Debate is essential Mattarella tells Rimini Meeting

(ANSA) - ROME, AUG 20 - President Sergio Mattarella said community relationships and debate are essential to build the future in a message to Bernhard Scholz, president of the Foundation Meeting for 'Friendship Among Peoples' behind the 45th annual gathering opening on Tuesday.
    The event organized by members of the Catholic activist group Comunione e Liberazione (Communion and Liberation, CL) wraps up on August 25.
    Mattarella said the theme of this year's meeting - 'If we don't search for the essential now, what are we looking for?' - focuses on the "extraordinary transformations we are experiencing.
    "There is a need to search for the essential just as global flows of information are becoming swollen rivers, while technological sciences show us solutions that were unimaginable until yesterday, while opportunities offered to single people once again suggest the fallacious flattery of the omnipotence of mankind", he said.
    "However, faced with new opportunities for humanity, we are affected by the horror, the atrocity and escalation of wars, the will to dominate, with a dramatic return to the past.
    "Feelings of fear, lack of confidence, at times indifference, not rarely spite and hatred, are back.
    For this reason, concluded the president, "it is essential to put the person back at the centre - the desire for a full life in community relationships.
    "Because the essential doesn't lie in an isolated I, which is self-sufficient, but in meeting with others, in the discovery of the truth brought by the other, and thus in walking together towards a tomorrow that must be conceived and built.
    "The educational and cultural commitment which the Meeting manifests has great value", added Mattarella. (ANSA).