Rome – In recent weeks Silere non possum has published several articles on internal dynamics within Comunione e Liberazione (Communion and Liberation, CL). As so often happens, especially in movements and lay associations, when one is prodded from the outside the first reaction is to close ranks defensively. It is an understandable, human attitude, and up to a point it is fine. We, however, want to go further.
Our aim is twofold: to offer a tool for reflection to those who live inside this extraordinary intuition of Fr Luigi Giussani, and at the same time to those who observe everything from the outside. Those on the inside are called to a real step of maturity: to open up, to listen, to observe, to try to understand those narratives that have often been received as something “handed down from above” and never truly verified. In this sense, it is a matter of taking seriously what Silere non possum will report today and in the future, in our usual style: documents, texts, acts. Not speculations or mere opinions, but facts.
Those looking from the outside, instead, are invited to suspend their prejudices and to take seriously a reality that has all too often been hastily labelled as corrupt, thirsty for power, anxious to occupy political spaces and prominent roles. It is precisely from these prejudices – sometimes not entirely far from reality – that we must start, if we really want to understand the journey that Comunione e Liberazione had begun to undertake in a physiological way. And to do this, it is necessary to go back to the roots of the theological thought of the one whom “Gius” indicated as his natural successor.
We state the aim immediately – so as to spare conspiracy theorists useless flights of fancy: it is a matter of bringing a bit of truth to light. This is what, as Catholics, we seek and toward which we tend. Truth about what has happened in recent years and about how we arrived at the letter of 13 November 2025, signed by Davide Prosperi. It will be a demanding yet fascinating journey, as those beside me, making it together with you, can assure you. A journey that will enable you to understand in depth what you have probably only intuited so far, heard in a partial way, at times distorted, and almost never verified with evidence and documents.
The theological thought of Fr Carrón
To understand Carrón’s theology, one must start from his diagnosis of contemporary man. He notes that our time is marked by a «particular historical moment, dominated by confusion and by the decline of desire», a condition in which the I appears emptied, incapable of truly desiring and of judging reality. It is not, in his view, only an economic or moral crisis, but a crisis in our relationship with reality: reason is reduced to a technical instrument, the heart to a vague feeling, desire to consumption. Carrón insists that the Christian is by no means sheltered from this climate. On the contrary, he notes that believers often «think like everyone else, with the same mentality as everyone else», because that criterion of judgment they bear within – the heart, which for him is «reason and affection together» – is obscured by the dominant confusion. For this reason, his theological discourse does not start from a system of abstract concepts, but from a particular idea of the human person: a subject marked by constitutive needs for truth, justice, beauty, happiness, which cannot be silenced even when the dominant culture tries to reduce him to his functions.
Drawing on the lesson of Fr Luigi Giussani and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Carrón explains that in the human being there is «something that does not derive from biological tradition» but that points to a «direct relationship with the Infinite». This is what he calls the religious sense: the elementary structure of the I, the need for meaning that no partial answer can exhaust. This anthropology is not a neutral prologue: it is already a theological position. For Carrón, in fact, to speak of God always implies taking seriously «the way in which man feels, desires, suffers». A faith that does not awaken the human subject, that does not rekindle the heart, is destined to become marginal or purely moralistic.
Christianity as an event that happens in history
On this anthropological background, Carrón situates his Christology. The key word is “event”. He states that «the nature of Christianity is to be an event. There is no other word that defines it better». Christianity, therefore, is not first and foremost a doctrine, a morality, a cultural tradition or a system of values; it is a fact: the Word made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, within history. Carrón often insists that Christianity happens when a person «intercepts the Christian event along the road of life» and discovers that it corresponds to his or her deepest needs, to his or her religious sense. It is not a matter, then, of adhering to an idea, but of being reached by a presence: an encounter that seizes the I and changes it.
