameful operation.” Thursday, August 26th: opposites meet. Samsom Lukare Kwaje, spokesman for the Movement for the Liberation of Sudan, meets the representative of the Sudanese government. They test the waters and see that it is possible to make progress toward the solution of what the United Nations has declared “the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet.” Silvan Shalom and Nebeel Shaat, the Israeli and Palestinian Foreign Ministers, are at the table. For the first time, they try a location that is not institutional. Behind them are thousands of murder victims, bodies on the streets, and before them they have the destiny of their peoples. God does not want more murder victims, more bodies on the streets. They talk to each other. One concedes a bit, the other a bit less, but what does it matter? How much infinite, tenacious patience did it take to build these occasions? What made them possible? Why is it worthwhile not to give in to the Euclidean geometry that demands that every human vicissitude be closed up on every side to be perfect? Friday, August 27th: opposites meet. Even in lesser matters. Anyone who knows the President of the Foundation for Subsidiarity, Giorgio Vittadini, can imagine how much he would love to give a piece of his mind to the Secretary of the Cgil (one of the principal Italian labor unions, historically Communist), Epifani, for all the burdensome obstacles they’ve set in the way of progress toward freedom in this country. But Epifani arrives at the Meeting and confesses that he is so struck that he would like to offer collaboration and the will to dialogue: “I would like to dialogue with CL and the Companionship of Works about the idea of a new centrality of a public realm that is not Statist, but the promoter of development that can be born from the grassroots…” and Vittadini throws out the window those bitter satisfactions that reason would claim when it knows it is right. During the meeting, he explains briefly, interjects, and clarifies, but all to serve a possible opening that, simply because it is offered, should be taken fully. Isn’t this an extraordinary Meeting? Tuesday, August 24th: opposites meet. Paola Bignardi, the President of Catholic Action, is at the Meeting. She proposes dialogue, and offers her own invitation, inviting us to their pilgrimage to Loreto. Is it too much to talk of opposites? Is it too indelicate, or not ecclesiastical enough? But no insider to ecclesiastical vicissitudes, if only through simple involvement in parish life, would have foreseen, even in his wildest imagination, such a simple meeting, imposing in its evidence. One can only reflect and wait in expectation. What does it mean? What kind of sign is this? What will it mean for the future? But now it’s time to drop the metaphor before it gets tiresome. After all, at the Meeting there aren’t only opposites, but encounters, and that’s that. Encounters just at their beginning, the form of which is barely perceptible, or already exploded or that want to continue, to consolidate, because there in the last week of August in Rimini is something that’s hard to define, but that… “I loved you before I knew you…” Here is Massimo Caprara, 82 years old, the secretary of Togliatti at the apex of the Italian Communist Party until the crisis and the break-off, prey to a search that he didn’t even know how to name until “I loved you before I knew you…” and it was as if we had always known each other. Or here is François Michelin, the grand, inaccessible founder of one of the few businesses on a truly world-wide scale, the great and solitary Catholic flower of a France that doesn’t even know what Catholic means any more, who came to the Meeting last year at the age of 77, and returned this year, simple and tranquil as if he were in his own home. Or Paola Pitagora, the icon of the left-wing who played the role of Mary, the “passionary” who is a bit tired of being always and only the passionary–“new things are needed, a new birth, faith is needed,” because faith “is a hand that helps give birth.” Or Magdi Allam, the Vice-Director of the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, so lucid in analyzing terrorism and courageous in denouncing connivance, who follows the guides among the stands, amazed. He, so capable of analysis, can’t grasp how all this can be created through a friendship. He asks, asks, asks, because he wants to understand everything, wants to understand more, as if, recount the girls who accompanied him in the stands, he felt the need of the something he had glimpsed. And then there are the encounters, and that’s that. Like the one to which all the people of the Meeting rushed, Julián Carrón’s presentation of Fr Luigi Giussani’s new “Almost Tischreden,” A Presence that Changes. At his side is the Brazilian poet, Bruno Tolentino, who tells about the first time he met Fr Giussani, on the occasion of the latter’s first trip to Brazil: On the plane there is a fellow and his wife who begins to get upset. It is Jean Paul Sartre, and he yells, “It’s about time we got some air on this plane.” He makes such a fuss and bother that they make that little