Author: Pete Vere

The monk, the cow and the apology

Over the past couple weeks I’ve been debating back and forth, in the comboxes of several blogs, with former LC priest Jack Keogh. He’s an Irishman who runs The Monk Who Stole the Cow blog. The name of his blog refers to a folk tale which is posted in the right margin of his blog.
Mr. Keogh is calling upon LC critics to show more charity toward those who remain in LC. Here’s my take on the situation:

A monk and his abbot were passing through a poor farming village atop the cliffs of Ireland when they came across a humble cottage owned by an impoverished Catholic family with three children. Nevertheless, the family took the monk and abbot in for the night. The family shared with the religious what meager milk and cheese the family had, produced from a single cow. This was the only farm animal the family could afford, and they relied upon the cow for their subsistence. Nevertheless, despite their poverty, the family was happy, knowing God was with them and provided for their daily needs.
The following day, as the “good” religious left the village, the abbot ordered the monk to return to the cottage and push the cow off the cliff. The abbot was widely reputed for his “holiness” and claimed “never to have said no to the Holy Spirit.” Therefore the monk obeyed as an ever-obedient co-founder. After all, being pushed off the cliff was the cow’s vocation “from all of eternity.”
About five years’ later, at a village two counties over, villagers discovered that the abbot had a certain unnatural affection for cows. What the penitential books at the time referred to as “unspeakable” sins involving farm animals. Given that this was medieval times – not the modern era where folks are somewhat more civilized – the villagers responded by pushing the abbot over the cliff. But that’s a story for another time…
The monk narrowly escaped the peasant uprising. He made his way back to the initial village under the cover of darkness. Seeing the cottage where he had stayed five years ago, and given the cold wet snow outside, he knocked on the door to request shelter and food for the night. He could not help but notice, as he waited for someone to answer the door, that the cottage was even more beaten up and weather-worn than he remembered it five years ago.
An older man answered in threadbare clothing. He had lost some weight, most of his hair, and his skin was wrinkled with worry. Yet the biggest change was in his eyes: Gone was the spark that had made the family happy, despite the poverty in which they found themselves.
“What do you want?” the old man grumbled.
“I’m a poor monk seeking food and shelter for the night,” the monk said. “You hosted my abbot and me several years ago.”
“Oh, you,” said the poor man.
“Look, I have nothing to give. It seems that everywhere you went cows kept falling off cliffs,” the peasant continued. “After our cow fell off the cliff, the baby died for lack of milk. This broke my wife’s heart, and she died about a year later. She died angry at God for having taken away our baby after showing you and your abbot some Catholic hospitality.”
“That’s blasphemy!” the monk said. “Your wife should have been more charitable with God, not to mention forgiving of our abbot. Then God would have blessed her with the serenity not to give in to the sin of bitterness.”
“Well she might have endured this crisis,” said the farmer, “but for the fate of our middle son. See, he was over in the next village begging for moldy and half-rotten potatoes – of which we ate a steady diet after our cow died – when he witnessed you pushing another cow over the cliff. You did so at the urging of your abbot. Horrified, my son ran to the bishop’s house only to catch your abbot offering the bishop a gift of freshly butchered steak.”
“My son reported what he had seen to the bishop. But your abbot denied everything and both you and your abbot claimed my son was lying out of jealousy for your meal of steak and fresh milk. It was his word against yours. That of an impoverished young boy against two men of the cloth. So the bishop believed you. He reported everything to the Prince, who also believed you and the bishop. The Prince then ordered my son’s cheeks branded with a red hot poker ending in the letter ‘L’ – a sign to all who come across him that he was a liar. Additionally, my family was ordered to turn over our remaining possessions – minus this cottage – to you and the abbot, as restitution for having accused you of pushing cows over cliffs. We never ReGAINED these possessions.”
“Well let’s not talk about past misunderstandings,” said the monk. “Let’s talk about happier things. How is your oldest daughter doing? The Abbot sensed God had called her from all of eternity to a vocation as Consecrated Wench. She would not say no to God, would she?”
“I don’t know,” said the farmer. “After speaking with other consecrated wenches who had left the village, she decided that a more merciful fate awaited her as a galley slave to Moorish pirates. Unlike your abbot, their lust is satisfied in the afterlife by 72 virgins. That’s more than twenty but less than a hundred – in case you can’t count. Anyway, it’s just me left in this hut now.”
“Well let me in and I will keep you company,” said the monk. “It is your duty as a Christian to forgive.”
“Let’s make a deal,” said the farmer. “I’ll forgive you, and offer you room and board for the evening, if you apologize for pushing my cow over the cliff and the pain it caused my family.”
“That’s not fair!” said the monk. “I was only following orders.”
“Those orders brought much evil on my family,” said the farmer. “So you can freeze outside in the snow until you apologize.”
“Okay,” said the monk, whose was feeling the chill of the wind against his soaked habit. “I apologize for the abbott’s ‘unfortunate orders,’ which I cannot explain, and the pain they’re now causing me as I try to find room and board for the night.”
“Well what about the living hell you caused my family?” said the peasant.
“How dare you act this uncharitably!” said the monk. “I know other peasants whose cows were pushed over cliffs and they don’t describe their experience as ‘living hell’.”
“Oh look, here comes a follower of St. Ignatius. I wonder if he needs room and board?” said the peasant. “After all, it’s cold and wet outside.”
“Okay, you’re twisting my arm. Although I am grateful for all the good my abbot passed on to me and others who received his charism, I… uh… apologize … for whatever pain his unfortunate orders, which I find difficult to reconcile with the good I saw while following him from village to village, caused you and your family.”
“A little better,” said the peasant. “But what about the pain YOU caused our family by following his orders. What about the pain your lies caused my son in having him branded a liar when he reported the truth about you, your abbot and cows were falling over cliffs?”
“How dare you judge me!” said the monk. “Only God can judge. Where’s your faith in the Church?”
“Behind you,” said the peasant, pointing to the Jesuit walking up the alley to investigate the situation. “Fr. Ignatius, can I offer you room and board for the evening? It’s a cold night out, I need good spiritual direction to overcome the spiritual pain that has cursed our family for the last five years, and this monk was just leaving.”