The decisive point, from a theological point of view, is not simply that Christ existed, but that He is contemporary to today’s human being. For this reason Carrón poses a question: how does Christ remain contemporary? It is not enough for him to say that Christ is a figure of the past to be imitated. He maintains that the Christian event remains today as a presence within the Church, a concrete company of men and women in whom there becomes visible «a new creature», a humanity otherwise inexplicable for its joy, freedom and capacity to relate to reality. In this sense, the Church is not only an institution, but the place where the living Christ continues to happen.
Faith, reason, experience: Christian verification
If Christianity is an event that offers itself to the I, the question that Fr Julián Carrón asks is whether it is reasonable to adhere to it today. In his book The Beauty Disarmed (La bellezza disarmata), the Spanish priest takes up quite explicitly Ratzinger’s dialogue with modernity. He notes, citing the then cardinal, that the crisis of Christian preaching depends on the fact that «Christian answers neglect the questions of the human being» and therefore do not touch the real life of those who hear them. If faith presents itself as a package of answers that do not arise from the questions of the heart, it ends up on the margins. His theological proposal is very effective: the religious sense is not just a step to be overcome in order to reach faith, but remains a permanent measure. As Carrón writes, «a living religious sense represents a verification of faith», because faith must prove capable of illuminating and fulfilling the needs of reason, affection, and freedom. In other words, faith is continuously «brought before the tribunal of experience»: if it does not withstand the impact of life, it becomes implausible. This does not mean, in his intention, handing everything over to subjective whim. Rather, it means that the truth of faith is recognised from within an experience that appears more human: more corresponding to the heart, less reductive of reason. Carrón asks the Christian to verify whether the encounter with Christ broadens the horizon, strengthens the intelligence of reality, supports freedom. It is a missionarily powerful position, because it takes the interlocutor’s freedom seriously, but it carries an inevitable question: to what extent does “experience” remain an instrument of recognition and not become a sovereign criterion that judges everything, dogma included?
Enlarging reason, saving freedom
Carrón links this centrality of experience to his reading of the Western crisis. In his view, the West is undergoing a crisis of reason and a crisis of freedom. On the one hand, he denounces the reduction of the rational to what is technically measurable: when reason becomes a purely scientific function, «reason and knowledge no longer have any relationship with life» and the great questions of meaning are expelled into the sphere of the subjective, the irrelevant private. On the other hand, Carrón sees that the dominant culture absolutises freedom understood as the absence of bonds, while at the same time emptying it of content: a freedom without a goal, that does not know what is worth living for.
Against this caricature, he proposes a Christian vision in which freedom is the capacity to say yes to one’s own fulfilment, a risky response to an attraction. In his writings this is very clear: the Mystery has accepted the risk of creating a free human being because only a freedom that is attracted, not forced, can love.
From here derives his conviction that Christianity enlarges reason and saves freedom. It enlarges reason because it introduces into history a fact – Jesus Christ – that enables reason to measure itself against the totality of the real, not just the technical segment. It saves freedom because it places it before a beauty that asks for adhesion, not blind obedience. Where Christianity is reduced to duty or code, freedom rebels; where it is perceived as a fascinating event, freedom can finally find a direction that is not imposed.
The Church as companionship and “disarmed beauty”
The book The Beauty Disarmed, which Carrón wrote in 2015 while Europe was going through a season of cultural disorientation and economic crisis, is a synthesis of the method he proposes to the Church. The priest, then at the head of Comunione e Liberazione, in that historical moment gathered a series of interventions and lessons into a volume that became a sort of organic summary of his theological thought. The context in which Carrón chose to publish this text is that of a weary West, marked by the decline of desire and distrust of institutions. The underlying question that runs through it is clear: can Christian faith still say something reasonable, credible and public in the age of relativism and mild nihilism? Faced with a pluralist society, therefore, he maintains that Christian presence cannot be based on power, numbers, or cultural hegemony. Instead, it must rely on the power of attraction of a beauty that does not need armed defences, because it imposes itself on its own.