priest move to a different seat because he was depriving that fellow and his wife of air. Tolentino also recalled that when they disembarked, photographers and journalists thronged around Sartre, singing his praises. To the side, alone, ignored by everyone, was the young priest. Tolentino comments, “He, Sartre, whose thought is dead and buried with him, and thanks be to God isn’t even remembered any more, was welcomed like a king. The other, Fr Giussani, who came to Brazil to bring so much good, which continues to spread to this day, was in a corner, abandoned.” Abandoned, but always present, so much so that, a few days before the Meeting, Tolentino went to see him, and Fr Giussani said to him, “Bruno, do you remember that time on the plane with Sartre, when we met, twenty years ago?” Eh, dear Giuss, it wasn’t twenty years ago, but forty, and the work of that beginning continues to this day. A presence that changes. That infinite, tenacious patience Now it’s evident that Kerouac and his road have nothing to do with all this, nothing in the least. This infinite, tenacious patience that makes things be is possible only because a beginning and a goal are clearly present. The tiniest hairsbreadth more of good is infinitely more than the tiniest hairsbreadth less of good. But this would carry us too far away, to that mysterious reason present in history, known well by many of those who love the Meeting. And yet, if one were capable, one should speak about this force, this factor that joins human vicissitudes and makes thinkable what humanly appears unthinkable, or incomprehensible, or senseless. Like the announcement of CdO (Companionship of Works, a cooperative of businesses) President, Raffaello Vignali, that within a year, a CdO center will open in Jerusalem, an international headquarters composed of Jews and Palestinian Christians together. What possible chance could a CdO office have of promoting economic and civil progress where the alphabet is that of bombs and terrorist attacks? And yet, even now, one can intuit how precious that little creature will be, held together by the relationship between an Ibrahim and a Joshua, a Mohamed and a Yussuf. People, adventures, and human vicissitudes with highs and lows, stops, leaps and bounds, and re-starts. It will be a creature to care for, to pray for, to warm in the palm of our hands and with the breath of our passionate interest, so that it can continue to exist, a guardian of hope. If you need to give it a name, call it “guardian of hope.” Let’s admit it: in the midst of these tragic international events, the oft-repeated intention of the Holy See, to follow the main road of safeguarding the Christian communities, has always smacked of reductionism in the newspapers. How can you think of dealing with the tragic complexity of modernity, taking as your cardinal element the life of the meager, when not forgotten, Christian communities? Isn’t there an egotistical vein to this, along the lines of ‘first of all, take care of your own’? This Christian-Jewish Arab-Palestinean CdO sets things right, and helps us understand better when Fr Giussani repeats that “the Church is first of all a life.” At least, it’s happened this way for me. In the Meeting and outside the Meeting And then there’s the Meeting that is in the meeting and outside the Meeting. It is the Meeting of the newspapers, the television stations, the Meeting of the mass media. And here, as well, this year’s was an extraordinary Meeting. The newspapers and television stations reported the things that happened–the meetings, the topics, the persons, the events, and the economic, cultural, and political implications. The newspapers were (almost) devoid of the political line-up games. CL-CdO on the right, in the center, or on the left, or all over the place, in order to be everywhere as needed. No longer do the reporters rush to the meeting in search of that exotic animal, the Christian, in its infinite gradations, that sacrifices its vacation and dedicates itself to prayer, when, all around him, light-hearted youths go crazy in the fun-house beach and disco world of Rimini. Giancarlo Cesana, at the meeting on the 25 years of the Meeting, finally had a chance to revert the question. “The Meeting? It’s a normal world, a normal reality made up of normal people, who dress and act like everyone else, but when they’re here, they’re transfixed by something for which they do extraordinary things, that ordinarily they wouldn’t do.” Okay, so then what is this factor, so evident and concrete that it generates behaviors that are difficult to locate in the normality of everyday life? This question is important to ask and to answer. Many will keep in their mind’s eye the evening when hundreds of young people gathered to recite the Rosary for their young friend, a good student, a soccer lover, who so dearly wanted to live, really live, and who left, entrusting himself to He who could truly respond to his desire for life. There’s more, much more There’s the impression that the directors, or organizers, or heads, or whatever you want to call them, just let such a Meeting flow in front of them. That