Imagine a combination of the Dublin Horse Show, the Rose of Tralee, the Fianna Fáil Ardfheis and the Galway Races - with God at the centre of it. An implausible combination, certainly, writes John Waters.
But this is a reasonably evocative description of the annual Rimini Meeting, from which I've recently returned. Organised by Communion and Liberation (CL), a relatively small grouping of intensely alive Catholics, the event is at once incongruous and hugely uplifting for someone reared in the dark shadow of the Irish church. Rimini is the Brighton of Italy's Adriatic coast, mostly dedicated to the pursuit of the gods of summer: sun, sand and sea.
But every August for the past 27 years, a different reality has lain alongside the basting bodies on the beaches. CL was founded more than 50 years ago by Fr Luigi Giussani, a man with an exhilarating sense of the breadth and meaning of faith, and the meeting is now the organisation's most visible public engagement. It takes place in a gigantic exhibition centre with more than a dozen spaces. Every year, some 700,000 people, mostly young adults, come from all over the world to this extraordinary festival of faith, commerce, culture, art and science.
Several thousand Italian CL members run the festival on a voluntary basis, many travelling long distances and paying their own way. I attended this year's event as a speaker, on the invitation of the editor of the CL magazine Traces. Speakers are not paid, but travel and accommodation expenses are met by the organisers. The theme of this year's meeting was intriguing if long-winded: "Reason is the need for the infinite and culminates in the longing and the presentiment that this infinite be manifested."
Flagship exhibitions on the Milky Way, the Benedictines and the poet Dante were intertwined with debates about everything from Creationism and Darwinism to dieting - some 200 events over seven days. For someone raised in a version of Catholicism which looks askance at much of reality - especially modern reality - it is at first quite shocking to encounter the incongruous juxtaposition of faith and marketplace. The meeting, however, is strongly rooted in the ideas of Fr Giussani, who had among his admirers both the current pope and his predecessor (Giussani died early last year). Through Giussani's many books and teachings is a call for the integration of faith with reality and reason.
"Separating heaven from earth," he wrote in The Risk of Education, "is a crime." Christianity, he insists, is "God on earth", an event in history rather than an idea. Jesus exists not as story or metaphor but in the realm of fact. Giussani challenges the assumption that faith and reason follow parallel lines, insisting they are one and the same. Faith exalts rationality because it answers the cry of the human heart for truth, beauty, justice and love. Faith and reason are one because the human longing for perfection has but one answer: God - our identity and our destiny. There are no questions, says Giussani, without answers. Faith is the highest form of rationality because happiness is synonymous with eternity. To speak of God is the most rational thing in the world.
Giussani's exhilarating vision centres on the valorisation of personal experience, on the veneration of tradition combined with a wariness towards traditionalism, and on an elevated sense of what freedom means. In his words there is a challenge to both traditional piety and modern secularism. Unless God is relevant to my life and my experience, he tells me, He has no meaning. But without Him, there is no meaning at all. Religion, says Giussani, is not about morals, but about the fact that God is what defines humanity.
Moralism, he states starkly, is idolatry. We require a new approach, combining an awareness of absolute truth with openness towards the shifting nuance of this truth in a changing world. What is the meaning of this? Has there been a mix-up in the subediting department or has Waters gone mad with piety in his middle years? How long before the authorities step in? It is a measure of how far we have departed from reason that these thoughts do not seem to fit here, on this page, which is, after all, reserved for rational discussion about reality, apart from the weekly "Rite and Reason" slot, which is acceptable by virtue of its strong borders. In its organisation and thought processes, our world increasingly resembles a newspaper: each thing in its own box.
We often think of the decline of faith as resulting from the hubris arising from increasing knowledge, but this is just half the story. Faith has been isolated from life by both our growing cleverality and a tendency towards oversimplification which insults the burgeoning intelligence of the young. Fr Giussani offers a way back.
Citing Dante, Kafka, Mozart and Leopardi, he suggests an alternative to the arid conflict between tradition and modernity, a new way of seeing the moment-to-moment integration of abiding truth with the imperative of the new. If Christianity has a future, this is it.