Fr. Luciano Larivera (EUM) has been appointed as Secretary for European Affairs at the JESC. He is succeeding Fr. Martin Maier whose election as new director of Adveniat by the German Catholic Bishop Conference has been announced last month.

Fr. Larivera introduces himself:

I am Italian, born in 1968 in Milan, and both my parents had emigrated from the southern region of Molise. I am a former student of both the Jesuits of Leo XIII and the Luigi Bocconi University of Milan. After the year of compulsory military service, I entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1993. During the years of formation I lived in Genoa, Padua, Reggio Calabria, Naples and finally in Rome, where I was ordained a priest in 2004 and obtained my license in Moral Theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University.

From 2003 to 2015 I lived and worked at La Civiltà Cattolica, where I carried out my journalistic service especially on: foreign news, issues of international politics and economics, the evolution of the European Union project, the social doctrine of the Church. In 2010 I professed my final vows, after my Tertianship in Culver City (Los Angeles).

Since September 2015 I have lived and worked in the Jesuit community of Triste, in addition to various community and parish tasks, I directed the Veritas Cultural Center of the Jesuits, hosting father general, Arturo Sosa, for the 60th anniversary of the center in 2018. Among the cultural activities that I have promoted: the dissemination of Laudato si' and the UN 2030 Agenda for sustainable development; knowledge of other religions, in particular of Judaism, Islam and Tibetan Buddhism; meetings of Ignatian and biblical spirituality; training in journalistic ethics; the teaching of the Italian language for asylum seekers; reflection on the sustainable development of the port and the city of Trieste; finally, I promoted initiatives to deepen the geopolitical dynamics in the world and the implications in Europe, Italy and Trieste.

The values and institutions of the EU, and its policies have always been an object of interest and a source of hope for me, and by coming to the JESC, with the position of Secretary for European Affairs. I am happy to share these passions and the engagement with the Jesuits and lay people who work there and the people with whom we will collaborate in the network.