The Meeting of Rimini continues to grow, and in the 2026 edition – titled ‘The love that moves the sun and the other stars’ and scheduled from Friday to August 26 – it will occupy a total area of 140,000 square meters at the Fair, 16% more than last year. The main novelty is the Grand Auditorium, built to host the speech of Pope Leo XIV, with a capacity of ten thousand seats. The exhibition spaces increase to 12,000 square meters, almost half more than in 2025, while the bookstore will occupy one thousand square meters and the dining area will have six thousand seats. “We want to welcome people who come to meet and to encounter many realities in the best possible way,” says the president of the Meeting, Bernhard Scholz – “I myself am amazed every time by these figures. But interest is growing and we must respond with adequate structures and a real capacity for hospitality.”
The program includes over 150 conferences with five hundred Italian and international speakers, 13 exhibitions and as many shows, four of which at the Teatro Galli and two screenings at the Corte degli Agostiniani, in the historic center of Rimini. The Yoga Kids Village will occupy over six thousand square meters with two hundred events for children and families, while the Enel Sport Village, created with Centro Sportivo Italiano, Cdo Sport and Rbr Rinascita Basket Rimini, will extend over more than 13,000 square meters. There will be 3,300 volunteers involved, 58% of whom are under 30: 460 are already working on the setup, another 80 will take care of the final dismantling. The Meeting will remain open every day until midnight, with 180 partner companies and ten Regions present with their own institutional spaces. Last year the event recorded eight hundred thousand attendees and 18 million views of the official app.
Rimini – The presence of the Pope at the Meeting of Rimini gives this year’s edition a significance beyond the importance of the event. It is not just a religious appointment, nor a ceremony intended to strengthen a group identity. It is, more deeply, an opportunity to question the place of Catholics in Italian public life, after thirty years in which the end of Christian Democracy was often mistaken for the end of political Catholicism. The two things, obviously, do not coincide. The DC was a determined historical experience: it was born during the war, governed the reconstruction, organized republican pluralism, and dissolved when the political system that had made it possible collapsed.
Thinking of rebuilding it would be an exercise in political archaeology. But believing that, with it, the reasons for a Catholic presence in the public sphere have disappeared is no less serious a mistake. The problem of Italian Catholics today is not the absence of values. It is the absence of forms. There are associations, social works, foundations, educational experiences, volunteering, entrepreneurship, cooperatives, territorial networks. There is a Catholic society more vital than its media representation suggests. What is missing is the ability to translate this wealth into a recognizable political culture, into prepared leadership, into a lexicon capable of speaking also to those who are not Catholic. For too long public Catholicism has been squeezed between two opposite reductions.
On one side, the idea that faith must remain confined to the private space, as if moral convictions had no reflection on the conception of the person, family, work, school, and solidarity. On the other, the temptation to reduce Christianity to a combative identity, a flag to wave in cultural conflicts, a religious form of political belonging. The latter tendency is today manifestly strong in the USA. Both paths risk being sterile because the first produces irrelevance and the second sectarianism. Political Catholicism, in its best tradition, was something else, namely a pedagogy of complexity. It taught that between the individual and the State there is a network of communities, associations, autonomies, families, professions, territories; and that a solid democracy is not one in which everything depends on the State, but one in which society is robust enough to organize freedom and responsibility.
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Political Catholicism, in its best tradition, was a pedagogy of complexity
The decisive word is subsidiarity. Not as a ritual formula, but as a political principle. It is a theme on which Communion and Liberation has invested much in the past. Subsidiarity means recognizing that not every problem requires a centralized response; that institutions must help people and communities do what they can do, not systematically replace them; that social pluralism is not an obstacle to national unity, but a condition of it. It is a demanding vision, far from both absolute individualism and paternalistic statism. Over the years, the Meeting has had the ability to represent Christianity as a presence in the world, not as a refuge from the world. Naturally, no annual appointment can solve the problem of Catholic representation. And no papal visit can turn into a political legitimization of a party that does not exist.
But the importance of the meeting lies precisely in the possibility of remembering that the Church is not called to distribute certificates of reliability to parties, while Catholics are not called to seek protection from power. Their task is more difficult: to bring back into Italian politics the sense of limits, duration, responsibility towards future generations. In a time dominated by instant communication, personal leaderships, geopolitical fractures, and the growing fragility of belonging, it is a task far from marginal. It requires study, training, organization, and a new willingness to serve institutions without mistaking them for instruments of conquest. It implies a cross-cutting approach to new major issues, such as artificial intelligence, on the path traced precisely by Leo XIV. Perhaps this is the lesson Rimini can offer: Catholics must not occupy a space, but return to building a political culture.