Carrón writes that the evangelical proposal must appear «simpler, deeper, more radiant» and that what convinces is not cultural pressure, but Christianity lived as an «event charged with attractiveness, which seizes the human being by its beauty». The Church, he explains, should first of all generate places where a different humanity can be seen: freer relationships, work lived as vocation, affections not reduced to possession, a non-idolatrous use of money. This witness is worth more than any communication strategy. It is precisely for this reason that Carrón is very careful not to turn the Church into just another political actor – and we will see that this is the point on which some began a merciless battle against the Spanish priest within the movement. The Church’s primary task, he insists, is not to occupy spaces in public debate, but to generate a people: men and women who are free, in whom Christ is visibly at work. Against this background, his statements on politics and on Catholics engaged in public life become more intelligible.
Ethics, affectivity and the crisis of the I: a decisive passage
A concrete testing ground for Carrón’s theology is his reading of the crisis of the family and of affectivity. When he addresses the theme of marriage, Carrón avoids the purely defensive tone that characterises a certain portion of pseudo-“Catholics”: those who, as Silere non possum has often shown, enter the Church because they perceive it as a place of power, where roles can be obtained and relationships cultivated to secure positions. In this climate, their political ideas – often very intransigent towards others but careful not to expose their own failings – end up being covered and legitimised through a selective and distorted use of the Gospel.
Carrón removes the movement from this deadly loop, which has exposed the innovative work of Fr Giussani to no small amount of criticism over the course of its history, and decides to address these issues with lucidity. The Spanish priest explains that the fragility of relationships is not only the result of bad laws, but of a deeper crisis of the I: without an educated subject, even legislation most favourable to marriage cannot prevent the drift. Carrón recalls that «good laws have not been enough» to keep alive a Christian vision of the human being, and cites as proof the fact that in legally “protected” contexts the prevailing mentality has nonetheless shifted in the opposite direction. Hence the conviction that structures are useful, but not sufficient: «the human being can never be redeemed simply from the outside». The education of the I, the generation of adult and free personalities, is worth more than any legal framework. This line of thought, applied to private ethics, is then transferred by Carrón to the terrain of politics, with all the consequences that entails.
Event before values: the critique of “political Christianity”
When Carrón speaks of politics, he does not start from strategies, but from a judgment on how Christians have often lived their relationship with public life. He notes, rightly, that in part of the Catholic world the defence of values has, in many cases, ended up mattering more than the proclamation of Christ himself. He speaks of an «exchange between antecedent and consequent», in which people have tried to save Christian civilisation by preserving its ethical principles, while the source – the event of Grace – was effectively bracketed. In this context, Carrón recovers Rémi Brague’s expression of “Christianist Christianity”: a Christianity «deprived of Grace», reduced to a system of norms and values to be imposed or proposed culturally. Against this drift, he affirms that «the vital sap of the values of the person is not Christian laws or confessional juridical and political structures, but the event of Christ».
This does not mean that values are irrelevant, but that they must be put back in their place: they come after. First comes the encounter with Christ that generates a new I; from this I, and from the life of a people, there arise over time juridical, cultural and political forms that are coherent. Wherever the opposite operation is attempted – saving Christianity through law – one ends up, Carrón explains, producing a sterile and often counterproductive rigidity. And it is precisely this attitude of some pseudo-“Catholics” that not only drives people away, but legitimately leads them to scrutinise the lives of those who cry out for “traditional values” and judge everyone. Thus it becomes clear that those who preach God, Country and Family often have very little to teach: they use the Church and the name of God to back their political ideas, they do not truly defend the country starting from the weakest but side with the strongest and the richest, and on family they have scant credibility, because their own lives are often more disordered than those of many whom they pretend to admonish.
Political commitment: necessary but “katechontic”
Despite this critique of “political Christianity”, Carrón is by no means a neutralist. On the contrary, he is very clear in stating that the Christian cannot withdraw from public life. As he has written, «those who are engaged on the public stage, in the cultural or political sphere, have the duty, as Christians, to oppose the current anthropological drift». Commitment in politics and culture «remains necessary», especially where the destiny of the common good is decided.
