One of the aspects of the opening address that the president of the Italian Bishops Conference (CEI) most highlighted is the "great educational emergency", as recalled by the Pope in the pastoral meeting of Rome last June. Bagnasco repeated Benedict XVI’s warning about the "growing difficulty that can be found in passing down to the new generations the basic values of life and a straight behaviour", then he stated that the society in which we live "seems to be suffering from a strange ‘self-hatred’, precluding itself through its relativism from "being able to distinguish and therefore pursue the truth". Such risk also falls on the political world, as to which the president of the Bishops Conference said: "in no area, not even in the political arena, can one neglect for time-serving reasons, or by convention, or otherwise the ethical needs that are intrinsic to faith. And this not out of contempt for, but for the love of politics and the subtle art it demands". According to Bagnasco, "becoming Christ’s witnesses is not (therefore) something that will be added later, a consequence that is somehow external to the Christian education". (continued)
