Rome – In the first part of this investigation we focused on the theological core of fr. Julián Carrón: his diagnosis of an age marked by “confusion” and the “waning of desire”, his insistence on the religious sense as the elementary structure of the self, and on faith that must constantly be subjected to the verification of experience, so that it does not turn into ideology or moralism. In this second step we examine how that approach took shape, over the years, in some concrete choices of Communion and Liberation: the relationship with politics, the Englaro case, the abuse scandals and the collapse of the Formigoni “system”. These are passages in which Carrón attempts – not without internal resistance – to detach the movement from the logic of political collateralism and to reach out to those who suffer, placing at the center not the “non-negotiable values”, but “what we hold most dear”: the faith that is measured against life.
Faced with an activism in CL which, in the years following September 11, had become increasingly collateral to the ethical battles of the right, with clear links to figures such as Giuliano Ferrara and Marcello Pera, fr. Julián Carrón, President of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation, in 2008 calls the movement back to the root of Giussani’s method: the issue is not “Christian values” – also defended by many devout lay people – but the verification of faith in life. This is the same line that, years later, in La bellezza disarmata, Carrón will express by insisting on the need for faith to pass through the “tribunal of experience” and for a “living religious sense” to represent a permanent verification of faith itself. Within this framework, his public interventions in the early 2000s become a kind of “laboratory” in which Giussani’s successor tries to correct the course of a movement perceived, even from outside, as the religious arm of a certain center-right.
CL and politics
The first turning point is politics. In 2008, ahead of the elections, CL circulates a text entitled «Elezioni 2008 – Ciò che abbiamo di più caro» (Elections 2008 – What We Hold Most Dear). The framework is clear: every call to the polls is first of all a provocation to the Christian conscience, an opportunity to verify “what we really care about” and to unmask the ambiguity that can creep into any action. Elections are described as “a unique educational opportunity”, not as the decisive battleground on which salvation is at stake.
Carrón reiterates that salvation must not be sought from politics: the tradition of the Church offers two criteria – libertas Ecclesiae and the common good – for judging every political project and every civil authority. Preference is given to those who defend a State that promotes freedom, good, life, the family, freedom to educate and to build works according to the principle of subsidiarity, with an explicit invitation “not to waste one’s vote” and to look to “some friends” already engaged in this direction. The text remains anchored to traditional references – defense of life, the public role of faith – but shifts the center of gravity: it is not about “winning”, but about seeing whether and how faith is relevant to life, even in the political act.
It is a transitional phase: on the one hand, CL continues to indicate a clear orientation; on the other, Carrón begins to defuse the claim to identify the movement with a given camp and to turn the consent of CL members into an electoral power bloc.
One year later, in 2009, the test moves onto the most explosive terrain of ethical issues: the Eluana Englaro case, that of the young Italian woman involved in a serious car accident on 18 January 1992, who lived in a vegetative state for 17 years and for whom there was discussion about the possibility of interrupting artificial nutrition. In a debate polarized around euthanasia, “non-negotiable values” and the clash between opposing fronts, CL publishes a flyer with a provocative and disarming title: “If Only the Nazarene Would Caress Us”.
The text starts from a sentence by Enzo Jannacci – “Existence is a space that has been given to us and that we must always fill with meaning, in every circumstance” – and reverses it into a question: can a life like Eluana’s “be filled with meaning”? Does it still have meaning? The young woman’s death does not close the questions; it makes them even more radical: what has each one done to fill her life with meaning? What contribution has been offered to those most directly affected, “starting with her father”? The flyer exposes the risk of remaining prisoners of a reason reduced to our own measure, unable to withstand the impact of a suffering that exceeds our parameters. These are the same questions that Silere non possum raised just a few days ago, when the case of the “Kessler Twins” erupted. Yet within the Church, today as in 2009, there are still realities which, even in the face of pain, refuse to let themselves be questioned and show themselves capable only of “absolving”or “condemning”, as if that were the task entrusted to us. Hence the need first of all to change our gaze: to indicate a right path does not mean having to condemn, attack and strike all those who do not want or are not able to follow it. It is the same attitude as Francis of Assisi: he proclaimed poverty, above all he lived it in person, but he did not devote himself to criticizing, slandering, calumniating, attacking or delegitimizing those who did not share it. He did not have time for that.
