Dr. Joan Francesc Pont
On 22nd May, Joan Francesc Pont, full academician and president of the Section of Social Sciences of the Royal European Academy of Doctors-Barcelona 1914 (RAED), gave the closing speech of the institutional act that the historic Catalan Consulate of the Sea held to mark the feast day of its patron, St Mark the Evangelist. Pont is also a member of the Council of Twenty of the Consulate of the Sea and vice-president of the Chamber of Commerce of Barcelona, the institution that welcomes the tradition and the legacy of the Consulate.
In his speech, the academician vindicated the values of coexistence and tolerance, along the lines of the speech made by the dean of the Official Association of Lawyers of Barcelona, Maria Eugènia Gay, defending a concept of tolerance associated with the limits that a society allow coexistence. “Living together -said Pont- requires a spiritual structure of the city full of secularism, that is, of convictions that do not intend to exclude others, that do not want to occupy all the available space. Law is much more than the written norm: it is the search for the ideal of justice from the spirit of the norm, with the impulse of a demanding social conscience and a militant tension for the values shared by civil society”.
The events, led by the president of the Chamber of Commerce and the Consulate of the Sea, Miquel Valls, were preceded by the traditional mass that is celebrated in the Basilica of Saint Mary of the Sea in Barcelona.