they just let it happen, first of all, much more than produce it, or lock it into their organizational network. On the other hand, how could they do otherwise? There’s more, much more than what their personal freedom could be able to put into action. Certainly, they spent days in vigilance, ready to handle any possibility of disservice, any off-key word, any personal and group weakness in terms of the goal. Maybe they were so weary or so tense that sometimes they gave in to irritability. But where do they come from, these meetings on Ugandan hospitals, on Christians in Iraq, on public health themes? How did those six people get here from Kazakhstan? How did that leader of the favelas, son of Liberation Theology, arrive here? How is it possible to discuss human capital with the most important exponents of Italian and international banking and enterprise, nourished and subjugated by the metaphysical omnipotence of economic law? Where do the meetings with politicians, scientists, and diplomats come from? What produces the exhibits on astronomy, physics, painting, Cézanne’s art, sacred art, or the liturgy, the concept of time, or innovation? And the hundreds of young volunteers who leave traces of themselves strewn all over every room of the house, how is it that here they clean the roads, the auditoriums, and the bathrooms? And the hundreds of the no-longer-so-young volunteers–how is it that, having spent the year picking up the far-flung traces, they now marshal their resources and dedicate themselves to the pizzas, the cash registers, the kitchens, and wherever else they’re needed? And the press releases, offered so punctually every morning at six thirty by girls who love to get up at high noon? And that wonderful little newspaper, Meeting Daily, so useful and well done? How many meetings in Italy and in every part of the world, by now, have the bishops, entrepreneurs, ministers, doctors, poets, journalists, athletes, theologians, actors, and scientists had, before coming here to the Meeting, to tell about themselves and to listen? What brings together two Student Youth (GS) members from the beginning of the Movement, Fr Pigi Bernareggi, a priest in Brazil, and His Eminence the Patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Angelo Scola, each to tell, according to his own history, style, and temperament, about the great reason that changed their lives? There’s more, much more than a group of directors. Behind all this is a people. And the people is always more than our capacity for imagination. The last week of August On August 22nd, the Pope’s greeting opened the Meeting. And on August 28th, Fr Giussani’s farewell closed it. Outside, in the world of Euclidean geometry, two parallels run and maybe will intersect in infinity. Here, thanks be to God, two riverbanks have been given, that meet us and that meet each other, thanks to us as well. The Pope’s greeting after the recitation of the Angelus, via satellite from the Castel Gandolfo residence, August 22, 2004. I now address my greeting to all the participants in the 25th Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples, which is taking place at Rimini in these days. In particular, I extend a cordial thought to Msgr Luigi Giussani, founder and leader of the Communion and Liberation Movement, which promotes the Meeting. This year's theme, “Our progress does not consist in presuming we have arrived, but in constantly striving for our goal,” is a pleasing synthesis between the Christian spirit and a typical value of modern culture, precisely, “progress.” Christianity, despite human limitations and errors, constitutes the most important factor of true progress because Christ is the inexhaustible principle for the renewal of humankind and of the world. May all believers, therefore, and all who genuinely seek the truth, find in Christ a cause for commitment and hope. This is my wish, which I accompany with a special Blessing. John Paul II August 28, 2004 Final press release The Meeting is ending in a moment in which homicidal hate has been tragically renewed. In addition, the situation, not just in Italy, is ever more confusing and worrisome. Precisely because of this awareness, for 25 years from its birth, the Meeting has wanted to be what it is: a gesture of real friendship, even if at times it is arduous and apparently impossible, as was the meeting of the Israeli and Palestinian Foreign Ministers. But, as John Paul II said in his words to the Meeting, after the Angelus on Sunday, August 22nd, “Christ is the inexhaustible principle of renewal of humankind and of the world.” This is the goal. It is true that it is inexhaustible, thus beyond our strength; but, it can be participated in, precisely as friendship. There is war in the world, and only the experience of friendship is the promise of a greater reconciliation. The thousands of people who have lived the Meeting know it, and their experience is hope for all. It is also a responsibility, called freedom. Freedom Is the Greatest Good that the Heavens Have Given Men is the title for the 26th Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples, August 21-27, 2005.