Rome - With the election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, within and around Communion and Liberation the latent tensions do not ease: they increase. And, to understand how and by whom the channel to the new Pontiff is built - precisely while the operation to corner Fr. Julián Carrón takes shape - we must follow a precise thread: that of a circle that grew up in the shadow of Fr. Giacomo Tantardini.
Tantardini, a priest with a controversial profile, cultivated for years a “behind-the-scenes” reading of ecclesial life: scandals, subterfuges, palace manoeuvres become the lens through which to look at Rome and the Church. Around this approach a small school forms, with names that will later reappear in “Catholic” journalism: Stefania Falasca, Andrea Tornielli, Gianni Valente, and others. It is a world that enters information-circles bringing along the same reflexes: the idea that the Church is above all a field of forces, a system of balances and conflicts, more than a place of faith and conversion.
Between 2009 and 2012, at Tantardini’s prompting and under his direction, Falasca and Tornielli (and the circle gravitating around 30Giorni) work to build and consolidate a narrative of the cardinal from Buenos Aires: interviews, profiles, reconstructions. It is in that season that Bergoglio is “introduced” to a part of European Catholic opinion through a precise frame, often more functional to a cultural and ecclesial battle than faithful to the real complexity of the person.
The election of the Archbishop of Buenos Aires
When Bergoglio is elected, that group accelerates: the goal is not only to recount the new Pope, but to enter his perimeter, become reliable interlocutors, offer interpretive keys and maps of the “good guys” and “bad guys” inside the Church. They themselves, over the years, will recount a highly symbolic detail: immediately after the election, Bergoglio contacted them directly - a phone call to Stefania Falasca and Gianni Valente - sealing a relationship already prepared before the conclave.
It is here that the decisive passage for the history of CL in the “post-2013” period is grafted: the perception the new Pontiff develops of the movement does not arise in a vacuum. It is filtered by a narrative delivered by those who, in turn, received it within the Tantardinian horizon. And Tantardini - while recognizing the stature of Fr. Luigi Giussani, who kept him close - harbored for years an unresolved relationship with CL, between esteem for the founder and resentment toward an environment he perceived as capable of relegating him to the margins.
On this ground, a part of “backstage” information fuses with ecclesiastical circles interested in delegitimizing leadership and figures deemed competing or hostile. It is not a detail: it is a method. And it is within this method - amid media pressure, suggestions, oriented reconstructions and contacts built in advance - that the season of dossiers and campaigns against individual prelates matures (Angelo Scola, Stanisław Jan Dziwisz, etc...). In those contexts, moreover, Fr. Julián Carrón was often perceived as the “lesser evil”: the Spanish priest was considered extraneous to traditional Italian power games and, precisely for this reason, deemed little interested in dynamics of command. Initially, for them, he is not “a man to be targeted”.
There is then a mechanism that recurs insistently: some figures (Tornielli, Falasca and others) tend to draw near to those who are on the rise, to support and flatter them as long as power holds; when instead their influence declines, they quickly step aside and, if convenient, also contribute to further weakening their image.
The very fact that a man goes on television boasting of his friendship with the Holy Father just elected says a great deal about the principles that guide the members of this faction.
In this scheme, Tornielli is also indicated by several prelates within the Holy See as one of the most skilful interpreters. A bishop recounts how particularly capable this man is of feeding a circuit of indiscretions and reconstructions that are entirely unreliable: from the dissemination of confidential letters to strike at the figure of Scola but which then turned out to be a way to attack Carrón, to contacts with cardinals and bishops to gather information on one priest or another, up to a reciprocal exchange in which he also circulates untrue news. A method that, as we have seen in these years, he also uses against those who have the courage to bring his shabby figure to light: he has personal attacks rebound (homophobic insults, defamation and slander) and cultivates relationships and alliances with controversial figures, already removed from their dioceses and convicted by Italian courts for very serious crimes. In summary, Tornielli - but also Falasca, who in these years has made her fortune by instrumentalizing her link with Bergoglio and in particular later with Pietro Parolin - ends up embodying in an exemplary way that “method” attributed to Tantardini: a mechanism that does not inform, but wears down and poisons. But we will speak of this in a dedicated episode in which we will publish some exclusive audio-video content.
