Parolin at the Festival of Spirituality: the challenges of this time concern us all

May the event promoted in Rome, entitled “The Soul and Time”, today on its second day, bear fruit. The Vatican secretary of state wishes this in a message in which he rejoices at the initiative proposed by three publishers, which intends to combine the spiritual element with the concrete one of reality. “Our time – underlines the cardinal – is experiencing wars, famines, climate change, but it is the one in which God calls us to live”

Vatican News

The greetings and best wishes for the good work of Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican Secretary of State, arrived at “L’Anima e il Tempo. Festival of spirituality” which opened yesterday evening in Rome. “I’m sorry I can’t be with you at the inauguration”, writes the cardinal in a message addressed to the promoters of the event – Edizioni Frate Indovino, Edizioni Cantagalli and Edizioni Città Nuova – which will end on Sunday 16 October.

We need to listen to each other and look each other in the eye

Cardinal Parolin rejoices at the initiative organized at a time when participation in public events after the pandemic is resuming, not without difficulty, then underlines: “It is nice that publishers who share the same faith and the same inspiration , in a difficult situation for their sector, get together to invite discussion, comparison, deepening. We need to look each other in the eye, to listen to each other, to talk to each other, to dialogue, to get out of the often self-referential world of social media average”.

Time is the one in which God calls us to live

Commenting on the title of the Festival, “The Soul and Time”, the secretary of state writes that the soul is “the call to our spiritual being, to the umbilical cord that binds us to the Heavenly Father, to our destiny”, and time, “the dimension in which we are inexorably immersed (…) is ‘our time’, that is, the time in which God calls us to live, to work, to put our talents into play, to bear witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ”. Parolin therefore refers to the dramatic moment we are experiencing and writes: “How can we fail to remember the tragedy of the war in the heart of Europe and the many wars in progress? world? How can we forget hunger, thirst, famine? How can we forget about climate change and migration? “.

The commitment for the future of man and the world

Finally, the cardinal observes that to all this is added a general feeling of bewilderment and loneliness, even in a hyper-connected world. The question of meaning, such as the commitment to building a more human and just world, for a politics and an economy that focus on the common good and the protection of creation: “These are challenges – Parolin emphasizes – that affect us all. “. Hence the hope that these days of meetings in Rome “will bear fruit for those who will participate and for all”.

Parolin at the Festival of Spirituality: the challenges of this time concern us all – Vatican News