Venice Summer School

19th to 26th August 2012
Venice Jesuit Community in Campo dei Gesuiti
Cost: 280 Euros

Website Address: www.faithandpolitics.eu

News: The main guest speaker of the 2012 summer school will be the ex-Italian Prime Minister and former President of the European Commission, Romano Prodi. He will be speaking on what it means to be a Christian engaged in political life today. Among his many current responsibilities, he was appointed in 2008 as President of the African UN Peacekeeping by the secretary general of the United Nations Ban Ki Moon.

This course is designed to help people in the age range of 18-35 grow in their appreciation of the relationship between their faith and social and political action. It has been run now over 6 years every two years and was a development of a similar summer school that the French Jesuits run.

The structure of the course is a mixture of inputs on various aspects of religion and politics/social action; group work in national groups to tell the story of this at national levels, a spirituality dimension including prayer and mass each day with a spiritual theme being developed each day, and aesthetic dimension using the art and architecture of Venice to help participants see the faith and politics/social action relationship in the history of Venice, and a Biblical dimension using (usually) the life of St. Paul to speak of how his life united these elements.

No less important are the invited speakers who witness to the faith and politics/social action link in their own lives. Previous speakers have included John Battle MP, the Czech ambassador in Paris, the minister of trade and industry in the French government, the Mayor of Ludwigshafen.

The course also aims to live simply and so we do our own washing up and setting tables, and serve the food ourselves which is delivered by boat each day. So, far the atmosphere has been excellent with a really good international group of Germans, French, English, Irish, Maltese, Italian, Polish, Spanish, and Belgian. The language used is English.

The course is subsidised by a grant from Porticus and represents simple cost of the week with no profits made.
 
If anyone is interested they can contact Tony Carroll (t.carroll@heythrop.ac.uk) directly and he will be able to answer any other questions. There are five places for British participants. We usually aim for a group of around 50.