Carrón recalled that without a presence that shows how even such a wounded life can be lived as full of meaning, there advances the “suspicion that in the end everything is nothing”. In the face of suffering, not even Christ is spared dismay; the difference is not a moral superiority, but his bond with the Father, which overcomes the suspicion of a failed existence. The text quoted Benedict XVI (Spe salvi 26) on the unconditional love of God as the only true redemption and pointed to the presence of Christ as the only reality capable of giving meaning to pain and injustice, through the face of those who bear witness that “life is worth more than sickness and death”: the sisters who cared for Eluana for years, that “caress of the Nazarene” which, as Jannacci says, we all need. Here Carrón’s choice is clear: not to turn the Englaro case into an identity flag, but into a radical question about the meaning of life and about the Christian companionship offered to those who suffer, starting from Eluana’s father. It is an act of tender closeness, not a street-level confrontation.
The scandal of abuse in the Church
In 2010, faced with the “deeply painful” issue of pedophilia in the Church, Carrón intervenes with a long letter to a national Italian newspaper. His first word is dismay: not only at the seriousness of the facts, but at the inability of any response – demands for accountability, acknowledgment of the evil, reproach for errors in handling cases – to quench the thirst for justice that rises from the human heart.
The decisive question is formulated in Latin: “Quid animo satis?” What can truly satisfy the human heart? The justice we long for is boundless, proportionate to the depth of the wound; for this reason, even after convictions, repentance and penance, “nothing is enough” for the victims. Likewise, the perpetrators of abuse face a challenge impossible to resolve by human strength alone: nothing is sufficient to repair the evil they have done.
Carrón denounces the risk of an “assassination of the human”: in order to go on shouting for justice “to our measure”, we end up stifling the voice of the heart, forgetting the victims and abandoning them in their tragedy. In this context, he stresses that Benedict XVI was the only one not to reduce the demand for justice: on the one hand, he recognized without hesitation the gravity of the evil, urged people to assume responsibility, denounced the poor handling of cases out of fear of scandal and took concrete measures; on the other, he admitted that all this “is not sufficient” to compensate for the harm done.
The path indicated is that of a radical appeal to Christ, “victim of injustice and sin”, who still bears the wounds of his unjust suffering and understands in depth the pain of the victims. Appealing to Christ is not a subterfuge to avoid justice, but the only way to save its infinite demand, avoiding the shortcut of separating Christ from a Church deemed “too sullied” to bear him. Mercy thus becomes the only space in which the thirst for justice can avoid being betrayed. Here too, Carrón is consistent: instead of turning the scandals into a defense brief or into pure moralistic denunciation, he brings everything back to the question of the Christian event and to Christ’s ability to respond to injustice without censoring its gravity.
Lombardy: the Formigoni scandal and politics once again
Another episode that leads a politicized part of CL to look at Carrón with suspicion takes place in 2012, on the occasion of the regional elections in Lombardy and the collapse of the system built around Roberto Formigoni, overwhelmed by investigations and judicial scandals. In another letter, published by a national daily, Carrón confesses he was overwhelmed by an “indescribable pain” in seeing CL identified with the attraction of power, of money, of “lifestyles” light-years away from the movement’s original experience.
While reiterating that CL is extraneous to any misappropriation and has never built a “system of power”, Carrón acknowledges that “we must indeed have given some pretext”. Criticizing the way in which information is disseminated – often at the price of violating constitutional safeguards – is not enough: the point is deeper. The encounter with don Giussani meant discovering Christianity as a reality “attractive and desirable”; precisely for this reason it is a “great humiliation” to realize that, for some, the fascination of the beginning was not enough to free them from the temptation of a purely human success.
Carrón speaks explicitly of superficiality and “lack of discipleship”, asks forgiveness for the damage done to the memory of the founder, entrusts to the courts the task of verifying any crimes, but invites everyone also to look at the common good generated in many areas. He recalls Giussani as a man who “overflowed with Christ”, explains that no mistake can cancel the “passion for Christ” infused by the encounter with his charism, and calls for a purification: to return to conversion to the One who first captivated them.
