"We cannot avoid this call to dialogue..."

Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi

Rocco, at Whispers, offers a Quote of the Day from Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, reported in an article, "Between church and bloggers, a successful face-to-face" in L'Osservatore Romano for May 22, 2011.

The article reflects on the May 2 meeting of 150 bloggers from around the world with Church officials at the Vatican.

Sample a few snips:

We can say that we are in new squares and new cathedrals -- virtual spaces, to be sure, but ones inhabited by people who communicate, express ideas, tell stories, ask hard questions and expect answers. We can not, then, avoid this call to dialogue, taking into account that it entails a fluid world, a complex, articulated one in continual movement...

From this appeared the need, expressed clearly during the meeting, to decipher the mentality, the culture and philosophy that animates the bloggers, so that the church might be able to undertake a new evangelization and spark public opinion, learning itself to be interactive and not anchored only to a pyramidal style of communication that is foreign to the culture of our time. It can overcome a merely one-directional communication, without possibilities of dialogue and exchange, something destined to leave an impression of rigidity and self-reference...

...a new reality is growing that communicates emotions, sentiments, impulses of the spirit, opinions and stories in an unedited way... Let us seek, then, to reflect on the ideas raised in this dialogue, even the most suggestive, interesting and even slightly provocative, to highlight the necessity of not letting this meeting of bloggers remain only one event to be consigned to the annals of history, but that it becomes the first step of a long path of listening to the many people who wish to speak with us.

Such comments give one pause:  a peaceful, contented, hopeful pause.

Pause for a moment yourself as you read Cardinal Ravasi's words...

Can you feel the fresh air wafting through the room?

 
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