4 comments

  1. Dear Pete,
    The scandals of MM’s behaviour, known and alleged, are devastating. My heart and prayers go out to the children so hurt, and to the women and parents.
    I also pray for the legionaries and consecrated women of Regnum Christi. And to the visitators, for each of them already has a fulltime responsibility.
    I hope that Fr Jonathon’s mother doesn’t see this clip. Without knowing her or her son, I grieve for her and him and that it could one day be one of mine, held up for ridicule so readily… For I have two sons in the Legion, and a daughter a consecrated woman And two children who have been co-workers and gained much by the experience. All our children are practising Catholics for which I pray daily and for which I am so glad – especially as I left the Church myself in my early twenties.
    We live expensively far from any LC/RC centres, but RC has been a gift for us living in a diocese not good at keeping directives from Rome. (One orthodox priest commented publicly that any such communications were archived promptly.) It was so easy to get to a stage of spending the Mass just waiting for the next innovation or heretical statement, and of waiting for the next new teaching from the Catholic school… and to get into little groups of negativity as we got sidelined from the parish community.
    Regnum Christi has given us a way to focus on the positive, to act for the formation of ourselves and for the good of the local community: eg 40 hours’ adoration in a city central chapel. (Not perceived as a need but well patronized – although extra adorers willing to commit themselves to a regular hour would always be welcome!)
    The LC priests we have met have all been friendly, kind and often funny (read real) and we have had good spiritual input. They were originally ‘rubbished’ vocally by some diocesan priests for wearing clerical attire, and saying the Mass attentively, but the scandal of MM’s life has made them more acceptable here.
    We never did recruit for the sake of numbers, but I like others have invited friends to join us if we thought that they too would find the approach helpful. Some did, others not. Like DaniNz over on Giselle’s blog, some like us have found it helpful to have a group with which to share our faith and to act, we hope, for Christ and for the good of his Church. That doesn’t mean that everyone finds a supportive community life helpful and that’s fine. The Catholic Church IS catholic.
    So the Regnum Christi experience has obviously been different for different people.
    Where to now? We stay for the meantime because for us this has been a way to live our Catholic life more surely – some couples as disturbed as us by the goings-on in the diocese left the Church for SPPX.
    We will be guided by the Church Universal for the next step. We hope that there will be no way no one in leadership in any possible refounded movement in any way supported/hid/facilitated MM in his sins. But for the sake of our dear children, who found a way to offer Christ their lives and love in the Legion and the movement, we will stay and pray.
    And would it have been different if our parishes had been vibrantly orthodox; if any young, confidently happy priest had suggested a vocation possibility to our sons…?
    Who knows. We just trust that God, who loves each one of us, is somewhere in this mess, and will use it for our salvation.
    But please, take down the post of Fr Jonathon Morris and enjoy the music by itself.

  2. Hi Marguerita,
    My prayers go out to you as the mother of two Legionaries and a consecrated. I can understand the difficulty position in which you find yourself.
    Just to clarify, the reason Fr. Jonathan Morris (often referred to as “Fr. Jonathan Edwards” on this blog) gets a bit of a rough go by readers is not because he’s a Legionary, but because he never apologized publicly for attacking Fr. Tom Euteneuer on the Fox News website. (His subsequent “clarification” was neither an apology nor a retraction). Fr. Tom was a Marine before discerning the call to priesthood and becoming a pro-life activist.
    To share a little bit of background about this blog, which may put this post in context, Catholic Light has a bit of a following among Catholics serving in the military, owing to some strong connections. For example, my blogmate Eric Johnson is a retired Marine who did a tour in Iraq. Likewise, a lot of my ministry is to soldiers and veterans who served oversees.
    The same is true with our connection to the pro-life movement, particularly on the issue of defending the Church’s prohibition of contraception. So there’s some pro-life and pro-military camaraderie that surfaces in this regard.

  3. By way of P.S. to my comment above, SS on Giselle’s blog shares an important insight, which I have also noticed without being able to articulate so eloquently: “One RC tactic, if I may generalize for a moment, is to over-attribute the good in the Church to RC and the bad in the Church to ‘lack of RC’. Perhaps I’m over-sensitive to the risk of others over-attributing to RC the bad in a parish. You see my point? I just get the feeling from some of the comments that this sort of thinking was at risk of happening and wanted to caution against it.”

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