Andrew Carvell outlines how the annual Rimini Festival of faith and friendship, the largest Catholic cultural event in Europe, manages to attract up to one million Catholics annually.
In mid-August Italy closes down in the heat and everyone who possibly can, escapes for a couple of weeks to the seaside or the mountains. The old town of Rimini, which has 100,000 residents, swells to nearly a million with holiday-makers from all over Italy and further afield, flocking to its ten-mile strip of beach on the Adriatic for ferragosto.
It is here, at Rimini’s vast fiera or Exhibition Centre, that the ‘Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples’ takes place in the last week of August. Starting in 1980, the annual ‘Rimini Meeting’ as it has come to be known by the Italian media, is now the largest Catholic cultural event in Europe and possibly the world, with attendances reaching nearly a million people every year. So what is this ‘Meeting’ that inspires over two thousand volunteers, mostly young workers and students, to give up their summer holidays each year to make it a reality?
In 1954 post-war Italy, a young priest, Fr Luigi Giussani who was teaching theology at the Archdiocesan Seminary of Milan, asked permission from his bishop to leave the seminary so as to work in the secondary schools of the city. Giussani had realized something about his apparently still profoundly ‘Catholic’ society, which was to inspire all his subsequent work as an educator. From speaking with young people, Giussani realized that, although most of them were still practising Catholics (this was 1950s Italy), ‘religion’ had become just an aspect of life, an important one surely, but one that had become separated from study, work, politics, friendships, sport and culture. Faith was about ‘holy’ things while ‘real life’ was about ‘secular’ things. In this situation it was inevitable that the most ‘realistic’ young people would come to see faith as irrelevant to the things of ‘real life’.
For Giussani, this meant that the core meaning of the Faith was being forgotten, and that within a generation the light which faith had cast on the ‘secular’ things of life would also be forgotten. From the very beginning of his work with youth groups, he insisted on the ‘reasonableness’ of the faith, that when we are truly in the grip of the Christian ‘Event’, then everything in life becomes invested with depth, with meaning, with ‘reasons’.
Giussani’s approach was never a moral discourse about what one ought and ought not to do in one’s work, politics, friendships, family. Instead, he insisted on a re-discovery of the fundamental desires of one’s own heart (what he calls ‘the religious sense’) and of the attractiveness of the Christian Event as the truly satisfactory answer to these desires. When one encounters this attraction and follows it (what Giussani calls ‘morality’, letting oneself be moved by what is good) then life becomes too precious a time to be wasted, all the ‘secular’ business of life becomes urgent, becomes a cry for liberation, a shout of gratitude.
Giussani always insists that he never intended to start an organization or a ‘way’ but rather to point modern youth to the Way, which is Christ. In Giussani’s speeches and writings one doesn’t find new theological departures or proposals for new institutions and structures, but rather one finds the great tradition of Christian theology, from Sacred Scripture onwards, presented in a startlingly modern, even post-modern light. This fidelity to tradition, together with Giussani’s relentless insistence that the Christian Event is about all aspects of life, has resulted in a very broad-based Catholic educational movement with a strongly lay or ‘secular’ character (secularity is almost a badge of honour for Giussani’s followers).
The ecclesial movement which grew out of Giussani’s educational method almost accidentally came to be called Communion and Liberation (CL) which was originally a nickname given by the Italian press from the title of a ‘flyer’ circulated by some students. Precisely because what is proposed freely embraces all of life, one doesn’t find a ‘training method’ or ‘plan of life’ or even a ‘membership’ in the movement but rather an almost bewildering array of initiatives which have been begun by those inspired by Giussani to live in their own lives the life of the Church. These initiatives include a group of young men who obtained permission to found a new Benedictine priory near Milan; ‘Compagnia delle Opere’, a co-operative of businesses with non-profit organizations and charities, which has become one of the largest co-ops in Italy. Then there are the ‘Memores Domini’: groups of lay men and women who live the evangelical counsels of poverty, obedience and virginity in community but who go out to work in schools, factories, hospitals, and banks like anyone else. AVSI is an association of voluntary workers which brings professional services to people in marginalized societies in the developing world, and has been recognized officially by the UN as a development agency in its own right. ‘Partito Populare’ was formed for a few years to try to give a voice to voters who had lost faith in the system during Italy’s political scandals. The movement of Communion and Liberation has spread from Italy to 70 countries around the world, including Ireland, where it has about 60 members. One of the events the Irish group organizes is a public ‘Way of the Cross’ in the Phoenix Park on the afternoon of Good Friday each year.
Each year the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples in Rimini attracts some of the best-known names both nationally and internationally in culture, religion and politics. The list of speakers at the meeting over its 25 years reads like a roll call of figures who have engaged in cultural and political dialogue on the world scene. To mention just a few, they include Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Helmut Kohl, Pope John Paul II, Boutros Boutros Ghali, Lech Walesa, Cardinals Lustiger, Martini and Ratzinger, Romano Prodi, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, Pat Cox and Ennio Morricone.
As well as hosting talks and debates between well-known figures, the meeting hosts lively exhibitions and shows of historical, cultural and artistic interest, not to mention showings of films and a series of concerts of different types of music from classical to rock to avant-garde. The Meeting has an almost carnival atmosphere, and a large part of its appeal is that the ‘culture’ of food and drink is also addressed by restaurants and food bars for all tastes and budgets.
Further information:
www.clireland.com
www.clonline.org
www.meetingrimini.org
Article Credits
This article first appeared in Word ( August 2004), a Divine Word Missionary Publication.