The movement against the Pope
When Francis receives Communion and Liberation for the sixtieth anniversary of the movement and for the tenth anniversary of the death of Fr. Luigi Giussani, he arrives at that appointment with a perception already strongly oriented: the movement has been recounted to him through the filter of Tantardini and the circle that revolves around him. It is a decisive junction, because the encounter with CL, the one made of flesh, of stories, of women and men who have encountered Christ also thanks to the figure of the Gius, does not take place in a vacuum, but within a web of “pre-packaged” relationships and readings. To this is added a political-ecclesial datum that weighs heavily: the conflictual relationship matured around the figure of Angelo Scola, with whom Bergoglio had also measured himself in the conclave and whom he already hated for the things that Gianni Valente, Andrea Tornielli, Stefania Falasca, had told him. Let us not forget the dossiers that these cliques prepared in those years. Precisely that environment has been among the principal suppliers of a narrative that ties the Italian episcopate to Scola and to CL; a narrative that Francis ends up assuming as an interpretive key. And in the background remains the gaffe of the CEI, which even went so far as to offer congratulations to the “newly elected Pope Angelo Scola”: an episode that, in the first years of the pontificate, contributes to further stiffening his gaze on the Episcopal Conference, marking it with distrust and irritation.
In the audience of 7 March 2015 Francis speaks in an affectionate tone but with clear warnings: “the center is not the charism, the center is Jesus Christ”, and above all the warning against self-referentiality—the “label spirituality” of “I am CL”—up to the most irritating thrust, the one that warns against reducing the experience to organization or power: “we will end up transforming ourselves into mere managers of an NGO”.
That discourse, addressed to the eighty thousand people present in St. Peter’s Square, sounded like a public correction: Francis asks to “decenter”, not to “petrify” the inheritance (“it is the devil who petrifies”), not to turn Giussani into a “museum of memories” nor to worship “the ashes”, but to keep “the fire” alive. Precisely those passages - perceived as a judgment on the concrete form assumed by the movement - are received with irritation by a part of CL: not as a fatherly reminder, but as an attack; not as a proposal of freedom, but as a delegitimization. It is there that the fracture becomes visible: the Pope speaks of conversion and of going out, the movement feels it is being put on trial. From there begins Carrón’s struggle in the attempt to get CL to accept the pontificate of Pope Francis.
Victims of the Santa Marta method
A struggle that, years later, Silere non possum criticized in harsh tones: Carrón was paying the price that, in different forms, many have paid in the relationship with Jorge Mario Bergoglio, that of having defended “the Pope” and of finding oneself exposed to a climate of gossip and backbiting that ended up becoming a system. And, paradoxically, precisely those who had expended themselves to preserve ecclesial unity were then struck by decisions countersigned by the Pontiff that were entirely disproportionate and not grounded in real reasons. It was not an isolated case. The CL affair is one of the many dynamics that emerged during the pontificate of Francis: a context in which what seemed to prevail were the voices of those who managed to gain closer access, even through ambiguous relationships. In this key, Francis ended up favoring even some of his enemies—wolves disguised as lambs—skilful, however, in presenting themselves and in practicing what attracted him most: the salon, proximity, informal mediation.
Francis modulated words and judgments also according to who managed to intercept him, to impose on him a narrative of events, to filter people and facts until they appeared in a different light. And here lies the most painful paradox: if there was someone who, more than others, was trying to do exactly what that 2015 discourse asked—decenter, not petrify, keep the fire alive—that was precisely Carrón.
The point, however, is another. Carrón chooses to welcome those words immediately and to tell them to the movement without exasperations: not as a verdict, but as a track of work already under way. He will offer the Spiritual Exercises precisely on this. He does not seek preferential channels, he does not attempt shortcuts to enter Santa Marta, he does not build subterfuges: he takes the indication seriously and treats it as a criterion to assume. On the contrary, those who were already dissatisfied - for political reasons and for a radical aversion to the innovations introduced by Carrón, which could truly have brought the movement out of self-referentiality - choose another path: that of activating contacts, seeking access, building supports. It is in that passage that the fracture, already visible, ceases to be only a dissent and becomes a method.
Politics and journalism: two powers, the same master
From the same Tantardinian school also comes Antonio Socci who, a few days after the audience, turns Francis’s discourse into an internal political crowbar. On 12 March 2015, in an article published in an Italian national daily, Socci argues - in substance - that the Pope’s warnings to CL are the result of Carrón’s management, setting against Bergoglio’s “warnings” a roundup of praises addressed to the movement by previous Popes, almost to say: the problem is not CL, it is who leads it. The point that Socci omits, however, is decisive: between 2005 and 2013 even Benedict XVI repeatedly praised CL when Carrón was already in leadership, and - as we documented in the third episode of the investigation - Carrón continually called the movement to put into practice precisely what the Magisterium asked.
It is the reflex of a journalism used as a weapon, not as an instrument of understanding. It is what happens when newspapers and bylines work for a political or ideological positioning: a fragment of reality is isolated, enlarged until it becomes “everything”, and passed off as the definitive key to reading, erasing the context and the evidence that contradict it.
