Annual meeting of the Italian MID

The sessions were presided by the coordinator of Italian MID/DIM, br Matteo Nicolini-Zani, assisted by its secretary, br Giandomenico Placentino, monks of our Bose monastic community. In his introduction, the coordinator explained the sense, the end, and the modality of the dialogue. Conscious of being called “to become monks in an interreligious way”, the members of the group this year began a common “pilgrimage” to the rediscovery of their specific identities as spiritual seekers and monastics. The itinerary of dialogue, in which they were able to know each other better and in which the specific monastic identity of those present was compared, showing up consonances and dissonances, was carried out in two phases.

The first phase towards discovery “who is the monk?” in the various religions examined the theme: “Monasticism as an anthropological phenomenon”. In this first part reflection centered on the fundamental conviction that monastic life, because it is human life, tends towards developing and perfecting the monk so as to bring him to the maturity proper to man, hence is a school of humanity. If monasticism is a human even before being a religious reality, it has a pre-confessional  dimension common to every religious tradition.