What culture can Catholics create? How can faith become culture? These questions will be posed by the participants at the 5th Conference on Catholics and public life that begins in Madrid on 14 November. It is being organized by the San Pablo-Ceu University in the capital. The president of the Catholic Association of propagandists, Alfonso Coronel de Palma, maintains that faith must be public to “generate culture”. “We want to be a point of encounter where there’s total freedom for dialogue and discussion”, he said during the press conference held to present the conference. Its theme this year is “What culture?”. It involves many experts who will speak of the meeting between culture and faith at the interdisciplinary level: art, healthcare, ethics, communication, politics, teaching, etc. For the first time an attempt will be made to integrate the family in the sessions; the idea has even been hatched of holding a “mini-conference” for children, “not as a mere crèche but with the possibility for them to actively participate”, explained Carla Díez de Rivera, one of the organizers. The speakers will include Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo, former Spanish premier; Andrea Riccardi, professor of history at Rome’s Third University; Michael Schooyans, professor at the University of Louvain; Rafael Rodriguez-Ponga, general secretary of the Spanish Agency of International Cooperation, and Jose Maria Beneyto, professor of international public law at the University of San Pablo. The conference may also be followed on line (www.ceu.es/congreso).
