“As soon as the Meeting is started, we must be able to find a synthesis in order to deploy the best resources of the faithful and the Churches of Italy. Italian Catholicism has given figures of giants of faith and culture, of sanctity and social industriousness, who have successfully and uniquely innervated the social fabric of the country”: it was said this morning by father Franco Giulio Brambilla, lecturer of Christology and theological anthropology and dean of the Theology Faculty of Northern Italy, as he opened his report on the theological-pastoral horizon of the Ecclesial Meeting of Verona on the subject of “hope”. “The word ‘hope’ he added does not only belong to the Christian language but to the human language of all times. Especially at the time of a smooth-flowing society which is all engrossed in the ‘here and now’, the expectation of the future demands that we correct the diseases of hope and highlight the positive buds that sprout in the experiences of today’s life”. Then, Brambilla warned against the risk of "personal isolation", highlighting that "nowadays, hope is confined to the intimate space of individual hope or to the sphere of a social progressivism, which hide the close bonds that join a person’s hopes and the expectations of society”.
