Carrón (CL): “With His Choice of Name, He Shows Us That He Has No Other Wealth But Christ”

Following the news of the election of the new Pontiff Francis, Fr. Julián Carrón, President of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation, issued this statement:

Within the irrepressible joy of having a new guide for our community of believers, I am
struck by how he managed to communicate to us, from his very first movements, with simple
gestures comprehensible to everyone, where his gaze is fixed. With his choice of name, Francis, he
shows us that he has no other wealth but Christ. He trusts no modality of communicating this if not
plain and simple witness to Christ.

Pope Francis’s disarming request expressed the awareness that this witness is pure grace and
that we must beg for it: “I ask you to pray to the Lord that He will bless me.” In the Pope’s prayer,
together with the crowd in St. Peter’s Square, the miracle of the life that is the Church—whose
heart is Christ Himself—took shape before the eyes of the world.

I am struck by the profound harmony, founded on faith in Jesus Christ, between the realism
of Benedict XVI, who with his gesture reminded the world that the Church is Christ’s, and the
humble realism of Pope Francis, who immediately expressed the consciousness of his ministry as a
Bishop in communion and on a journey with the people of the Church of Rome, “which presides in
love over all the Churches,” according to a fitting expression by the great Saint Ignatius of Antioch.

Moved by the invitation to start the journey together, Bishop and people, we ask Our Lady
to grant each of us the abandonment to Christ that Francis witnesses to us in this moment.

Grateful to the Spirit, who gave a guide to His Church, we therefore start the journey
desiring to follow and to serve the Pope with all of ourselves, according to the teaching that we
received from Fr. Giussani: “The face of that single man [Christ] today is the unity of believers,
who are the sign of Him in the world, or as Saint Paul says, who are His Body, His mysterious
Body—also called ‘the people of God’—guided and guaranteed by a living person, the Bishop of
Rome.”

CL Press Office
Milan, March 14, 2013