Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, November 25, 2022
Study afternoon on The Religious Sense of Father Luigi Giussani on the occasion of the centenary of his birth.
Speakers: René Roux (University of Lugano), Gianfranco Dalmasso (University of Bergamo), Leonardo Lugaresi (Patres Association), Ezio Prato (Theological Faculty of Northern Italy), Marco Vanzini (Pontifical University of the Holy Cross).
Discussant: Ilaria Vigorelli (Pontifical University of the Holy Cross), Paolo Prosperi (Pontifical University of the Holy Cross).
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The Relational Ontology Research (ROR) group dedicated a day to the figure of Father Giussani and, in particular, to his book The Religious Sense, considering it a text rich in insights for the society in which we find ourselves immersed, post-modern and post-Christian. The religious sense is the highest expression of reason, it is where man knows the pinnacle of his stature: in each person’s life there is a transcendent question to which an answer of the same nature corresponds.
The book is an invitation to stay in the joy and depth of Christianity, but also to know how to communicate it to the outside world: indeed, Fr. Giussani had the particular gift of being able to show how the deepest expectations of the human heart are fulfilled in Jesus Christ.
At the basis of Christianity there is an encounter: God speaks to men as friends. Fr Giussani invites us to reconsider the wonder that today’s encounter with reality still arouses in us. Even though immersed in a virtual society, and with that fully controllable, we are called to recognise an otherness that amazes us, precisely because it does not belong to us completely and, with that, to open ourselves to the infinite.
The experience of encounter, today, could also function as a key to a renewed dialogue between Christianity and religions: how is it that we have come to think that all religions are equal? We have posed the question of religions only as salvation and not as truth; we have a way of thinking of religion only from the interiority of man. What new perspectives should we pursue? Only a new openness to the encounter with the other can unveil it.
