Catholics meet for the New York annual meeting next month: "There is nothing like it"

Washington, DC Newsroom, January 28, 2025/08:00 am

During three days next month, Catholics in the United States and abroad will meet in the heart of New York for a unique cultural conference of its kind dedicated to education, dialogue and friendship.

Organized each year by members of Communion and Liberation, an ecclesiastics movement Founded by the Italian priest, Father Luigi Giussani, the event will take place from February 14 to 16 at the Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 West 18th St., New York City. Several of the presentations will be broadcast live and no registration is required.

“There is nothing like it,” said Holly Peterson, one of the longtime organizers of the New York meeting in CNA in an interview. “Doing something free that is like a kind of fairly high level does not exist.”

Indeed, the broad program of events during the meeting includes group discussions, artistic performances and exhibitions exploring subjects that are generally not engaged during ordinary Catholic rallies.

This year, for example, an exhibition will analyze “human beings and their defective relationships with reality and the past” through the objective of the HBO series “succession”, while another will tell the story of Vietnamese Americans 50 years after the end of the end of the Vietnam War.

The presentations include a presentation on “Wonders hidden in a peacock tail”, a round table on the position of the Catholic Church on immigration, a witness to “stories of life and hope in the Holy Land” and a conversation on “goals, content and methods of education in the United States”

“For me personally,” said Peterson, the New York meeting is “an event, something that changes you. I can’t wait to change and I can’t wait to hear – and see and meet – things And people who will literally change my life.

This year, speakers and participants will explore how modern men and women can repair their “difficult relationship with the past”.

Derived from a passage written by the Italian poet Dante Aligheri, the theme of this year, “here begins a new life”, proposes that “meeting with great love … can heal our relationship with the past and give us reasons to hope and to build.

The organizers of the event declared in a press release that this year’s event “would highlight how, in a cultural situation which presents serious challenges – including a general loss of contact with the past and the danger of ‘ever larger personal insulation – meeting with an extraordinary presence, “a great love”, reveals a new meaning for the past, the present and the future. »»

“When there is ignorance of my story,” said Peterson, “it’s almost like I was cut off from my story.”

Peterson, who is part of a small group of around 15 people who coordinate the event each year, described the meeting as “an attempt at a group of friends to approach our culture where we are at the moment, and Not to say that it is bad but just to look for what is good inside and to advance it. »»

While planning the event every year, Peterson said that the group is thinking about “what is happening now in all aspects of reality”, including medicine, literature, art, science and politics.

“Obviously, the presidential election appeared as a subject of discussion,” she noted. One of the group discussions, “how we got here: the roots of the American political crisis”, will address this subject.

In her interview with CNA, Peterson said she was the most excited for the first and last events in the meeting, which will showcase the chief architect For the reconstruction of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris and the mother of Blessed Carlo Acutis, respectively.

“I can’t wait to be open,” she said, “and really the opening in this place of great friendship.”

(The story continues below)

Subscribe to our daily newsletter

“It’s a kind of cliché to say that you cannot walk two steps from the New York meeting without meeting someone who is a friend,” said Peterson. “It’s really a moment of gathering for our friends.”

Communion and liberation were founded by the late Milan in the 1960s. As a young teacher in a Catholic high school, Guesani noticed that many of his students, although Catholic baptized, had “zero” the interest in The faith of their parents, rather promoting secular political theories that come in vogue. He presented them to a new method of thought, that where God is revealed in daily experiences.

You will find below the protruding facts of the panels and exhibitions provided for the New York meeting of this year:

Current affairs

● Saturday February 15 at 9:30 am: “A fragment of being: the bodily dimension of human identity in the era of virtual reality”, with Carter Snead, professor of law, University of Notre Dame

● Saturday February 15 at 11:30 am: “No reason to build a family? Demographic decline ”with Nicholas Eberstadt, American Enterprise Institute, and Brad Wilcox, professor of sociology, University of Virginia

● Saturday February 15 at 2 pm: “A feeling of precariousness: loneliness and discomfort in today’s society” with Robert Putnam, professor of public policy, Harvard University and Sherry Turkle, professor of social studies of science and Technology, Massachusetts Technology Institute

● Sunday February 16 at 11:30 am: “How we arrived here: the roots of the American political crisis” with James Hunter, professor of religion, culture and social theory, University of Virginia; and Paul Kahn, professor of law and human sciences at the University of Yale

● Sunday February 16 at 4 pm: “What we do and do not know: global warming and climate change” with Kerry Emanuel, professor of atmospheric sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and David Rimmps, Professor of Earth and Sciences planetary, University of California in Berkeley.

Education and theology

● Saturday February 15 at 4 p.m.: “Not just a promise: presentation of” in Search of the Human Face “by Father Luigi Giussani”, with John Milbank, President, Center of Theology and Philosophy, University of Nottingham

● Sunday February 16 at 11:30 am: “Awakening Curiosity: AIMS, content and methods of education in the United States” with David Steiner, Executive Director of Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy

● Sunday February 16 at 5.30 p.m.: “A new life: two modern young saints: Carlo Acutis and Pier Giorgio Frassati”, presented by Cardinal Christophe Pierre, non-Nonce Apostolic in the United States; Antonia Salzano, mother of Carlo Acutis; And Christine Wohar, founder, Frassatiusa

Literature and music

● Friday February 14 at 9 p.m.: “A life rich in music”, a concert of classical music of renowned pianist

● Saturday February 15 at 9 p.m.: “Ardent-Inought: a trip with Cormac McCarthy inspired by his novels”, with original music by Jonathan Fields, composer

Madalaine Elhabbal is a journalist for the staff of the Catholic press agency based at the EWTN in Washington, DC, Bureau. It was published by Catholicvote and also worked as a foreign language assistant in France. She graduated from the Benedictine College.