With deep sorrow we learned the news that Mikel Azurmendi  has returned to the house of the Father.

"We will always remember him", said the president of the Meeting Bernhard Scholz,"as an exceptional witness of an extraordinary intelligence and a great simplicity of heart that allowed him to grasp the true and the beautiful with an immediacy that always left us full of amazement and gratitude".

An anthropologist, Azurmendi was a member of ETA in its beginnings, only to abandon it when it took the path of terrorism. After two attacks attempts and the constant threats of ETA, he temporarily left the post of professor of anthropology at the University of the Basque Country, leaving for the United States.

Openly secular and agnostic until the day of the encounter with the reality of Communion and Liberation, during his long career he explored some of the most pressing themes of modern society such as immigration, nationalism, jihadism and the public value of religious experience.

He received the Hellman/Hammet Award in 2000 and also the IV Award for Coexistence in 2001, from the Miguel Ángel Blanco Foundation.

Here is the video of the beautiful online testimony he made for the 2020 Meeting, interviewed by Fernando De Haro.