«VERSO UNA NUOVA PENTECOSTE»: CELEBRARE INSIEME NEL 2025, LA MEMORIA DEL PRIMO CONCILIO DI NICEA (325), FACENDO DIVENTARE QUESTA RICORRENZA COMUNE A TUTTI I CRISTIANI UN EVENTO DI UNIVERSALITÀ E INCLUSIONE
“TOWARD A NEW PENTECOST”: CELEBRATING TOGETHER IN 2025, THE MEMORY OF THE FIRST COUNCIL OF NICAEA (325), MAKING THIS MEMORY COMMON TO ALL CHRISTIANS AN EVENT OF UNIVERSALITY AND INCLUSION

Summary/Abstract: “Toward a New Pentecost”: celebrating together in 2025, the memory of the first Council of Nicaea (325), making this memory common to all Christians an event of universality and inclusion. “Towards a new Pentecost”! The article takes up these words of Pope Francis during his visit to Romania and develops a hypothesis: the celebration in 2025 of the 17th centenary of the Council of Nicaea (325) could be an opportunity for Christians together, Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants, to live a “new” Pentecost. New because it would manifest that some obstacles of the past can be removed if the Holy Spirit is allowed to act. The article addresses the issue of the dogma of homoousios defined at Nicaea with a formula that concerns faith in Jesus Christ, but in the same context it shows that an imperial practice is emerging that will increasingly accentuate the divisions within the church (Orthodox and heretics) and in society (citizens or outlaws). The imperial mentality identified in the type of religiosity of the two emperors Constantine and Theodosius persists throughout the centuries in the sensitive relationship then is established between state and church and this leads to reproduce within the church, through the curial culture, the same dynamics of absolutization of power. The final part reflects on Pope Francis who points Christians today toward a different direction, that of overcoming the power conflicts of the past and recalls the urgency of a witness of brotherhood in the confession of the one faith in God the Father and in the Son of the “same substance as the Father”, a faith that can be confessed together only with the power of the Spirit that generates communion.

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