Fr. Julián Carrón’s Message to the Organizers and Participants at the Rimini Meeting 2012

Dear Friends,
What comfort I felt this morning, in thinking of each of you engaged in the frenetic activity of the Meeting, as I read the Pope’s moving handwritten message! Benedict XVI has made yet another gesture full of tenderness toward us, indicating the key point that we must keep in sight so that we do not lose our bearings during this busy week: we are “made for the infinite.” You have in this the warmth and the light with which to face the week’s activities.
What boundless gratitude, to be able to look at oneself each morning with the awareness that “the greatness and supreme dignity of the human being” consist in the relationship with the infinite, that the thirst that invests “every fiber of my flesh” and that no sin can eliminate finds its answer in the “joyful discovery that we are children of God”! Only with this self-awareness can we live “life as vocation.” And all of the challenges that we will have to face during the course of these days (from the heat in the parking lot or kitchen, to the humble task of cleaning, to the more conspicuous challenges on stage) are given to us precisely in order to increase this self-awareness. “Nothing remains trivial or insignificant in the journey of life and the world,” as the Pope reminded us. On the contrary, “everything, every relationship, every joy, as well as any hardship, finds its ultimate reason in being opportunity of relationship with the Infinite; it is the voice of God who continually calls us and invites us to look up, to discover that clinging to Him is the full realization of our humanity.”
Let’s show ourselves to be friends to one another, sustaining each other in this journey of purification from any “false infinites,” so that we can witness to all those who will meet us during this week what makes “life truly free and full,” that “the key point, then, is not to eliminate dependency, which is constitutive of man, but rather to direct it to Him who alone can make us truly free.”
Grateful for the witness that you give me with your sacrifice in order to proclaim to all the hope that we carry in our fragility, I wish you a happy Meeting.

Yours,
Julián Carrón