Rimini Meeting invites Christians to reflect on what is essential in life

By Benedetta Capelli and Luca Collodi - Rimini

Pope Francis' words, which arrived on Tuesday in a message addressed to the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples in Rimini, will be the guiding light of the 45th edition of the Communion and Liberation annual gathering, running from 20-25 August. 

Its theme, “If we are not after the essential, what are we after?” is drawn from a phrase of the famous American author Cormac McCarthy.

In his message, Pope Francis urged us not to be discouraged in the face of "the challenge of a peace that seems impossible" but to work to generate a new world in the name of fraternity.

“A Presence for Peace” was the title of the opening conference on Tuesday, in which the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa spoke after an introduction by the President of the Rimini Meeting Foundation, Bernhard Scholz.

The event, available in streaming on the website of Vatican News, will be the compass of the week-long meetings and debates, in which participants will discuss questions about humanity's destiny and sense of pain, which contemporary culture tends to remove, while keeping a perspective of hope.

Holy Land and social inequalities

Also notable on the first day was the testimony of Hussam Abu Sini, head of the Communion and Liberation movement in the Holy Land and the show "The Challenge of Jerusalem" by director Otello Cenci, in which the playwright Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt seeks seeds of peace in the streets of the Holy City.

The economist Branko Milanovic and the former president of the European Commission, Josè Manuel Barroso, are set to discuss the growing inequalities produced by the economic systems in the various countries after the Covid pandemic.

The programme includes a focus on mental illness in light of the experience of Italian psychiatrist and mental health reformer Franco Basaglia, and a dialogue between public institutions and private businesses on water.

An intense programme

The Meeting programme includes a total of 140 conferences with around 450 Italian and international speakers, 100 of whom come from abroad. 200 hours of live streaming will be broadcast in 7 languages.

This year also sees the contribution of 3,000 volunteers, 60 percent of whom are under the age of 30. Among them are also young people from Brazil and Armenia, with a large representation from Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal.

There will be 16 exhibitions, including the life and works of Alcide de Gasperi, the famous Italian statesman and founder of the Christian Democratic Party after the fall of the Fascist regime in Italy and the end of World War II.

Another exhibition features the 1914 Christmas truce during the First World War. There is also an exhibition presenting the construction of the Basilicas of Mount Tabor and Gethsemane in the Holy Land. Some of the exhibitions will also be held in itinerant form and will be presented in various Italian cities starting from September

Scholz: 'We must not resign ourselves to the indifference of our world'

“This meeting," stated Mr Scholz in an interview conducted by the Rimini Meeting's Press Office, "takes place in a dramatic historical moment, with great technological and economic changes, unpredictable uncertainties, and many conflicts, including dramatic and tragic global ones. We want to discover together what allows us to be protagonists even in these difficult times—not to succumb, and not to take refuge in indifference and resignation.”

According to the President of the Rimini Meeting Foundation, the overarching aim of the event is to "discover how much good there is in a world that, in many ways, does not seem to leave much space for hope, for the future."

The theme chosen for the Meeting this year is, therefore, “an invitation to get out of a certain superficiality, and to say that there is something important and significant, which is within everyone's reach that allows us to face even these great changes that we are experiencing in the economy, in schools, in factories, and in politics head-on, without succumbing.”