from Canção Nova News with Vatican Radio

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The faith, with its reasons, is challenged in the secular age. For three days last week, specialists were in convocation through the Italian Association of Theologians, (AIT) to seek answers to this challenge. Specialists brought forth the traditional refresher courses offered to Theologians

The secretary of the Association, priest and professor Riccardo Battocchio, explained that the human being lives in an epoch in which as many affirm, religion and Christian faith appear in the scope of public discourse among so many other options. According to him, this challenges the responsibility of Christians, who reflect on the faith.

“As theologians, we must seek, in this course, to reflect on the conditions that become possible for a free adherence to faith, the Word of Revelation, that proposes itself as endowed of meaning today as in all contexts: in the secular context not less than in contexts that apparently appear generally marked by a public presence of religion”, he said.

Father Battocchio affirmed still that the theologians do not have so much the need to demonstrate the truth of the faith, but, overall, to show the reasons that make plausible the adherence of the faith. For this, he explained, that one of the two roads that they seek to travel is to evidence the correspondence between the proposal of the faith, the announcing  of the Gospel and that expectation of freedom that resides in the origins of human experience, conscience also of the faith as critical stance  to the human.

“We cannot propose the faith without bringing into consideration that which the man is in this our time and in history. And the theologian must seek this dialog with history,  with the conditions in which man encounters himself. The need of the theologians is to offer the reasons  through which believing is today, an act of freedom, that not only supposes freedom, by permits it to realize itself in the most full way.”

translated from Portuguese