Blog

Easter 2025

Realizing you are alive

it's as simple as that, it's a sound

That comes from our flesh,

a sound that our flesh

Has taken from the sound of the world.

To hear it you have to remove noise,

the noise that pretensions make

grudges, you have to disassociate

By those who live to lynch the infinite,

By those who encapsulate the story

within the walls of the obvious

And of convenience... (Franco Arminio)

With these first lines from Arminius, I would like to open the page dedicated to all of you, friends of the John Paul II Foundation, to welcome Easter delivered to us once again this year by the bounty of nature, by the tradition of a millennia-old civilization and, for many of us, by Faith - argomentum non apparentium, an expression used in the letter to the Hebrews (11:1) - in the risen Christ and, for science, simply by the position in spatial coordinates of the Earth in its orbit around the Sun.

The Foundation organizes its calendar starting right from Easter which is followed by the celebratory feast of St. John Paul II, then by "Foundation Day"-an event that involves everyone from the Scientific Committee down to donors and friends-and then ending with Holy Christmas.

Each time, a simple and equally challenging verb imposes itself: "Inhabit the words." We need to use these appointments so that that "realizing that we are alive" has the meaning of "living" to be faithful to the will of the Founders, to the statutory principles, attending to the everyday life that always tests consistency, sensitivity, generosity.

We must be acutely aware that only the involvement of all-and hopefully many more-supporters, donors, volunteers or simply friends enables us to reach "the other," never more than now at the center of the Christian message.

These are big words that we often think and say and that always elicit sharing, but then perhaps we do not care enough to ask ourselves whether the meaning of these words pulls our actions along or instead experience the disappointment of shipwreck in a web of fictions within which meanings and realities blur.

Within the framework of the Foundation-that is, in representing the framework of the activities it carries out-is it possible to avoid doubts and acquiescence toward the economic-political decisions pursued by the decision-making elite? There are unmistakable signs of growing inequalities and marked differences between "empires" and states in which it seems that only a run-up in armaments must be the only solution capable of guaranteeing their security.

Do we put our wills at the service of the goal of preventing, or at least limiting, the inevitable widening of the furrow that separates social classes by reducing them to the single dichotomy of the "rich few and the poor masses"?

Those who work in and for the Foundation inhabit the one word that absorbs them all, viz. agape, declined within the limits of one's abilities, but comforted by so many people who share and affirm it by entrusting their donations to us.

"Diversis gentibus una" was the motto on Livorno's first coin, "the unghero," the gold thaler minted by Grand Duke Ferdinand II in 1665. Could we apply the same exergue to all coins of all nations making it a universal motto!

Soon it will also be Easter in areas scourged by the arrogance of power. Perhaps it would be more familiar to resort to the image of the cross. In the areas next door, the lights shine as always, just as frequencies of all the colors of fulfilled desires dance. Those who share the Faith with which the Foundation bears witness, do not get distracted: think of a man named Francis who will tell the world "Christ is risen, he is truly risen."

Best wishes for a Happy Easter

Andrea Bottinelli

President John Paul II Foundation