On Thursday morning, September 19, 2019, Pope Francis received Father Julian Carron, President of the Communion and Liberation Fraternity (CL), one of the more widespread post-conciliar ecclesial realities in Italy and in the world.
The Holy See Press Office reported this morning’s meeting, which was held in the Vatican.
Father Julian Carron is a Spanish priest, born on February 25, 1950 in Navaconcejo (Caceres) in Extremadura, Spain. A University Professor and scholar of the New Testament, he met Father Giussani in the ‘80s.
After Father Giussani’s death in March of 2005, the central deaconry elected him President of the Communion and Liberation Fraternity and, shortly after, the Pontifical Council for the Laity appointed him Assistant Ecclesiastic of the Memores Domini. In March of 2014 he was confirmed President of the Fraternity for the next six years.
On October 11, 2013, Pope Francis received him in a private audience. In a subsequent letter to the Fraternity and to the whole Movement, Father Carron invited members to verify “if each one of us, each community of our Movement ’makes the essential visible, namely, Jesus Christ?’” It was a topic to which he returned in the audience that the Holy Father gave CL in St. Peter’s Square on March 7, 2015, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Father Giussani’s death.
In April of 2016, on the occasion of a new private audience with Pope Francis, Father Carron wrote a letter to the Fraternity: “I believe there is nothing that will help us more than the constant tension to identify ourselves with the witness that Pope Francis gives us daily.”
On November 30 of that year, the holy Father sent a signed letter to CL’s President, to thank the whole Movement for the donation collected during the pilgrimages of the Holy Year of Mercy.
Pope Francis received Father Julian Carron in audience on Friday, February 2, 2018. In that meeting, the leader of Communion and Liberation expressed his desire to “be able to share with the Pope the steps we have taken and the journey we have made after the audience we had with him in St. Peter’s Square, and after the suggestions he made to us there for our journey, and the letter on poverty that he sent us; and the steps we have proposed to ourselves, to follow him with all the initiatives that we have undertaken in this regard.”
