One of the sessions of the inaugural meeting of the Atrium of the Gentiles. PHOTO: Courtesy

Two professors from the high school of Anthropology and Ethics of the University of Navarra, Carmen Monasterio and Dolores Conesa, attended the inaugural meeting of the Atrium of the Gentiles that took place in Paris on March 24-25.

The committee Pontifical Council for Culture, in response to a wish expressed by Benedict XVI in his Christmas message speech to the Roman Curia in 2009, has promoted the creation of a space for dialogue between believers and non-believers. The initiative, which has received the name 'Atrium of the Gentiles', is intended to be a new structure that will open a place for meeting, dialogue and exchange, where believers and non-believers can express themselves.

Paris, a city emblematic of secularism, was chosen as a highly symbolic place to launch the inaugural event. Four prestigious venues - Unesco, the Sorbonne, the high school of France and the high school of the Bernardins - hosted colloquia with the participation of various personalities from the world of culture around the theme topic Light, religion and common reason.

The session, which was held on March 24 at UNESCO headquarters in the presence of a large representation of diplomats, international officials and representatives of the world of culture, focused on intercultural dialogue. The event was introduced by Irina Vokova, Director General of UNESCO; Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture committee ; and Getachew Engida, director General attachment of UNESCO.

Giuliano Amato, former president of committee of the Italian Republic, stressed - among other issues - that this intercultural dialogue plays a decisive role at the most fundamental political level, which is to live together in an environment of justice and freedom. As he explained, the origin of democracy is the distinction between good and evil: without this, democracy does not work and freedom does not remain. If freedom does not serve to establish justice," he said, "there is no democracy, because democracy needs a moral foundation. For this reason, he stressed that believers and non-believers have in common the task of recovering the moral foundations of democracy, which is not founded on relativism. The search for the common good, concluded Amato, cannot be done alone, but all together, each one sacrificing a little of himself.

The following day, at the Sorbonne, there was a meeting among university academics, both professors and doctoral students. The session focused on discussion between the heritage of the Enlightenment and the heritage of faith. The philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, who acted as moderator, presented the need to reconstruct the question of humanism. For his part, Axel Khan, physician, geneticist and President of Descartes University, developed the coexistence of three perspectives or three origins of truth: theological, metaphysical and scientific. Julia Kristeva, semiologist and psychoanalyst, emphasized that the current fascination with mysticism reveals a deficiency in contemporary humanism that seeks what it does not have. In her opinion, humanism should be an individual listening, in the singular, which is why she considered it very opportune to revalue the humanism of modern Jewish thought that speaks of the other in the singular. Bernard Bourgeois, member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, developed the possibilities of reconciliation between reason and faith.

That same day, on Friday 25 in the afternoon, a meeting with members of the French Academy took place at the high school of France. With this we wanted to emphasize that if this dialogue that is now being inaugurated is to bear fruit and not just words, it must go to the concrete consequences of what is being talked about. The task thus opened to society requires that this reflection be incarnated in specific cultural practices, and this is what the five academies that make up the high school of France represent. This is why this session dealt with topics such as the relationship between Economics, ethics and finance by Bertand Collomb and Jean-Claude Casanova, members of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. A space was also dedicated to law and its relationship with the multiplicity of cultural references with the participation of academics François Terre and Rémi Brague. The last two interventions, by Jean Clair and Claude Dagens, dealt with the relationship between art, worship and culture.

The last meeting took place at high school of the Bernardines, where Patrick de Carolis of the Academy of Fine Arts moderated a roundtable with the participation of Emmanuelle Mignon, administrative assistant general of Europacorp, and Jean Racine, president of the Library Services National of France, among others. The presentation of the global project of the Atrium of the Gentiles, which already has a good issue of scientific Colloquia scheduled until 2013: Tirana, Stockholm, Prague, Assisi, Geneva, Quebec, Marseille, Moscow, Pavia, Chicago and Washington, took place during this roundtable .

As Cardinal Ravasi pointed out, it is a matter of offering opportunities to discover what both sides, believers and non-believers, can contribute to the great questions such as the search for truth or the meaning of life. There Ravasi recalled the famous statement of Pierre Reverdy, a French Catholic writer: "There are fierce atheists who deal with God in much greater depth than many frivolous believers". But Ravasi added that there are also believers who deal with man and the world more than certain sarcastic atheists.