By P. Raymond J. de Souza
Pope Leo XIV travels today to Rimini for the annual cultural festival organized by Communion and Liberation (CL). Few use its formal name, the “Meeting of Friendship Among Peoples.” It is simply “Rimini.” It may be the only thing many know about that Italian coastal city, which gathers major figures from religion, the arts, and even Italian politics for its summer gathering. Some 80,000 participants attend, and another three-quarters of a million follow it online.
Communion and Liberation launched the Rimini Meeting in 1980, and already in 1982 it was visited by St. John Paul the Great. Pope Leo will be the second pope to visit it, and what he says about culture, art, and beauty will be watched closely. Just this week, in his general audience, the Holy Father spoke about music and the worship of God.
The theme of Rimini this year is taken from the final verse of Dante’s Paradiso: “The Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”
It is perfect for Rimini, where devout Catholics speak in a language they hope will engage even non-believers. Thus, the “love” of this year’s theme is explained as “the dynamic principle of the cosmos, the energy that holds everything together and drives it toward its fulfillment.”
That sounds a bit like “the Force” from Star Wars, but that is the style of CL. It is clearly designed to offer an opening to the Holy Father and his recent teachings on artificial intelligence.
“We live fragmented within digital bubbles that isolate us rather than connect us,” CL’s introduction continues. “In a world where algorithms decide what we see and whom we meet, rediscovering love as a force that moves and transforms becomes a radical challenge. It means recognizing that reality is not a static chaos, but carries within itself a direction, a dynamism that pushes us beyond ourselves.”
That there is a dynamism that leads us beyond ourselves was articulated in Rimini in two memorable addresses not given by a pope, but by a future one: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in 1990 and 2002. How does that dynamism of love manifest itself? In beauty and holiness, which is what Ratzinger said the Church offers the world as its ultimate witness.
Ratzinger was close to the CL movement and to its founder, Msgr. Luigi Giussani, so much so that he preached at the funeral Mass of Giussani just months before his own election as pope in 2005:
Father Giussani grew up in a home —as he himself said— poor in bread, but rich in music… And so, from the beginning, he was touched, even wounded, by the desire for beauty; he was not content with just any beauty, a banal beauty: he sought Beauty itself, infinite Beauty; thus he found Christ, in Christ true beauty, the way of life, true joy.
Ratzinger thus applied to Giussani a long-held conviction of his own, more famously articulated at Rimini in 2002:
I have often stated my conviction that the true apology of the Christian faith, the most convincing demonstration of its truth against any denial, are on the one hand the saints and on the other the beauty that faith has generated.
Later in the same address, Ratzinger recalled that “an unforgettable experience for me was the concert of Bach conducted by Leonard Bernstein in Munich after the premature death of Karl Richter.”
“I was seated next to the Evangelical Bishop Hanselmann,” he said. “When the final note faded triumphantly, we looked at each other spontaneously and, with the same spontaneity, said: ‘Whoever has heard this knows that the faith is true.’”
Ratzinger, too, grew up rich in music; he described his native village as belonging to the “Mozartian region of Bavaria.”
In 1990 he drew on an artistic image, one of the most famous by the most celebrated artist in history.
“With his artist’s vision, Michelangelo saw in the stone before him the image hidden beneath, waiting to be freed and brought to light,” Ratzinger said. “The task of the artist, in his view, was simply to remove what still covered that image. Michelangelo thought of authentic artistic activity as a bringing to light, a freeing, not a ‘making.’”
The artist liberates, or reveals, a beauty that is already there. Revelation is, to a great extent, the Christian understanding of reality. Turning from the artist, Ratzinger then turned to one of his favorite saints.
“The same idea applied to anthropology was already evident in St. Bonaventure, who explained the journey by which man becomes authentically himself using the image of the sculptor,” Ratzinger explained. “So it is for man: in order for the image of God to shine in him, he must above all, and first of all, accept that purification by which the sculptor, that is God, frees him from all the rubble that obscures the authentic aspect of his being, that makes him appear as nothing more than a rough block of stone, when in reality the divine image dwells within him.”
The artist reveals the figure in the marble. The divine Artist reveals the holiness that lies within the dust of the earth. The dynamism of revelation is love: the artist’s love for his subject, God’s love for man.
The Divine Comedy reveals what it means that it is love that moves the sun and the other stars. For CL, Rimini is a collective profession that beauty is a principal means of that revelation. That resonates, of course, with Pope Leo, son of St. Augustine, who came late to loving beauty, “so ancient and so new.” There is no doubt that Leo will have read Ratzinger at Rimini before his visit and will offer his own reading of the dynamic force of Love in a digital age.
About the author
Fr. Raymond J. de Souza is a Canadian priest, Catholic commentator, and Senior Fellow of Cardus.