Edinburgh 1910 (25.03.2010) - ISTITUTO DI STUDI ECUMENICI SAN BERNARDINO

The conference organized last March 25th in Venice by the Saint Bernadine Institute of Ecumenical Studies (ISE) was a scientific convention as well as an opportunity for contact among the people of dialogue. This in a time which offers little consolation for those of us who live by the conviction that a fraternal understanding among Churches could help them make their announcement of the Gospel more transparent. The Institute hosting this conference confirms its vocation as a place of research and fraternal exchange.

On the whole, the Venetian appointment - well attended in spite of being held on a working day - represented a constructive opportunity to sum up the position of Ecumenism, an extraordinary as well as unexpected gift of God in the Twentieth Century which is navigating a delicate stage in Italy and in Europe. The title, The future of a one hundred year long walk. Edinburgh 1910: memory, identity and project, in fact explains the necessity to hoist the heart above and beyond all obstacles, meanwhile looking with confidence towards a tomorrow deeply rooted in the past. A yearning immediately evoked by the curators, Marco Dal Corso from ISE and Brunetto Salvarani from the Faculty of Theology of Emilia-Romagna, focused on three aspects: tackling the responsibility of memory; transforming divisions into differences; developing a common project of applying Evangelical hermeneutics to alterity.

In remembrance of the Edinburgh meeting, a traditional starting point of the Ecumenical walk, we locate the inextricable interlacing of dialogue and mission, as immediately pointed out in the historical presentation entrusted to Riccardo Burigana, lecturer at ISE, who underlined the Ecumenical effects of that assembly, from the rediscovery of the Bible to the relativization of the traumatic events of XVI century, up to the valorization of the perfect Ecumenical gymnasium represented by student organizations.

On this basis, three overviews followed, explaining the inter-disciplinary intent of the initiative: the sociological outlook was entrausted to Enzo Pace from Padua University; the journalistic to Luca Negro, director of the newspaper Riforma, and the ecclesiological to Serena Noceti, a theologian from the Faculty of Theology of Central Italy in Florence. The first speaker reflected upon what it means today to believe in relative (not relativism) and in plural, traits of the current religiosity. The second speaker outlined the hypothesis of working new paradigms for Ecumenism, beginning with Ecumenism of reciprocal witnessing and enhancing the experience of the Charta Oecumenica whose tenth birthday will fall next year. Finally Serena Noceti offered a synthetic account of current ecclesiology answering the crucial question what is a church and taking into consideration the present moment of Ecumenism not from the aspect of crisis, rather in full re-orienteering means, which has much to gain in a righteous relation with the theology of mission.

The meeting continued in the afternoon with a round table of three speakers, being the representatives of the three major Churches in our country: Carmelo Dotolo, a missiologist from the Pontifical Urbaniana University; Evangelos Yfantidis the archimandrite of the Sacred Orthodox Archdioceses of Italy and Malta; and Paolo Naso, a politologist from La Sapienza University in Rome. Dotolo discussed the necessity to take the new paradigm, between pluralism and interculturality, seriously in the frame of an overcrowding of new areopaguses and multiple agencies of such kind. Yfantidis highlighted the role of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople as leader of the Ecumenical walk since the beginning. Naso, instead, reflected on the three major fractures from Edinburgh until today, the changed geopolitical context, a different quality of fundamentalisms and a different geography of religions.

The close of the meeting was entrusted to Piero Coda, president of the Italian Theological Association and dean of Sophia University Institute of Loppiano (Florence), who presented the paper The church which will come, inviting the audience to read the prophecy of the Spirit already present in our history, beginning with the most prophetic document in the Catholic teaching for many years, which is Pope Paul VI's Ecclesiam Suam, where the reality of dialogue was already emerging in the attempt to describe the change of paradigm, calling the Church to act it in order to adequately respond to the challenge of the signs of time. Coda admitted this will be a difficult walk to be lived with the necessary patience and parresias! Especially because the change is really great, therefore we will be able to speak of responsible mission only in the light of a church becoming synod, walk together with others, and enhancing its lay side, particularly in the daily experience of dialogue.

I conclude with words from Ecclesiam Suam: 'We rejoice and find great consolation in the fact that this dialogue, both inside and outside the Church, has already begun. The Church today is more alive than ever before. But when we weigh the matter more closely we see that there is still a great way to go. In fact the work which is beginning today will never come to an end. This is a law of our earthly, time-bound pilgrimage' (n. 121).