However, Carrón specifies that today this commitment assumes, «in the Pauline sense, predominantly a katechontic value», that is, a role of restraint and containment. Christians in politics, according to him, are called to exercise a function «of critique and containment, within the limits of the possible, of the negative effects of pure procedures and of the mentality that is their cause». In a system that reduces everything to democratic procedures detached from any idea of truth, it is already a lot to be able to limit the damage. Carrón does not harbour illusions about the salvific capacity of politics. In his judgment, we cannot expect from politics «the ideal and spiritual renewal of the city of men»: this task belongs to «a new humanity generated by love for Christ». Laws can help, hold back, correct, but they cannot replace the source. Here returns, in another form, the critique of political Pelagianism: the idea that good legislative engineering is enough to regenerate the human fabric of a society.
The other as a good: a political and ecclesial principle
One of the most interesting aspects of Carrón’s political thought concerns the way of conceiving the other, especially when that other is an adversary. Starting from the Christian experience of communion, he maintains that without the awareness that the other is a good for my life it is impossible to emerge from the current crisis of personal and social relationships. He writes that if there is no place in us for «the experience that the other is a good for the fullness of our I», in politics as in human relationships it will be impossible to build a different coexistence. This statement is not left at a generic level. Carrón applies it directly to Catholic politicians, stressing that “the first” called to live this logic are precisely them. And he notes, with a certain bitterness, that «many times they appear more defined by party alignments than by the self-awareness of their ecclesial experience and by the desire for the common good». In other words, many Catholics engaged in politics seem to be formed more by the culture of their party than by the living experience of the Church. And this is the experience we often have when we criticise or applaud some choice of this or that politician and witness the reaction of that band of pseudo-traditionalists who rise up as if the majesty of their current leader had been offended.
Here lies the crux: belonging to a party does not mean always being right, nor does it imply that every one of its proposals is good just because it is “closer than others” to “Catholic values”. If the criterion becomes the party cardrather than Christ and his Gospel, we get nowhere: we do not bring our experience of faith, we practice only a form of ideological belonging disguised as religion. Carrón also observes that when a person’s consistency rests solely in politics, he or she tends to cling to power and conflict as the only form of public survival. If, on the other hand, one’s deepest identity is rooted elsewhere – in belonging to Christ and the Church – politics can become a sphere of responsibility and service, not the place where one stakes one’s ultimate value. Here again the theological link emerges: only an I regenerated by the Christian event is able to live politics without idolising it.
Church and politics: distinct but not separate roles
From these premises, Carrón draws a clear distinction between the task of the Church as such and the task of individual Christians in public life. The Church, in his view, must not «intervene in the political arena as one of many parties», presenting itself as a partisan actor in competition with others. Its specific task is another: to show, through the life of the Christian people, the truth of man and of God, generating persons capable of responsibility and freedom. Christians engaged in politics, instead, are called to translate, according to the rules of democracy and in the light of Catholic social teaching, what their experience of faith has verified as good for coexistence. In a pluralist context, they cannot claim to impose confessional solutions, but neither can they renounce giving reasons for the positive character of the Christian vision of the human being. Their originality does not lie in flaunting a Catholic label, but in bringing into public life a different gaze on the human being and on the other.
An assessment: strengths and questions in Carrón’s thought
It is clear that Carrón’s theological thought presents itself as a coherent attempt to rethink Christianity in the age of the crisis of the West. His repeated affirmation of the primacy of the event over any system of values and norms avoids both intimist retreat and the dream of a juridical Christian restoration. His idea of disarmed beauty frees faith from the temptation of power and strongly relaunches the way of witness. His katechontic reading of politics helps not to load the State and laws with salvific expectations they cannot fulfil.
For Carrón everything is at stake in one point: what can truly generate a subject capable of standing in history – and thus also in politics – without yielding either to resentment or to resignation, but bringing a real, free and disarmed presence? His answer seems clear: only a Christianity lived as a fascinating and reasonable experience, as an event that happens today, can produce men and women capable of a public presence up to the challenges of our time.
M.P. and fr.E.V.
Silere non possum