What to do about the Legion?

It's a steel cage canon-law death match! It's Vere versus the Peters team! Well, maybe not.

Since a new set of Maciel revelations emerged this week, several thoughtful proposals have appeared on how the priests of the Legion of Christ can purify their community and recover.

Canon law professor Ed Peters calls for an investigation, an "apostolic visitation" -- imposed by Rome if the Legion doesn't ask for it -- and suggests that the community could dissolve itself and make a new founding.

Our Pete Vere, JCL, said in a CNA interview and in an interview with the Legion-affiliated Zenit news service that good priests in the Legion can reform it, acknowledge the truth about Fr. Maciel, and "return to being a vibrant part of the Catholic Church."

The distinguished philosopher Germain Grisez offers advice to his friends in the Legion: the present institute and its current leadership cannot salvage the community, restore trust, and preserve the good that this community has built. The Church knows that membership in a religious institute is not an absolute, Grisez argues, and a misplaced loyalty to the Legion organization or to its current superiors may be a failure to do one's duty for the Church.

So far, I think that the argument is with those who urge a clean refounding. The reputation of the Legion is utterly ruined; the revelations of a repressive "corporate culture" make it look like a cult -- formation manuals, some of which have been leaked to the Internet, regulated behavior, even down to the details of how members are to butter their rolls -- and yet there are so many good men in LC and good men and women in Regnum Christi who love our Lord Jesus Christ and want to serve Him in His Church, and who deserve to do so without the burden of shame that their founder's corruption currently places on them.