Healing, forgiveness and the Legion of Maciel

This entry expands upon a comment I wrote at Life-After-RC.com:
A friend of mine is a spiritual director to Catholic professionals who work with abuse victims. My friend once asked a directee why some victims manage to move on with their lives, while others are stuck with the horror of what was done to them. The directee told my friend: “Those who heal and move on are those who find the ability to forgive.”
It’s not easy. Sometimes one must forgive more than once before one can receive God’s healing. Often one must also learn that forgiving one’s abuser is not the same thing as making oneself a doormat for the abuser or allowing the abuse to continue. Nor does it mean that one jettisons one’s quest for human justice, or throws caution to the wind. Which is why another friend of mine, a Catholic mother of many sons and some daughters in between, has forgiven Fr. Maciel and the Legionary priests who imposed their methodology on her older sons in the Legion’s apostolic schools. However, she will not send her younger sons to these schools, nor will she allow her daughters any further contact with LC/RC-sponsored apostolates.
Nevertheless, the road to healing lay through forgiveness. We need to pray for all of Maciel and the movement’s victims. We need to pray that the Holy Spirit – for the sake of these victims, for the sake of their healing – grants them the grace to forgive. We must encourage the victims to hold the movement accountable, to continue their quest for natural justice, but to do so in a spirit of Christian forgiveness – for their sake, not Maciel’s or the movement’s. This is the only way victims can break the bonds the movement holds over them.
Likewise, I would also ask LC/RC, both current and former, to personally ask forgiveness from those you wounded in the name of the movement, whether you did so intentionally or not. This includes spouses, children, other Catholics in the parish and the movement. You may receive a cold or angry response initially, but by asking forgiveness you show true charity of souls, since you make it easier for the person to forgive, heal and move on in life.
Similarly, I would encourage you who feel victimized by LC/RC to contact those in the LC/RC who you feel victimized you by the movement’s methodology – whether it be whisper campaigns, shunning, spiritual manipulation to put apostolate before family, being recruited into thinking ill of Maciel’s victims or covering up for his abuse, being misled about the true meaning of Maciel’s invitation to retire, etc. – and tell them that you forgive them, regardless of whether these individuals feel they have wronged you or not. Do NOT, however, allow yourselves to be drawn into debate over the rightness or wrongness of LC/RC methodology, or entertain temptation to go back, or agree to drop the pursuit of natural justice. Simply tell the members you forgive them.
As St. Paul says in Romans 12: 19-21: “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’ No, ‘if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
Likewise, LC/RC charity will be overcome by true Christian charity.

Stephen King gets it? Does Fr. Alvaro?

Cassandra Jones posted a report of Fr. Alvaro’s homily at yesterday’s Legion of Christ professions in Cheshire. You can read Cassandra’s report here. Fr. Alvaro spent quite a bit of time asking for forgiveness, Cassandra states. But in reading over the report I keep asking myself Forgiveness for what?
Fr. Alvaro appears to allude to the Fr. Maciel scandal on several occasions. I say “appears to” because one is never entirely clear from reading Cassandra’s report that this is what the Legion’s Director General is referring to in sprinkling spiritual advice with mea culpas. As Cassandra’s source reports: “I wanted to know how the scandal would be handled, so that’s what I will emphasize. It was not mentioned directly at all, of course, but a lot of what Father Alvaro was saying seemed to relate to it very closely.” (Emphasis mine). For an order whose defenders were quite specific in denouncing their founder’s victims, “seemed to” is not enough.
Allow me to digress as I confess the following: I have a weakness for Stephen King. (Or in current Legion-speak, “The troubling imagination of a certain modern author has integrated itself into my personal library, which is kept separate from my professinal and spiritual library.”) Some of it goes back to my budding years as a writer, exploring Catholic themes through short horror stories. Some of it, I am sure, is due to the ministry God has called me to as a canon lawyer, which often deals with the darker aspects of man’s fallen nature.
Regardless, there’s a common discrepancy in Stephen King’s writing that I first noticed when reading Needful Things. It’s in the way he portrays clergy. Protestant clergy are generally nutty fundamentalists, no different than Hollywood’s usual stereotype. This contrasts with how King typically portrays Catholic clergy – conservative, heroic, dedicated to the welfare of their flock and of their community, and struggling to overcome one or two minor personal flaws. In short, King often portrays Catholic clergy both sympathetically and realistically as good ministers struggling to be saints.
What makes this fascinating is that King is not Catholic. He was raised by his mother, a strict Methodist who struggled as a single mother to hold the family together after King’s father walked out. It’s his wife Tabitha who is Catholic. Moreover, he disagrees strongly with the Church’s teaching on contraception, as he has made clear through both his fiction and non-fiction. Nevertheless, his fundamentalist protestant clergy tend to be one-dimensional fanatics (The Stand‘s Mother Abagail a noted exception), while his Catholic clergy tend to be multi-layered, reflective and human. The contrast becomes all the more fascinating when King’s Protestant and Catholic characters interact.
Which brings me back to Cassandra’s report about Fr. Alvaro’s homily yesterday. As I read through the report, wondering what Fr. Alvaro was asking forgiveness for, my mind wandered to an incident in one of King’s books. It begins with the child of a Bible fundamentalist doing something naughty to a Catholic neighbor. It might have been a rude insult or a small act of vandalism, and I think the book was The Regulators. I can’t recall the details and it’s been several years since I read it, so I apologize if I recall the story vaguely or incorrectly.
Yes, I apologize. Specifically, I apologize for my recollection that is not as specific as my apology. And this, according to King as he describes the incident, is what distinguishes devout Catholics from fundamentalist Protestants.
In the book, the child’s father frog-marches the kid before the victim of the child’s bad behavior. The child alludes to the wrong-doing, if I recall correctly, but doesn’t actually name it. The child beats himself up verbally, inviting the wronged party to follow up with a physical beating as the kid’s father watches on. What follows is my recollection of the passage.
The victim suppresses a smirk, looks down at the child, and says something along the lines of “I just want you to do one thing. Look me in the eyes and tell me what you did wrong.”
Upon hearing this, the child transforms from resigned and robotic to visibly uncomfortable. He begins to squirm and looks up at his father with a pitiful gaze. Father is as horrified as son and begins to protest as parent. Speaking through the voice of the narrator – or perhaps the child’s victim – King launches into a thought about how admitting to one’s wrong-doing is the worst form of punishment one can inflict upon a Christian fundamentalist, who sees no value in the sacrament of confession. On the other hand, Catholics understand that freedom from sin only comes when one lets it out by confessing to the wrong-doing. What an interesting insight from a writer of psychological horror.
In short, Stephen King gets it. He may not have been raised Catholic; his novels may be saturated with dark themes and four-letter words; he may lack the grace of holy orders, of advanced degrees in Catholic theology, of being the head of a large Catholic order – but in spending a lifetime observing and writing about the darker side of our fallen nature, he understands that forgiveness and healing are tied to a specific admission of one’s wrong-doing and guilt. So he gets it.
Here’s the question: Does Fr. Alvaro?