The key issue is the understanding of Christian presence: “presence” is not synonymous with power or hegemony, but with witness, with a human difference that springs from the “power of Christ” to respond to the heart’s needs. What changes history is what changes the human heart; everything else is superstructure. Carrón concludes by indicating a long road still ahead, to be walked in the joy of being able to begin again, verifying faith in daily experience, as Giussani had taught. It is the moment in which, as journalist Ascione has noted, the “Carrón revolution” speaks more clearly: no more collateralism, no to Family Day events turned into show-of-strength rallies, stop to using the movement as a reservoir of votes for a particular political camp. Here lies the first real moment of rupture with the political world: the same world that, over the years, had learned to use – and today would like to use again – the vote of the CL people to support factions and power structures. In parallel, an internal shift takes place within the movement that is anything but secondary: Giancarlo Cesana leaves every direct responsibility in CL and, in his place, the figure of the young Davide Prosperi emerges, until then charged with following the movement in Europe – with the sole exception of Italy. It is the image of a movement placed at a crossroads: either fully embrace the “disarmed beauty” of a faith that renounces the weapons of power, or return to the comfort zone of political collateralism that guarantees influence but betrays the origin.
Faithful to the founder
To understand what is truly at stake in the rupture with political collateralism, we need to take a step back to fr. Luigi Giussani. Already in the 1970s, in his dialogue with Robi Ronza, the founder of Communion and Liberation identifies what he calls the “error of ’48”: having entrusted “in practice irrevocably” to Christian Democracy the task of managing the political presence of Catholics, thus laying the groundwork for the subsequent political and moral disintegration of the party. From here arises the choice of an “irrevocable critical distance” between CL, on the one hand, and the friends involved in the Popular Movement and the DC, on the other. In those same pages Giussani insists on a point that will become decisive also for the Carrón period: the first level of political impact of a Christian community is its very existence, provided that it is an authentic community, capable of generating freedom and responsibility. The Christian community does not ask for privileges, but demands freedom for itself and for all; for this reason, if it is genuine, it becomes a guarantee of “substantial democracy”.
When the commitment becomes directly political, however, it is no longer the community that commits itself, but individual persons, who act “on their own responsibility”, even if they have been educated within the movement. CL, Giussani concludes, “has given no mandate” to its members engaged in politics: calling them “CL candidates” or “CL councilors” is a confusion of levels which he judges “incorrect” and “disloyal”.
This vision – CL as “ecclesial experience, a place of education and practice of faith”, not as a political force – is the background against which the reading of don Julián Carrón is grafted, decades later. When, after the Lombard scandals and the Formigoni case, the movement ends up being effectively identified with a “system of power” and with the center-right bloc, don Carrón returns precisely to those pages: there he finds a criterion for judging the present, namely the need to maintain a structural critical distance from political parties and to avoid the Christian community being transformed into an organized faction at the service of any alignment.
The choice is not merely strategic, but profoundly theological. In La bellezza disarmata, Carrón re-proposes a prophetic text by Giussani on the “battle between authentic religiosity and power”: the real danger, the founder notes, is not first of all physical destruction, but the attempt by power – civil, political, even ecclesial – to “destroy the human”, reducing freedom and the relationship with the Infinite. The limit of any power is precisely true religiosity, that is, a living self, awakened in its desire. Hence Carrón’s insistence that Christianity, in order to be credible, must subject itself to the “tribunal of experience”: only if the relationship with Christ generates a “reawakening of the human” in all its dimensions – reason, freedom, affection, desire – does the Christian proclamation prove itself equal to the human need.
In dialogue with Charles Taylor and Rowan Williams, Carrón also recognizes that we no longer live in Christendom, but in a truly “secular age”, in which there is no longer any automatic correlation between civil belonging and ecclesial belonging. Secularization is not read as a mere catastrophe, but as an opportunity and even as a “vocation”: a time in which the human being, wounded and disoriented, remains nevertheless irreducibly desiring, thirsty for a fullnesscapable of satisfying his need for meaning. In this context, faith can no longer rely on external guarantees, on political privileges or on a system of norms. It must appear for what it is: not “a set of rules incapable of responding to the thirst” of the human heart, but the encounter with an exceptional reality, historical and present, that changes the way of looking at everything. Christianity, Carrón writes in Abitare il nostro tempo (“Dwelling in Our Time”), is an event that makes it possible to inhabit uncertainty “without fear”, not because it eliminates the crisis, but because it introduces into the crisis a presence that fills life with meaning.
In the light of this genealogy, taking distance from collateralism and from the use of the “CL vote” as manipulable mass is not a tactical adjustment, but the consequence of a judgment of faith: the Christian presence in history can be significant only if it remains a sign of a different humanity – verifiable in experience – and does not allow itself to be reduced to a cog in the machinery of power. It is within this horizon that we must read, in the account of what has happened in recent years just presented, the flyer on Englaro, the letter on abuse and the mea culpa on the “Formigoni system”.
M.P. and fr. E.V.
Silere non possum