And yet, it is precisely certain positions - relayed by newspapers, blogs and even Facebook pages - that ought to make one prick up one’s ears. These are environments often contiguous to the far right and, at the same time, constantly vulgar and defamatory toward the Pope (whoever he may be). They do not inform: they build a frame, and inside that frame they insert every fact. The method is recognizable. They offer a distorted reading of reality, hint at documents and “papers” that are never published—because clearly they do not have them—but still ask the reader for an act of trust: “we will take care of explaining how things stand”, according to their gaze, their priorities, their targets. And the question that those who observe these reconstructions should ask themselves is: why do these “interpretations” always end up striking priests and confirming not an interest in communion and ecclesiality, but a constant urgency of propaganda? More than a Catholic reading of events, it often seems an operation oriented to legitimizing categories and languages of fascist origin—or in any case radically identitarian—disguised as the defense of the faith. If we look for the words “Jesus Christ” in these blogs we will find them far less than “Donald Trump”, “Giorgia Meloni”, etc...
Checkmate to the Pontiff
After the March 2015 audience ends, Carrón intervenes to stop at the outset those who, within the movement, invoke a “stance” against the Pope. His recall is clear: in St. Peter’s Square—he says—CL relived “the experience of the encounter with Christ”, recognizing that “primerear” of which Francis had spoken; and precisely that gaze, he adds, prevents reducing the charism to a “museum of memories”, calls to “keep the fire alive and not worship the ashes”, and protects from self-referentiality. In other words: Carrón invites reading the warnings not as an affront, but as a confirmation of the direction already pursued for years, in ecclesial obedience and in fidelity to Giussani’s intuition. And yet, while Carrón tries to recombine, others choose the opposite operation: to use those words to do exactly what Socci is doing in the press, that is, to turn the audience into a trial and the trial into a weapon. The project is to orient Pope Francis, presenting to him a “turnkey” reading of CL and its internal balances. The Pontiff had already been “mapped” in his relational style, in his way of listening and of granting audiences, and around that opening factions and friendships move ready to turn proximity into influence. The objective, concretely, was not clarification but the channel: to obtain, first of all, a private audience with the Pope without Carrón’s knowledge.
At the head of this design are Mario Molteni and Andrea Perrone, who decide to go to the Pope claiming that Carrón is distancing the movement from society and making it self-referential. They attempt a first access to Santa Marta through an ex Memores Domini, a friend of Francis since the time of Argentina; but that channel does not open, because those who guard it know the protagonists well and do not intend to act as intermediaries.
The opening comes later, through a foundation linked to the Catholic University: thus Molteni and Perrone obtain access and, to the Pope, they set the dossier on a precise point, indicating in Carrón the cause of CL’s problems. It is here that the dynamic becomes explosive: while Carrón is trying to educate a movement that, in part, rejects the new Pope and reacts with irritation to his words, others manage to present themselves as credible interlocutors and to steer the conversation in the opposite direction, with the goal of striking Carrón. In that meeting, the political contours and cultural affiliations that fuel the initiative remain in the background, and the objective of pushing the movement toward a more marked alignment is not made explicit. The Pope receives instead a simplified picture: a responsible party already indicated and a crisis traced entirely to that name. From there, it will be Francis who directs them toward the new Prefect of the Dicastery for the Laity, the Family and Life, Joseph Kevin Farrell. Thus begins a continuous shuttle between Milan and Rome: at regular intervals, exponents of that group of the dissatisfied present themselves at Piazza Pio XII with audio recordings and selected speeches, fragmented, recomposed, to argue before the Prefect that “Carrón is appropriating the charism”.
If with the Pope the lever was self-referentiality—a theme capable of breaking through in his way of reading ecclesial life—with the Dicastery the strategy changes: everything is concentrated on the lexicon of the charism, of “appropriation”, of the alleged deviation from the origin. A terrain that, over the years, becomes increasingly sensitive because in other realities, truly, certain drifts have existed and have produced damage. It is a classic mechanism: when the problem is not there but one wants to build it to strike a person, one ends up tailoring the suit on the problem. Clues are gathered, “convincing evidence” is packaged, elements are put together which, isolated and oriented, serve to persuade whoever holds power to intervene against the target. Not to clarify reality, but to direct its outcome.
To these have been added figures who, for ideological-political reasons, have always opposed Carrón and have always desired a Communion and Liberation aligned politically, present also in initiatives like the Family Day. These include some Memores Domini, Giancarlo Cesana with the entire entourage of Tempi, Luigi Negri (deceased on 31 December 2021) and also those who have cultivated their own “creation” as a parallel reality with respect to the indications of the President of Communion and Liberation, such as Bishop Massimo Camisasca.
Camisasca is the founder of the Priestly Fraternity of the Missionaries of St. Charles Borromeo, a reality that over the years has seen more people leave by fleeing than those ordained. We met a cardinal who told us of “serious abuses of conscience within the San Carlo seminary and a method that, for years, has led many young men to depression”. On this point, and on much else, we will return in the fifth episode of the investigation.
fr.E.V., fr.L.C. and M.P.
Silere non possum