'There is a God':
How the Church in Italy
is preparing for Christmas
As announced last summer, the Italian bishops' Cultural Project under Cardinal Ruini has organized
an international conference on God among philosophers, scientists,
and artists, in a culture denies Him.
Even as the Pope points out that God reveals himself to the 'little ones' not to the intellectuals.
ROME, December 7, 2009 – Halfway through the season of Advent, an international event is being held in Rome that has at its center that God "who has come, who is coming, and who is to come."
The event is organized by the Italian bishops' conference, more precisely by the committee for the cultural project headed by Cardinal Camillo Ruini.
The title is: "God today: With him or without him, that changes everything." And it is closely connected to what Benedict XVI, in the memorable letter to bishops on March 10, 2009, indicated as "the overriding priority: to make God present in this world and to show men and women the way to God."
In concrete terms, from December 10 to 12 a vast audience will hear from bishops and philosophers, theologians and scientists, artists and musicians, poets and scholars, men and women of different perspectives and faiths, close to God or far away.
But all of them will be there to talk about Him, the God of the Bible, the Trinitarian God, the Christian God, the one who has the human face of Jesus. That God who has been exiled from postmodern culture and rejected by science, and yet is ever more present in the reality experienced by so many men and women of this time.
Poster for Day 1 of the conference: Cardinal Bagnasco and Rome Mayor Alemanno give welcome remarks; Andrea Riccardi presides; and Cardinal Ruini and Robert Spaemann will be among the first speakers. The theme on Day 1 is "The God of faith and the God of philosophy'.*
Some of the speakers are famous: Cardinal Ruini, naturally, the originator of the event; Robert Spaemann, the German philosopher who has dedicated his most penetrating essays to the question of God; and also Roger Scruton, Emanuele Severino, Rémi Brague, Aldo Schiavone, Robert Schneider, Antonio Paolucci, Denis Alexander, Giuliano Ferrara, Martin Nowak, Giorgio Israel, Peter van Inwagen, and many more.
They will talk about God under different aspects. About "God in music" and about "God and violence," about "Creation and evolution" and about "God in cinema and television," about "God and the sciences" and about "God in beauty."
It will also be a dialogue without borders in the geographical sense.
"The question of God is not exclusive to the West," Cardinal Ruini said in presenting the event to the media on Friday, December 4, in the Palazzo del Campidoglio. "Scientific language is increasingly more universal, and therefore also universalizes its own negation of God. For this reason, the West has a debt to pay to the whole world: not to remove, but to clarify for itself the reasons for faith in God. Only in this way will it be capable of dialoguing with different cultures, principally those of Asia, instead of closing in on itself."
The gamble of the event about "God today," in short, is to revive a positive encounter between the faith and culture of today, in a sort of modern Areopagus, re-creating the adventure that Raphael depicted five hundred years ago in the marvelous fresco "The School of Athens".
The master philosophers assembled set off, each in his way and by sometimes tortuous paths, towards what they see on the wall in front of them: the mystery of the sacred host, the earthly and heavenly Church, the magnificence of God.
For those who read Italian, the program of the event, the profiles of the speakers, and then little by little the recap and texts of the presentations are available on the web page dedicated to it:
www.progettoculturale.it/questionedio
Benedict XVI, naturally, has been informed about this event organized by the Italian Church and taking place a few steps away from the Vatican buildings. He will not speak there. But the harmony between the event and the magisterium of this Pope is so strong that it emerges of its own accord, even in the most unexpected ways and moments.
One striking example of this harmony is the homily that Benedict XVI gave off the cuff on Tuesday, December 1, early in the morning during the Mass he celebrated with the members of the international theological commission, in the Pauline Chapel.
Papa Ratzinger began his homily by commenting on the Gospel of the day, precisely that passage in which Jesus gives praise to his heavenly Father, "for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike."
That mystery of God, ignored and rejected by the dominant culture but alive in the hearts and minds of the "little ones" – as preached by Pope Benedict in this fascinating homily – is the same one that the event in Rome will bring to light in the next few days.
[Magister then posts a translation of the homily to the theologians, translated and posted on this thread on Thursday, Dec. 3]
*P.S.
I could not help noticing that the theme for Day 1 of the conference is virtually identical to Prof. Joseph Ratzinger's inaugural lecture as Professor of Theology at Bonn University in 1959. It was published in Italy in January 2007 as 'an important contribution to natural theology':
In looking it up, I also came across a review of it by Andrea Tornielli at the time, which deserves translation.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 07/12/2009 22:04]