5 November 2026
The 2027 Meeting began to take shape just a few days after the previous edition ended. After a short holiday, it was back to work: reviewing the results of the Meeting that had just concluded, gathering data, preparing communication materials, rethinking the organisation and setting in motion the many activities that go into preparing each new edition.
This work officially got underway on Friday, 16 October, in the hills above Rimini, with a staff gathering that brought together the Meeting’s employees and closest collaborators, alongside President Bernhard Scholz and Director Francesco Perazzini. It was a day of work, but also of fellowship: an opportunity to come together again after a particularly meaningful edition, marked by the presence of Pope Leo XIV, and to begin building the next Meeting together.
At the heart of our discussions was a question: what does the experience we have just shared call on us to change? And how can we be the first to become the “courageous pioneers” evoked by the theme of the 2027 Meeting?
It was a day of open and honest dialogue, in which we shared our enthusiasm for what had happened, as well as our reflections, questions and the difficulties we had encountered. We wanted to take nothing for granted and to learn from experience, so that each new edition would be more than a repetition of the last: it would be a step forward.
This month, then, The faces behind the Meeting are, first and foremost, our own: those of the people who work for the Meeting all year round, often away from the spotlight, and who begin anew each time with passion and a sense of responsibility. So that the Meeting can remain ever more faithful to the original intuition that inspired it and to the expectations of the hundreds of thousands of people who experience it every year. And so that those who help build it can continue to allow themselves to be changed by this experience.