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.

The guilty conscience, according to Cardinal Ratzinger

“I brought Pope Benedict’s book On Conscience,” said my friend over breakfast this morning. Well actually he wrote it as Cardinal Ratzinger, but that’s besides the point. “You’re more than welcome to borrow it. It’s a great read that answers many of your questions.”
My friend is a theologian who specializes in the sacrament of reconciliation and the theology of conscience, confession, forgiveness and healing. With all the questions about Maciel, his methodology, and the formation of consciences in the movement he founded, I had invited my friend to breakfast in order to tap her expertise as a theologian and spiritual director. Basically we discussed issues that have been discussed here and at other blogs like Life After RC, issues surrounding reports of visible signs of Maciel’s final impenitance, the subjugation of conscience to utilitarian purpose within the movement, and the seeming inability of Legion superiors to recognize or apologize adequately for the horrors inflicted upon Maciel’s victims.
Opening Ratzinger’s book, or the English translation published by Ignatius Press, God directed me to the following passage – one that provides a good perspective of what we see happening with the movement:

Gorres shows that the feeling of guilt, the capacity to recognize guilt, belongs essentially to the spiritual make-up of man. This feeling of guilt disturbs the false calm of conscience and could be called conscience’s complaint against my self-satisfied existence. It is as necessary for man as the physical pain that signifies disturbances of normal bodily functioning. Whoever is no longer capable of perceiving guilt is spiritually ill, “a living corpse, a dramatic character’s mask,” as Gorres says.

Monsters, among other brutes, are the ones without guilt feelings. Perhaps Hitler did not have any, or Himmler, or Stalin. Maybe Mafia bosses do not have any guilt feelings either, or maybe their remains are just well hidden in the cellar. Even aborted guilt feelings… All men need guilt feelings.

