Each year, the monthly magazine Jesus in cooperation with the Monastery of Bose and Italian Christian Workers Association prepares an interfaith calendar 'I Giorni del dialogo' (Days of Dialogue), which presents Christian, Jewish and Islamic holidays. The 2022 calendar commemorates WCC assemblies. What inspired the design of this special piece? Brother Guido: Each year, for the past dozen years, a theme is chosen—such as young people, prayer, creation, historical encounters—to be illustrated with photographs and short texts. Already for 2021, we had planned to dedicate the calendar to the WCC 11th Assembly, but then the postponement due to the pandemic allowed us to better elaborate the project, calling it "Reconciliation and Unity. The WCC’s journey towards the Karlsruhe Assembly 2022.” My intention was to make Christians in Italy—and especially the Catholic component—more involved in the path taken by the Christian churches of the whole world since 1948. The choice of publishing a photo for each of the ten previous assemblies was an attempt to describe this journey in both times and spaces. The choice of black and white for the photos alludes to the fact that true colours come from the encounters between people, from their faces, from their being together.
As a member of the WCC Theological Study Group of the Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace, how do you retain your well-regarded sense of hope and optimism during these times? Brother Guido: In these years of pilgrimage to the places in the world most affected by injustice, violence and war, the hope of us members of the Theological Study Group and Reference Group has been nurtured by the Christian people and communities we have met. We have visited their wounds, celebrated the gifts that their witness offers to other Christians and to society as a whole, sought to understand with them how to transform injustices and heal wounds. Discovering in the sisters and brothers of other churches around the world the common longing to seek "first the kingdom of God and his righteousness" (Mt 6:33) at the heart of the tribulations was a balm for the trials that each of us goes through in our concrete reality.
This experience allowed us to discover the concreteness of walking together and the transformative capacity of the different experiences of faith lived in daily life.
What are your hopes for the WCC 11th Assembly? Brother Guido: I hope that all those who will participate in the 11th WCC Assembly in Karlsruhe will be able to experience and share that empathy and Christian solidarity that we have been able to touch with our own hands by visiting our brothers and sisters in the four corners of the world. The theme of the 11th WCC Assembly—“Christ’s love moves the world to reconciliation and unity”—becomes a call to universal fraternity, to rediscover our own truth as human beings bound to one another, called to feel like members of a single body. A bond that from the Christian world expands not only towards the believers of other religions, but embraces every human being in his deepest dignity, in his being in the image and likeness of God.
Click here to see the Interreligious calendar- "I Giorni del dialogo" (Days of Dialogue) | 
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