Pope Is "Decisive" for Communion and Liberation

Father Carrón Notes Commitment to Faith-Culture Dialogue

VATICAN CITY, DEC. 15, 2008 (Zenit.org).- The current pontificate is decisive for the life and history of the Catholic lay Communion and Liberation movement, says its president.

Father Julián Carrón said this today after he was received in audience by Benedict XVI.

"We are always very attentive to what the Pope tells us to orient us along our way," Father Carrón said. The priest is the successor of Monsignor Luigi Giussani, the founder of Communion and Liberation.

Father Carrón told Vatican Radio that he wanted to meet with the Holy Father to "tell him all that has happened and to share the fruits of the encounter" the group had with him a year ago.

"For our history, the relationship of Monsignor Giussani with then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has been very significant," Father Carrón added. "We, above all now, consider his magisterium to be decisive for our life as a movement, for our history.

"We are attentive to everything that the Pope says about the cultural presence of the faith."

The president emphasized that the movement "very much appreciated" the "great discourse at Regensburg [and] the recent address that the [Holy Father] gave in Paris to the men of culture," which was distributed to all movement members.

The fraternity, Father Carrón said, has committed itself to "spreading this perfection of culture that is born from belonging to the Christian experience, which is capable of engendering a humanity with a totally open rationality, as the Pope continually gives us witness."