By the way, a look into Sacred Scripture should have precluded such diagnoses and such a theory of justification by the errant conscience. In Psalm 19:12-13, we find the everworth-pondering passage, “But who can discern faults.” That is not Old Testament objectivism, but profoundest human wisdom. No longer seeing one’s guilt, the falling silent of conscience in so many areas is an even more dangerous sickness of the soul than the guilt that one still recognizes as such. He who no longer notices that killing is a sin has fallen farther than the one who still recognizes the shamefulness of his actions, because the former is further removed from the truth and conversion.
Not without reason does the self-righteous man in the encounter with Jesus appear as the one who is really lost. If the tax collector with all his undisputed sins stands more justified before God than the Pharisee with all his undeniably good works (Luke 18:9-14), this is not because the sins of the tax collector were not sins or because the good deeds of the Pharisee were not good deeds. Nor does it mean that the good that man does is not good before God, or the evil, not evil or at least not particularly important.
The reason for this paradoxical judgment of God is shown precisely from our question. The Pharisee no longer knows that he too has guilt. He has a completely clear conscience. But this silence of conscience makes him impenetrable to God and men, while the cry of conscience that plagues the tax collector makes him capable of truth and love. Jesus can move sinners. Not hiding behind the screen of their erroneous consciences, they have not become unreachable for the change that God expects of them–of us. He is ineffective with the “righteous” because they are not aware of any need for forgiveness and conversion. Their consciences no longer accuse them but justify them.

A fatal flaw in Legionary formation

I received the following email from a former Legionary who had been ordained with the order. I’ve removed the names of individual Legionaries to protect confidentiality:

Hey Pete, hope you are well.
I want to comment personally with you on your comment [over at Ladon Cody’s ExLC blog] that “Holiness comes from the inside. God alone knows who is holy and who is not. Externals can be deceiving. For instance, how many of us thought at one time that Maciel was holy?”
When I was still in the Legion, I commented with [John Doe], who was still in, and he told me that he commented with [another Legionary] back then and they agreed. The point is that Legion formation essentially was set up to work from the outside in. It made use of externals to build what they called the charitable or priestly heart. The idea was to practice external things: kneeling for meditation, opening doors for others, making little sacrifices at meals and tons and tons of other things, with the aim of internalizing them. The idea was not that those things would come from the heart, but that they would change the heart through simply doing them.
So many actions of every day and every moment were like magic formulas to be recited or practiced and, voila, a charitable heart! A holy priest! It is a huge internal flaw of formation in the Legion of Christ. A fatal flaw.
There is no recovering from something like this. There is nothing to save in LC formation because it is backwards.
Unfortunately, there is a whole sector of people in the Church who fixate on this type of externalization and are caught up in it, and call it holiness. It is only worth something if it does come from the heart, and then, if it produces no real fruit, it is still just a noisy gong, a clashing cymbal.

Like founder, like sons…

Hard to believe a whole year has passed since revelations of Marcial Maciel’s daughter became public. Hard to believe that the Legion of Christ – the order founded by Maciel – still has not offered adequate public apology or restitution to Maciel’s earlier victims of sexual abuse. Many of these victims were minors studying for the priesthood. They were boys entrusted by their families to Maciel and the movement he founded. Their families had believed their sons were being sent off to become holy priests under the care of a living saint. One would hope than an order of “holy” and “orthodox” Catholic priests would recognize the injustice of sexual abuse committed against children in the name of Christ, and the injustice of public calumny against these victims when they came forward with the truth.
Yet in retrospect – and I say this in all sadness – we should not be surprised by the failure of Legion superiors to apologize to Maciel’s victims. We should not be surprised by the movement’s failure to apologize for Maciel’s abuse, not to mention the movement’s coverup of Maciel’s actions as well as the public persecution of Maciel’s victims.
Why?
Because like any other religious movement, good or bad, the Legion of Christ appears to derive its spirit from its founder. When the spirit of the founder is good, when the founder seeks sincerely to follow Christ and is inspired by the Holy Spirit, then we recognize the spirit of the movement as a charism. But when the spirit of the founder is evil, then it curses the entire movement.
Which brings us to what I consider the most disturbing report concerning the founder since the scandal broke. It is the recent El Mundo report of Maciel’s death. For those who understand Spanish, you can read the original report here. For those who need an English translation, former Legionary Landon Cody has kindly provided one here.
Several sources tell me that El Mundo is a reputable Spanish news source. If this is true then I am most disturbed by the following aspects of Maciel’s death, as reported by the news source:

