Catholics to gather for annual New York Encounter next month: ‘There’s nothing like it’

 

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jan 28, 2025 / 08:00 am (CNA).

Over the course of three days next month, Catholics from the U.S. and abroad will gather in the heart of New York City for a one-of-a-kind cultural conference dedicated to education, dialogue, and friendship.

Organized annually by members of Communion and Liberation, an ecclesiastical movement founded by the Italian priest Father Luigi Giussani, the event will take place Feb. 14–16 at the Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 West 18th St., New York City. Several of the presentations will be livestreamed, and no registration is required.

“There’s nothing like it,” Holly Peterson, one of the New York Encounter’s longtime organizers, told CNA in an interview. “Doing something free that’s like a pretty high level kind of doesn’t exist.”

Indeed, the wide-ranging program of events at the Encounter includes panel discussions, artistic performances, and exhibits exploring topics that are not typically engaged at run-of-the-mill Catholic gatherings.

This year, for example, one exhibit will analyze “human beings and their flawed relationships to reality and the past” through the lens of the HBO series “Succession,” while another will tell the story of Vietnamese Americans 50 years after the end of the Vietnam War.

Presentations include an exposé on “the wonders hidden in a peacock’s tail,” a panel discussion on the Catholic Church’s stance on immigration, a witness to “stories of life and hope in the Holy Land,” and a conversation on the “aims, content, and methods of education in the U.S.”

“For me personally,” Peterson explained, the New York Encounter is “an event, something that changes you. I’m looking forward to being changed and looking forward to hearing — and seeing and meeting — things and people who will literally change my life.”

This year, speakers and attendees will explore how modern men and women can repair their “difficult relationship with the past.”

Derived from a passage written by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, the theme for this year, “Here Begins a New Life,” proposes that “encounter with a great love … can heal our relationship with the past and give us reasons to hope and to build.”

Organizers for the event stated in a press release that this year’s event would “highlight how, in a cultural situation that presents serious challenges — including a widespread loss of contact with the past and the danger of an ever-greater personal isolation — the encounter with an extraordinary presence, ‘a great love,’ reveals a new meaning for past, present, and future.”

“When there’s an ignorance of my history,” Peterson reflected, “it’s almost like I’m cut off from my story.”

Peterson, who is part of a small group of about 15 people that coordinates the event each year, described the encounter as “an attempt of a bunch of friends to address our culture where we are right now, and not to say it’s bad but just to seek out that which is good within it and bring that forward.”

While planning the event every year, Peterson said the group reflects on “what’s going on now in all aspects of reality,” including medicine, literature, art, science, and politics.

“Obviously, the presidential election came up as a discussion topic,” she noted. One of the panel discussions, “How We Got Here: The Roots of the American Political Crisis,” will address this subject.

In her interview with CNA, Peterson said she’s most excited for the first and last events of the encounter, which will feature the chief architect for the reconstruction of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and the mother of Blessed Carlo Acutis, respectively.

“I’m looking forward to being opened up,” she said, “and really being opened up in this place of great friendship.”

“It’s kind of a cliche to say you can’t walk two steps of the New York Encounter without running into someone who’s a friend,” Peterson explained. “It’s really a moment of gathering for our friends.”

Communion and Liberation was founded by the late Guissani in Milan in the 1960s. As a young teacher at a Catholic high school, Guissani noticed that many of his students, while baptized Catholic, had “zero” interest in the faith of their parents, favoring instead the secular political theories coming into vogue. He introduced them to a new method of thinking, one where God is revealed in everyday experiences.

Below are highlights from the panels and exhibits scheduled for this year’s New York Encounter:

Current Affairs

● Saturday, Feb. 15, at 9:30 a.m.: “A Fragment of Being: The Corporeal Dimension of Human Identity in an Age of Virtual Reality,” with Carter Snead, professor of law, University of Notre Dame

● Saturday, Feb. 15, at 11:30 a.m.: “No Reasons to Build a Family? Demographic Decline” with Nicholas Eberstadt, American Enterprise Institute, and Brad Wilcox, professor of sociology, University of Virginia

● Saturday, Feb. 15, at 2  p.m.: “A Feeling of Precariousness: Loneliness and Malaise in Today’s Society” with Robert Putnam, professor of public policy, Harvard University, and Sherry Turkle, professor of the social studies of science and technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

● Sunday, Feb. 16, at 11:30 a.m.: “How We Got Here: The Roots of the American Political Crisis” with James Hunter, professor of religion, culture, and social theory, University of Virginia; and Paul Kahn, professor of law and the humanities, Yale University

● Sunday, Feb. 16, at 4 p.m.: “What We Do and Do Not Know: Global Warming and Climate Change” with Kerry Emanuel, professor of atmospheric science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and David Romps, professor of earth and planetary science, University of California at Berkeley.

Education and Theology

● Saturday, Feb. 15, at 4 p.m.: “No Longer Just a Promise: Presentation of ‘In Search of the Human Face’ by Father Luigi Giussani,” with John Milbank, president, Centre of Theology and Philosophy, University of Nottingham

● Sunday, Feb. 16, at 11:30 a.m.: “Awakening Curiosity: Aims, Content, and Methods of Education in the U.S.” with David Steiner, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy

● Sunday, Feb. 16, at 5:30 p.m.: “A New Life: Two Young Modern Saints: Carlo Acutis and Pier Giorgio Frassati,” presented by Cardinal Christophe Pierre, apostolic nuncio to the U.S.; Antonia Salzano, Carlo Acutis’ mother; and Christine Wohar, founder, FrassatiUSA

Literature and Music

● Friday, Feb. 14, at 9 p.m.: “A Life Rich in Music,” a classical music concert by world-renowned pianist Kwok-Wai Lio accompanied by Father Luigi Giussani’s reflections

● Saturday, Feb. 15, at 9 p.m.: “Ardenthearted: A Journey with Cormac McCarthy Inspired by His Novels,” with original music by Jonathan Fields, composer