Saturday, August 24, the Rimini Meeting. The presentation of Aleksej Navalny's book was about to begin at the BookCorner of the Italian Association of Cultural Centres. As always at these events, instructions were given at the start about how to follow the meeting: how to connect to the QR code, how to activate the little radio...

A friendly woman approached who, in perfect Italian with an Eastern accent, asked me for help to connect her device. But I could see that something was not working. The characters on her phone were in Cyrillic, and she quickly explained: “I am Russian, this video is blocked for me.” So I offered my phone to connect to the meeting. Then I saw her sitting in the front row, with a notebook in which she was writing quickly, serious, attentively and focused. It was clear that those brief 20 minutes, almost “hidden” within the immensity of the events scheduled at the Meeting, were of special importance to her.

I was struck by the scene and when she returned to give me my phone I asked her about herself: “I have lived in Italy for years. From here I live the drama of my country. I have known about the Meeting for a long time and I know that many things are recounted about my country here. When I saw the presentation of Navalny’s book in the program, I thought that I could not miss it, because Navalny is my, my....” The woman was moved and could not finish her sentence.

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The whole Meeting, in its incredible enormity, can be worth the emotion of one person, because Christ's gaze is on you, it is personal. This episode allowed me to live Fr. Giussani’s example when he spoke of that missionary who went down to the Amazon River by boat to enter the jungle, walking for days to go and visit “just one person”…! Thank you,

Matteo