Communion
and Liberation
Another Conservative Roman
Catholic Group
Gripped by Scandal
A Guest Document
by John Allen on May. 02, 2012
[highlights by The M+G+R
Foundation]
ROME -- For a long time it was Opus Dei, and then,
even before massive sex scandals exploded around their founder, it was
the Legionaries of Christ. Today, at least in Italy, it now seems
Communion and Liberation's turn to be the conservative Catholic group
generating the most controversy, the sexiest news headlines, and the
greatest volume of conspiracy theories.
That's likely a special source of
heartburn for Pope Benedict XVI, for whom Communion and Liberation has
always been his personal favorite among the new movements in the
Catholic church.
It's also a colossal case of bad timing, since a
beatification cause for the group's founder, the late Italian Fr. Luigi
Giussani, was recently opened and endorsed by the bishops of Lombardy,
the region where the cause is based.
Want an index of how hot the
spotlight has been?
Cardinal Angelo Scola of Milan, widely seen as a leading
candidate to be the next pope and someone with a background in
Communion and Liberation, obviously now feels compelled to distance
himself. Scola told a group of reporters on April 26: "What do I know
about Communion and Liberation? I deal with the church of God. If you
want to know something about Communion and Liberation, go ask them."
Another sign of the times is that Giussani's successor,
Spanish Fr. Julián Carrón, recently wrote a letter to an
Italian newspaper confessing the group's "great humiliation," conceding
that if so many people see the group in terms of money and power "we
must have given them some pretext," and apologizing for the
"superficiality" with which some in the group have lived out Giussani's
inspiration.
To be sure, this isn't the first time Communion and
Liberation has been at the center of a media storm. In the mid-1970s,
there was a brief flurry of speculation that it was actually a CIA
front. The difference today is that the underlying cause of the tempest
is not rumor, but serious legal charges against some of the group's
most prominent members.
For an outfit that has long prided itself on close ties to
the Italian political scene, it was perhaps inevitable that such a bill
would one day come due.
Robert Formigoni, the highest profile adherent of
Communion and Liberation in Italian politics, now finds himself
embroiled in a deepening corruption scandal. The longtime governor of
the Lombardy region is at the centre of a judicial investigation into
bribery for the awarding of public health contracts. He also faces
charges of suspicious ties to a shady businessman now in jail on
corruption charges, and of using public funds to pay for his private
vacations.
Formigoni is a member of Memores
Domini, a body of consecrated laity committed to lifelong celibacy,
which is part of the broader Communion and Liberation movement. Four
female members of Memores Domini staff Benedict XVI's papal household.
Another veteran member of Communion and Liberation,
Antonio Simone, has already been arrested and charged with being part
of a scheme to bilk as much as $74 million from a well-known Italian
health institute. According to media reports, Simone's personal
Catholic piety is the stuff of legend; apparently, during the
1990s, when he held public office as an assessor in Lombardy, he would
convoke his staff for morning prayer before beginning the day's work.
Riffing off those bombshells, an Italian paper recently did a
write-up of all the various public officials and tycoons in Lombardy
with ties to Communion and Liberation, under the provocative title, Comunione
a Molto Poltrone, meaning "communion and lots of seats of power."
Among other things, the article suggested that businesses with ties
to Communion and Liberation control assets in excess of almost $100
billion, representing five percent of Italy's Gross Domestic Product.
As Opus Dei and other Catholic movements have done before,
Communion and Liberation has tried to explain that the mere fact a
businessman belongs to the group doesn't mean the group controls his
business, still less that it owns the assets of that business. Such
nuance, however, has been largely lost in the present climate.
At first, spokespersons for Communion and Liberation put
on the mantle of martyrs, complaining of a "media lynching" which is
taking on "the face of a Calvary that we don't deserve."
The May 1 letter from Carrón indicates something of a
shift in tactics, or at least in tone. Rather than complaining of
unfair treatment, Carrón apologized for the failure of some
members to follow Giussani's lead - although he did add, "It will be up
to the judges to determine if the errors committed by some also
constitute crimes."
It remains to be seen if that softer, gentler approach
will be enough to put out the fire. One early test would seem to be
whether the sainthood cause for Giussani moves forward quickly, or is
put on a back burner while the current scandals play out.
Communion and Liberation was founded in Italy in the 1950s
as an outgrowth of Giussani's teaching and youth ministry. Today it's
an international movement present in roughly 80 countries around the
world, including a small footprint in the United States, where its
best-known exponent is Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete.
Among the core ideas of Communion and Liberation is that of
the encounter with Christ as an "experience" which transforms all of
one's life. As a result, the group sharply rejects any effort to
style Christianity as a purely private matter without social
consequences.
Communion and Liberation sponsors an enormous annual
meeting in the Italian seaside city of Rimini, which is usually seen in
Italy as the informal kick-off to the annual political season after the
summer break because of its all-star lineup of political and
journalistic heavyweights. The meeting often draws around 700,000
people, and is seen by many observers as a cross-section of Catholic
civil society.
Over the years, Communion and Liberation has sometimes
been seen as a right-wing alternative to the more progressive ethos of
other sectors of the Italian church, especially in the vast Milan
archdiocese from 1980 to 2002 under Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, a
hero to the church's more liberal wing
Original
Source
Return to News
Commentary page
Published on May 2012
The M+G+R Foundation
Please Note: If the above dated image does not appear
on this document, it means that you are not viewing the original
document from our servers. Should you have reason to doubt the
authenticity of the document, we recommend that you access our server
again and click on the "Refresh" or "Reload" button of your Browser to
view the original document.