How do we experience mercy? Above all, “when have we discovered we need mercy to live?” This question is the theme of the summer vacation for CL communities. It is a pressing question, at the end of such an intense year, marked by terrible events and high...
If there’s a word that can provoke instant disagreement and controversy today, it’s “Europe.” Not only because the Union is tangled in a knot of challenges proving harder and harder to unravel (the influx of migrants, the raising of walls, the risk of ....
This issue’s editorial is the letter written by Fr. Julián Carrón to Communion and Liberation after the audience with Pope Francis on April 14th, and one year after the meeting with the Movement in St. Peter’s square. Dear friends: As you know, on...
There is a portion of the world that we look at rarely, and even then, only sporadically. We do so on particular occasions, for example, when protestors, for or against Lula, filled the streets in Brazil, or when Barack Obama made a historic visit to Cuba...
There is so much arguing in the world and among Christians. People debate, often with vicious intensity. Divisions are formed that last for centuries, each side supported by mounds of good reasons.And suddenly, seemingly insurmountable barriers, fixed as...
That contribution can we Christians make to today’s troubled world? Everyone sees the suffering, and in varied ways it is in everyone’s life. It takes the form of what is happening on the global stage: terrorism, a “world war fought piecemeal,” the...
Dear Editor: It’s becoming more and more common for people to be amazed by simple, human gestures that we hardly pay attention to anymore, since to us they are so automatic and habitual. At a hospitality center for refugees, a volunteer calls a Pakistani...
Many of our readers will have already guessed the inspiration for this cover. Others may not, because they weren’t present and haven’t read the text of that meeting last month (CL’s Beginning Day in Italy), in which Fr. Julián Carrón surprised those...
Those who have had the grace to go at least once to Bethlehem or Nazareth know those places were truly a nothing, just holes and hewn rocks in the desert of places that even back then were periphery, unknown to the world.And yet God chose to become flesh...
It was a historic visit for multiple reasons, and the article found in this issue of Traces captures them well. Amidst the meaningful moments of Pope Francis’s trip to Cuba and the United States, one stood out as particularly touching for mothers and...
An image made its way around in the last month. It was of Aylan, the three-year-old Syrian child who drowned while traveling to the West and was found by a Turkish police officer on the beach in Bodrum. It’s impossible to look at that image without...
At the heart of Laudato Si’, amidst the many important questions that Pope Francis raises, we find one at the foundation of all else: “What kind of world do we want to leave to those who come after us, to children who are now growing up?” It’s not a...
We should reflect more often on this gospel. It is in our best interest because reality closes in on us so tight at times that it seems ready to crush and overwhelm us, yet in these lines we can always find solid ground on which to stand firm and carry...
Those words made a lasting impression on us. Months later, they are still fresh in our minds and our hearts. It was last summer, shortly after the invasion of Mosul and the expulsion of Christians, with ISIS on the march all over the area. The opening...
This issue’s editorial is an excerpt from the dialogue with Fr. Julián Carrón, conducted by the Mexican news agency Notimex and then published in Vatican Insider. The Movement’s expansion presents challenges.In many environments, the Movement...
Today in Saint Peter’s Square we have experienced anew the encounter with Christ. We saw Him primerear right before our eyes through the person and the gaze of Pope Francis, the same gaze that won over Matthew two thousand years ago, but present today!...
Dear Friends, As you all know by now, Pope Francis has granted our request for an audience in Saint Peter’s Square for the tenth anniversary of Fr. Giussani’s death and the sixtieth anniversary of the beginning of our Movement. The gratitude that...
Dear Editor, Pope Francis never ceases to amaze us. Speaking at the December 17th General Audience, he said, “The Incarnation of the Son of God opens a new beginning in the universal history of man and woman [...] within a family, in Nazareth [...], in...
So then, what are we here for? The reason is dual, and the second is the consequence of the first; one could say, immediate or contingent consequence of the first. The first is: we are here to say...We were walking along a road, we heard someone talking,...
Strange attitudes are emerging in certain sectors of the Catholic world. This phenomenon was clearly seen, for example, during the Synod on the Family, not so much in the debate among the Synod Fathers on the “new challenges” confronting family life today...
With its 180 days of classes—and accompanying sports team practices, games, club meetings, rehearsals, concerts, musicals, and hours of homework—school is certainly an ubiquitous part of American life. This year, 55 million students and 3.6 million...