Carl Anderson's Address at Rimini Meeting

"Work to Better the Moral Compass of Business"

RIMINI, Italy, AUG. 31, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Here is the address Carl A. Anderson, supreme knight of the Knights of Columbus, gave last week at the Meeting of Friendship Among Peoples held in Rimini, Italy.

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Two years ago, Pope Benedict invited us to live out hope "with works of charity, because hope, like faith, is demonstrated in love."

That love of neighbor, which expresses both faith and hope, is the story of the Knights of Columbus.

When the Venerable Servant of God Father Michael McGivney founded the Knights of Columbus in 1882, he did so as a pastor, concerned about the welfare of the most marginalized.

Widows and orphans in 19th century America didn't have much of a social safety net. If a breadwinner died, his wife and children faced a life of poverty, and the likely dissolution of the family, as children would be divided up among relatives able to support them, or worse, would be sent to state institutions for the indigent... [read the rest here]

- Found on Zenit

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Dumbstruck by the Mystery

...our temptation is always to impose our prejudices or our measure on reality -- except when we are faced with a fact that leaves us dumbstruck, and instead of dominating the fact ourselves, we are dominated, overcome by it. If there were no moments of this kind, the Mystery could do anything, but in the end, we would reduce everything to the usual explanation. But not even a Nobel Prize winner can stop himself from being dumbstruck before an absolutely gratuitous gesture. If there were not these moments, we would find answers, explanations, and interpretations to avoid being struck by anything. It is good that some things happen that we cannot dominate, then we have to take them seriously, and this is the great question of philosophy. If the conditions for the possibility of knowledge (see Kant) impose themselves on reality or if there is something that is so powerfully disproportionate that it does not let itself be "grasped" by the conditions of possibility, then the horizon opens. If this were not the case, then we could dominate everything and be in peace, or at least without drama. Instead, not even the intelligence of a Nobel Prize winner could prevent him from coming face-to-face with a fact that made him dumbstruck -- instead of dominating, it was he who was dominated. Here begins the drama, because I am called to answer. It is the drama that unfolds between us and the Mystery, through certain facts, certain moments, in which the Mystery imposes itself with this evidence. These are facts that we cannot put in our pocket, which we cannot reduce to antecedent factors.
-- Julian Carron in "Friends, that is, Witnesses."