It seems that for the previous two years, the founder had lost the faith. He did not go to mass, did not pray… The Legionaries who took care of him came to know that he felt “repulsed by religion”. […]
But the few elect who were with him at the end of his life had a hard time seeing him as an old man. For them, the last hours of the founder were a real calvary. Marcial Maciel refused to confess his sins. He did not want to and did not believe in God’s pardon. Maybe he had spent too many years accostomed to fooling the divine representative in the confessional. How to suddenly declare him a pederast, he has relations with both men and women, he had at least six children who he never took care of like a real father, the abused drugs, he coveted and obtained great quantities of money, he plagiarized the spiritual guidelines of his congregation, he lied and damaged hundreds of people without it bothering him in the least way, and God knows what more. This, God does know. So, why confess his sins? “I said no!” he blurted out to Alvaro Corcuera, who was trying to anoint the dying man with holy oils.

Of all the sins that man can commit during his time on earth, only one is unpardonable by God. It is known as the sin against the Holy Spirit, or the sin of final impenitance. It is the sin of so hardening one’s heart against God that one chooses to die unrepentant of one’s sins.
As explained by Catholic Answers apologist Jim Blackburn:

Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is essentially the willful rejection of God’s grace and forgiveness.
A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture explains, “Unlike other blasphemies or sins which might be partially excused by ignorance, passion or inadvertence, this was[/is] a sin of willful malice and blindness to the light. As long as such a mentality persists, pardon is impossible, not because of any limitation of God, but because those who are guilty of this sin refuse to respond to the promptings of grace” (p.912).
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) states, “There are no limits to the mercy of God, but anyone who deliberately refuses to accept his mercy by repenting, rejects the forgiveness of his sins and the salvation offered by the Holy Spirit. Such hardness of heart can lead to final impenitence and eternal loss” (CCC 1864).

God alone judges the eternal fate of Maciel. We cannot know what conversation took place between God and Maciel in the final moments of the founder’s life. Perhaps, as he was breathing his final breath, the prayers of all his followers cracked the hardness of his heart, allowing him to make peace with a God he had betrayed throughout his life. One can fool the wisest of popes and presidents, but one cannot fool God. And God forces each of us to face the truth of our sins. Better to face Him in the confessional during this lifetime.
Nevertheless, we cannot ignore this report of Maciel’s death – a report that describes all the visible signs of final impenitance. “A tree falls in the direction it is leaning,” my Benedictine spiritual director use to say when explaining the importance of living a Christian life in preparation for facing God in death. If Maciel’s heart remained consistent with the double-life he led, if his heart remained true to his reported actions facing death, then he died either unable or unwilling to repent. In which case, but without judging, his eternal fate seems bleak.
This is something every Legionary and Regnum Christi member must reflect upon, two years after the death of their founder. Not only because the movement continued to describe Maciel as a saint in Heaven, despite an alleged death that suggests anything but. Not only because several top Legionaries reportedly witnessed the visibly unholy death of the founder. But because this spirit of impenitance, so visible (allegedly) in founder’s death, has cursed his movement that refuses to renounce him. Just as Maciel reportedly appeared to choose death rather than repent of his sins, so too have current Legion superiors vis-a-vis Maciel’s movement. Bossuet’s description of Jansenist nuns seems apt in this situation: “They are as pious as angels and as proud as devils.” But even more fundamental as Christians, what we are witnessing is St. Paul’s warning to Romans: “For the wages of sin are death.”
I pray the founder’s impenitance has cursed the Legion and Regnum Christi as institutions only. I pray that God softens the hearts of individual Legionaries and Regnum Christi members, so that they not follow the spirit of their founder into the grave. Let the curse die with Maciel’s movement. May Our Lord Jesus Christ free Maciel’s victims and followers from the curse of Maciel’s impenitance. And let us pray that no further soul risks eternal damnation because of the scandalous example of Maciel and those within the Legion who covered up for him.