UPDATE III: Believe what you see, Maciel is the message

UPDATE III Thanks to reader gto for pointing out that Regnum Christi appears to keep another website selling Fr. Maciel’s works – including those on love and dating for young couples. You can access it here as of 7:50 p.m. Eastern today.
UPDATE II The links in the initial post are no longer working. They worked this morning because I tested them after posting this blog. But other readers are also reporting the links down, both here and at Giselle’s blog. If this is a sign the movement is finally purging itself of Fr. Maciel’s toxic influence, then I hope the next step is to apologize to his victims.
UPDATE Giselle just blogged an entry on a similar topic, which is also worth reading (click here).
Initial entry
Several readers have told me that pictures of Fr. Maciel are still hanging in certain Legion of Christ/ Regnum Christi (LC/RC) houses. I hope you will forgive me if I beg off this discussion, but it’s been years since I last visited a LC/RC house of formation. So I have no clue whose picture is hanging where.
That being said, Fr. Maciel and his LC/RC apologists often state we should never believe the rumors we hear, only the questionable practices that we see with our own eyes. So here is what I saw this morning when I visited the Center for Integral Formation website.
A line at the bottom of the website states: ‘Patrocinado por los Legionarios de Cristo y Regnum Christi, al servicio de la Iglesia.’ My Spanish is far from perfect, but I believe this translates as: “Sponsored by the Legion of Christ and Regnum Christi, at the service of the Church.” So my own eyes lead me to conclude that this online bookstore is connected to the LC/RC, and that its resources are intended to serve the Church.
Now here are some of the titles I saw for sale, including a short summary of each work posted at the website:

Called to Love
Fr. Marcial Maciel, LC Read Fr. Maciel’s letter on the greatest subject of all time. Fr. Maciel reflects on life as a vocation, he addresses God’s particular call to parents, Grandparents, young people, women,priests, consecrated men and women, and all members of the Regnum Christi movement. Booklet
Price: $2.95
***
Dating and Engagement
Fr. Marcial Maciel, LC The beauty of love is shown in its practical application in engagement and relationships reflecting genuine love – not the counterfeit love prevalent in the world. Booklet
Price: $2.95
***
Dear Young People…
Fr. Marcial Maciel, LC This is Fr. Maciel’s invitation for young people to take advantage of the precious gift of youth. The address reflects on life and poses challenges. Booklet
Price: $2.95

Dear friends in LC/RC! As long as a bookstore you sponsor still carries Fr. Maciel’s works, it’s a moot question whether you hang his photo. You’re still promoting his works as serviceable to the Church, despite his exposure as a sanctimonious fraud. The sale of his books at Legion-sponsored websites, unlike rumors of his picture, is something we can see with our own eyes.
This simply doesn’t sit well with other Catholics. Nor can one dismiss the issue by saying there is good Christian teaching in these books, but Fr. Maciel simply never lived up to it. To quote Marshall McLuhan, the renown media theorist and Canada’s most famous convert to Catholicism, “The medium is the message.”
Your medium here is Fr. Maciel.
As noted by Fr. Damien Karras in Leave the Bathwater. Take the connoli, one cannot separate Fr. Maciel’s spiritual advice from how he covered up his failure to heed this advice. And Fr. Karras should know because he spent close to thirty years with the LC, defending Fr. Maciel until this past Februrary. As Fr. Karras puts it:

But while Fr. Maciel masqueraded as the saintly founder, the admirable priest, apostle and ‘suffering servant of Yahweh’ that all the LCs sought to emulate in their own vocation, his writings were veritable treasures that we meditated and quoted, memorized and preached.
Once we found out who he truly was, those same writings have turned into the cruelest of jokes, a most unholy parody of true spirituality and religious tradition, a sacrilegious satire that should make us all ashamed of having once proudly called ourselves ‘co-founders’.

And that’s what the outside world sees as well.

2 comments

  1. A couple years ago it was possible to think of Regnum Christi and LC folk as sincere Catholics who simply didn’t have a lot of discernment.
    If there isn’t any serious reform soon, it’s going to get to the point where you would have to be delusional to stay in RC or LC.

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