Friday, August 22nd, 11AM. Three African girls, two Indian girls, a Filipino guy and an English girl, accompanied by an Italian priest, crossed through the entrance of the Meeting in Rimini, the great summer festival organized by Communion and Liberation. It could seem like the beginning of a joke, and yet it is what happened some weeks ago. In fact, this year, for the first time, we organized a trip to the Meeting, for the young people of our English parish in Eastleigh, a town on the northern outskirts of Southampton.
In the months leading up to our departure, I had tried to give the young people a sense of what they were going to find; but I believe that none of them had yet truly realized the greatness and the beauty of that place, built by the people of CL. The impact with the hundreds of thousands of people in the pavilion, the meetings, the exhibits, the volunteers, the new friendships with university students (and the Italian food) was magnificent. From the time I met them, I had never seen these young people so happy and sincerely moved. Their joy was palpable: from the greatest things, like attending a Mass with thousands of persons, to the most simple things, like seeing on the map of the world at the stand of the Fraternity of St. Charles their little town of Eastleigh. For this reason, once we returned to England, I asked them to write me a few lines about what they lived at the Meeting.
None of them had yet truly realized the greatness and the beauty of that place
Thinking of their stories, some complicated and full of pain, the words that they left me assumed an even greater meaning. Amanda wrote to me: “The trip to Italy was incredible, beautiful and full of discoveries. The most important thing was that I fell in love with the Meeting of Rimini, in particular with the exhibits. My favorites were those on St. Carlo Acutis and St. Francis. A marvelous quote from the exhibit on St. Francis was: Finding something that can make me happy in life/ what can make life beautiful? This made me learn to love the beauty of small things, like the beautiful evening of singing with the university students from Milan.” These, instead, are the considerations of Paige: “Visiting Italy was an amazing experience. Being able to go to the Meeting of Rimini is something that I’ll never forget: learning from so many different experiences, saints and perspectives, was incredible. What I liked the best was understanding that all of us have a place. Even the most ordinary person, even those who commit errors, can do extraordinary things and inspire many other people. It was also very beautiful to make new friends and create this bond with them. In every place that we visited, we met and learned something from someone.”
Probably, one of the most beautiful things was something that Alicia wrote to me: “A fundamental moment was singing of the steps of the Meeting of Rimini with the university students. I thought that it was beautiful that all of them spontaneously got together to sing and to dance. One song made me cry: I think the title was “Gente di Mare” (People of the Sea). Simply because it was so beautiful that everyone was singing together while others were showing us the words. It seemed like that was really the true meaning of life.”
The title of the Meeting was: In deserted places, we will build with new bricks. In the aridity of proposals that reigns in English society, these young people experienced, in the days in Rimini, the beauty that comes from the encounter with Christ. A beauty so great that it aroused in them the desire to take part through the group, Awake My Soul, that we will begin this year in the parish. It was Simon who hit the nail on the head about it all, when he told me: “Fr. Matteo, next year, we need to go back and be volunteers!”.
