THE MEETING, A MATTER OF PERMANENT EDUCATION

The importance of the Meeting experience for Letizia Paoli Bardazzi, President of the Italian Cultural Centres Association (AIC) and member of the Meeting's Editorial Board.

 Letizia Paoli Bardazzi, President of the Italian Cultural Centres Association (AIC), met the Meeting in 1982 with GS from Prato, while camping in Rimini, and from that first encounter the Meeting became a matter of permanent education for her and her family. In 2004, during the twenty-fifth edition of the Meeting, Letizia and her family were in the United States of America, and on that occasion the American Cultural Centres were born on the idea that "culture is the overflow of a life lived”. From America Letizia Paoli Bardazzi, thanks also to the Fondazione della Sussidiarietà, began working to identify American cultural personalities who were then invited to speak at the Meeting. When she returned to Italy in 2009, she became part of the Meeting's editorial staff. "To experience the Meeting," says Letizia Paoli Bardazzi, "is to experience the faith that counteracts life and sheds light on what happens”. In 2011 she became president of the Italian Cultural Centres Association. For her, exercising this purpose, which is a service, means "participating in a life that never runs out and that is nourished by the living source of the encounter with Christ in the fascinating way of Fr Giussani's charism."

For her, it is very important what the cultural centres do during the year by re-proposing the Meeting's travelling exhibitions; this is one of the most significant and fascinating ways in which the Meeting's proposal comes to life through one of its most beautiful expressions.

For Letizia Paoli Bardazzi "the Meeting is a reality open to the world, it offers a Christian culture always with new ways and languages to be discovered. In that "Work for this, pray for this, suffer for this" of St John Paul II lies the challenge of today. It is the invitation to never tire in bringing to the world what we have encountered'. It is an embrace that is experienced at the Meeting and she testifies to it with her passion for everything that happens and with her yearning for this embrace to spread throughout the world. "At the Meeting," the AIC president then observes, "we are all like the medieval builders of cathedrals, who lived in hovels but gave their contribution to the building of great and wonderful things." This encapsulates the meaning of all that the volunteers do, they too build a great thing through the small thing they do, and indicates the value of the many who every day make their donation to Donaora and in this way give their contribution so that the Meeting continues to be there and to offer hope to the whole world.  In this way the value of donations for the Meeting is reaffirmed, to donate is to give something of oneself so that something great can be seen alive!

There is a final and decisively important observation that our interlocutor makes, it is that "from what happens at the Meeting a work begins, the beauty and truth of these days in Rimini is all to be rediscovered during the year through a work that recaptures it."