What is the Ezio Aletti Study and Research Center?
It is a center for study and research attached to the mission of the Society of Jesus at the Pontifical Oriental Institute. The Jesuits opened the center in a late nineteenth-century liberty-style palazzo donated to their order by Mrs. Anna Maria Gruenhut Bartoletti Aletti with the desire that it become a center of intercultural meeting and reflection.
The Centrum Aletti Velehrad-Rome (in Olomouc in the Czech Republic) is its first affiliated center.

For Whom is the Center?
Centro Aletti is primarily aimed toward scholars and artists with a Christian perspective from Central and East Europe, with the purpose of creating an opportunity for them to meet with their Western colleagues.
Meeting one another in charity fosters a creative attitude as they seek together the answers to the questions raised by today’s women and men.
The center offers a space where Orthodox and Oriental or Latin rite Catholics can live together and work towards personal development in between its East and West and that thus may be capable of meeting the future and the challenges that it will bring. It is the goal of the Centro Aletti to research a Christian spiritual physiognomy in a Europe that now has the possibility of rediscovering a new integrity within itself: a physiognomy that does not look backwards nostalgically nor that simply accepts what is new, but rather one that actively works toward its transfiguration.
Together, the impact between the Christian faith and the cultural dynamics of modernity and post-modernity can be studied. Answers that take into account the Christian tradition of the East and West can be sought, in such a way that together they point to the living Christ.

The Center’s Method:
The proper way to characterize the organization---and thus to already constitute the activity of Centro Aletti---is to place its study and research in a relational sphere, always “privileging interpersonal relationships” (Father General of the Society of Jesus, Peter Hans Kolvenbach, 15 July 1991). For this reason study is always tied to life because it takes the concrete churches and persons into account.
Work at the Centro Aletti therefore follows the rhythm of community life.

The Center’s Activity:
The center fosters a style of life in which intellectual research, spirituality, the apostolate, and the practical, concrete aspects of everyday life are integrated. This is achieved by persons and churches encountering each other, finding inspiration in traditions, letting themselves be questioned by current issues, embodying a theology that translates itself in the pastoral and a pastoral activity that flows into reflection. Artistic creation contributes to giving form to and stimulating a precise methodology, in a way that theology, spirituality, liturgy, and culture constitute a living organism.

Areas of Activity:
- Hospitality for scholars and artists who are living and working at Centro Aletti for a period of time
- Seminars, courses, and conferences that Centro Aletti organizes on- and off-site in collaboration with other institutions. The principle themes dealt with, in light of the Eastern and Western tradition, are spirituality and formation, theology in dialog with contemporary culture, as well as art and liturgy.
- The studio of spiritual art is an atmosphere in which art and faith can meet, not in an artificial manner but in the artistic creation itself, deepening the relationship between art and liturgical space at the theoretical and practical level of work. The workshop in fact creates works in liturgical spaces.
- Publications through the Lipa publishing house support Centro Aletti’s activity. Books that mature at the Centro Aletti school are characterized by this existential approach to the Christian treasures of the East and the West in a way that one seeking spiritual nourishment for faith in these years of European transition toward a new unity might draw from them.

A Multi-Faceted Outlook:
The center encourages focusing attention on the other, living and thinking together in order to understand and recognize one another. It is not in uniformity that unity is found, but in the intelligence of love that knows how to see in the cultures and specific characteristics of the different peoples the path to their transfiguration. In the measure in which they express themselves in gestures and words of communion, they are recognized as a revelation of the profound body of Christ hidden in history and revealed to the world from diverse sides.
In diversity the Holy Spirit makes harmony resound and the celebration of colors shine.

Pontificial Oriental Institute
Ezio Aletti Study and Research Center
Via Paolina, 25 – 00184 Rome
Tel. +39-064824588
Fax +39-06485876

Director: p. Marko Ivan Rupnik, S.J.

e-mail: centro.aletti@iol.it - www.centroaletti.com