Opening of the new Academic Year 2010-2011 (10.11.2011) - ISTITUTO DI STUDI ECUMENICI SAN BERNARDINO

Academic year 2011-2012 opening

(10.11.2011)

On November 10 2011, addressing the abundant audience with a warm welcome, Prof. Roberto Giraldo Dean of the Saint Berrnardine Institute of Ecumenical Studies in Venice opened the Academic Year 2011/2012 and presented the Institute's activities. The overall programs consisted of a study curriculum for a degree in Theology with specialization in Ecumenical Studies; two first level university Master degrees, one in Ecumenical Theology and the second in Interreligious Dialogue; two study days; one international seminar on ecclesiology for teachers and two conferences. He announced that the Institute regained incorporation in the Faculty of Theology at the Antonianum Pontifical University of Rome for the next ten years, signifying that the Institute earned the esteem of the Congregation for Catholic education's. The Dean expressed his pride for the ten License degrees issued last year and for the twelve new enrolments in the specialized course, many of these students are coming from different continents being brought together by their common interest in ecumenism.

The inaugural lecture was presented by noted psychiatrist Prof. Vittorino Andreoli who developed the topic Fragility: hunger for relationship. He explained that Fragility is not weakness, the antithesis of strength, but is something that binds to human existence, the enigma connected to the passage from nothingness to existence and to death. He wed fragility to wisdom: the wise person is one who, while trying to understand the human condition, feels the need of others, not to dominate him, but to receive his support. He put forward as an example Paul the Apostle's relationship with the Lord from which his fragility acquires a sort of strength: fragility is hunger for relationship, he stressed, and this hunger may be proportional to the perception of one's own fragility. A lack of relationship, he added, produces either loneliness or narcissism: the lonely person moves as if he did not exist for the other one, the narcissistic one lacks identity for which he needs the other. Drawing on the wisdom of Paul in his second letter to Timothy, 3,1 to 17, the speaker urged his audience not to lose their sense of fragility, that is the instinct which leads to a bond with another, becoming the social strength to the foundation of solidarity.

Professor Andreoli paused to reflect on the human dimension of Christ on the cross to emphasize His teaching: an indication that the greatness of a person lies in his fragility and that granting forgiveness to the enemy, more than demonstrating that we have understood fragility, changes the type of relationship. He then recalled Saint Francis's enormous fragility, his love for his fellows so much as to share their poverty, at that time understood as social fragility. Then he mentioned the fragility of the sufferer who is not able to accomplish even the simplest tasks. Finally he spoke of the hunger for relationship, of the ties of man with his own kind, with mystery, with God, to underline that fragility is the base of ecumenism which he sees in opposition to the enemy culture, predominant in today's society. He then encouraged us to meditate on the strengths that fragility has for the union of the Churches, which are able to know themselves better through the other; the speaker ended by stating that even if ecumenism seems a sort of utopia, now it is the time to believe in what makes the current time more human.