EUROPE/ITALY - “Our Meeting shows that Christianity, that is Christ, has an infinite ability to reach the heart of every human person and give value to human questions and aspirations” Mgr Massimo Camisasca told Fides a few days after the 25th edition of the Communion and Liberation Meeting in Rimini.

Thursday, 2 September 2004

Rome (Fides Service) - Mgr Massimo Camisasca, founder of the Priestly Fraternity of the Missionaries of St Charles Borromeo and the author of various works, saw the birth and growth of the Rimini Meeting, which for years has been a major time of encounter and mission for the many Catholics who belong to the church Movement of Communion and Liberation. Fides spoke with the prelate about the Meeting a few days after the 25th edition which had the title “Our progress consists not in presuming we have arrived, but in continual travelling towards our destination”.
Mgr Camisasca, how did the Meeting start?
“The idea of a Meeting came to a group of young members of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation in 1980 who wondered how to communicate what had fascinated them to the hundreds of thousands of tourists who came to Rimini every year. The idea and the undertaking must have seemed insane but the 25 editions of the Meeting show instead that their dream was not unreasonable. The soul of the Meeting was a group of lay people and a priest Rev. Giancalo Ugolini who founded the Association Meeting for Friendship among Peoples and in 1980 for a week, among the stands at Rimini’s Trade Hall, organised the first history making edition of the Meeting. At the time the area appeared to be vast, impossible to fill, whereas now, since the new Trade Hall was built on the outskirts of the town (the Meeting moved there two years ago), those large halls seem small. The theme of the first edition was “Peace and Human Rights” and it had a scenario which has remained more or less the same: a series of meetings with prominent experts in culture, the economy and politics from different parts of the world. Exhibitions and entertainment, spectacles, sports, music and cinema”.
What about the cultural and hence missionary aspect of the Meeting?
“Those young men wished to communicate how Rev. Giussani had opened their life, instilling curiosity, a desire to encounter others and above all to verify that following Christ every person, every work of art, every song, every experience reveals its truth, its being part of one great plan and possibly its ideological pretext, its fragility and its limits. In these 25 years the Meeting has been a wonderful expression of the mission of the laity in the Church. I think that from the quantitative and qualitative point of view it is Europe’s greatest expression of the mission of Christians. A mission, therefore, which is not only proclamation of the truth and which in no way is exclusion of others, on the contrary it is encounter and appreciation in the awareness that living Christianity is not synonymous with intolerance, but rather with opening and encounter”.
What makes the Meeting different to other cultural events held every year all over Europe?
“The Rimini Meeting is somewhat singular in its reality. It was started by young members of a Movement but its purpose is not to speak directly of the life of that Movement. Certainly it does communicate the experience of Communion and Liberation but not in the form of propaganda. The name CL is rarely mentioned, not out of reluctance or to hide something, but because the Meeting is meant to be an encounter of experiences not initials. In this sense not only is it open to everyone but it has shown that it is ready to take on anyone or anything. This in fact is what disorientates the media and those who look at the Meeting with eyes unwilling to follow this strange thing. The Meeting is in effect something strange, it forces those present and even the organisers to re-adjust their views after every meeting. Our meetings show in fact that Christianity, that is Christ, has an infinite ability to reach every human heart and to give value to every human question and aspiration”.
Mission, evangelisation is the daily bread and the nourishment also within the Fraternity of Priests you founded in 1985. For your Fraternity of Missionaries what is the significance of the verb to evangelise?
“I think that the word evangelise holds an important secret. Gospel, Good News. To evangelise means to mirror to others the light which has struck our life. You can only evangelise if you communicate a lived experience. This is why I insist on community life. This is why it is the most important witness of good that we can offer people: unity is possible, unity of the person, unity of the family, unity among friends. It is necessary to show that this unity is possible and when I speak of community life I mean this, visible documentation that people of different temperaments, backgrounds, sensitivity can not only live side by side but be for one another signs of the “Mystery” because Someone has brought them together, the Lord of their life. Father Julien Ries, a historian of religions described the Fraternity of St Charles San Carlo as “the paratroops of faith”. In this sense we feel we are sent of course to traditional lands of mission “ad gentes”, but also to the lands of the old Christian west where Christianity seems to die in the hearts of people and their faith is not strong enough to handle the tragedies of the present day”. (P.L.R.) (Agenzia Fides 2/8/2004 - Righe 57; Parole 857)


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