The pursuit of truth has always been the all-important challenge facing man. By his nature, man is led to seek the truth, and in this search he engages all the strength of his reason.

However, above all today, there exists a deep-seated mistrust of the possibility of knowing the truth; the relativism and skepticism that undermine our civilization are a direct result of this. So life, deprived of certainties, becomes opaque, apparently lacking any meaning and ultimately exposed to all possible forms of violence and oppression.

These doubts of our ability to know the truth coincide with intimate doubts about the very existence of the truth; without it, however, man is deprived of any hope that he will be able to find definite answers to the great questions of life that trouble his heart.

In this respect the Holy Father Benedict XVI, in conversation with students at the Lateran University, pointed out: “If the question of the truth and the concrete possibility for every person to be able to reach it is neglected, life ends up being reduced to a plethora of hypotheses, deprived of assurances and points of reference”.

The title of the forthcoming Meeting declares with certainty that “Truth is the destiny for which we have been made”, throwing down a challenge to that “weak thought” that seeks to deny the need for any ultimate meaning for which man works, suffers, loves, and thinks.

Our age is profoundly marked by currents of thought that no longer recognize reality in its objectivity as something placed before man and which man can recognize, claiming instead that it is reason that gives substance to reality.

The only alternative is that the truth is something or someone whom man can encounter, something that happens: an event.