Okay, I thought cow and monk stories were getting a little old. Yet in light of the Legion of Christ’s latest round of blame the [alleged] victim (click here), MariGold at Life-After-RC asks: Hey, Pete, can’t you give us another story about the abbot, the monk and the cow? Please? And get the threat about suing the Legion for damages as being “illicit.”
Done! The Legion’s attempt to brand Maciel’s son an extortionist has given my inner muse the stomach flu, and here’s what came up. (Or to quote, off-the-record, one of my spies in the movement’s highest echelons, who tipped me off about the letter’s release: “It’s disgusting. Once again, we’re assuming the role of victim by spinning Maciel’s son as an extortionist. Left out is the context of his demand. Namely, that he’s a real victim, that his paternity claim is probably legitimate, and that he’s been horribly abused by Maciel.”)
So this latest version is dedicated to MariGold….
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The Monk who milked the Widow
A long time ago, a 60-year-old Monk set out on his travels accompanied by his assistant, a young Brother. Night was falling when the Monk told the Brother to go on ahead to find lodging. The Brother searched the deserted landscape until he found a humble shack. A poor teenaged widow and her infant son lived in the hovel.
The Brother returned to the Monk, who asked – in the interest of the Brother’s soul, of course – whether he found the Widow (and with a little more discretion, her infant son) cute.
The Brother blushed.
“Ah,” said the Monk. “You better stay here and sleep in the barn, less the Devil tempt you with a widow younger than yourself. Vocations are a fragile and precious gift. They are given to us from all of eternity. Thus a lost vocation means sure damnation.”
“Nevertheless,” said the Monk. “We cannot leave her alone with a little one while Freemasons, Jesuits and town criers like Jason Berry roam the night. I will go ahead and keep her company. I’m an old man – nearly 60 – who has never said no to the Holy Ghost. And you know I suffer from severe cramps in the lower stomach area. These bring me relief when temptation strikes.”
The Brother nestled down in the back of the cart, to save the cost of an inn for the night, grateful to God for having co-founded a monastery with a such a wise Monk.
The Monk approached the Widow’s hovel. It occurred to him that the young widow likely had little means of supporting herself and her son. Her husband had probably been around her age when he died – too young to build up a pension. The Monk guessed that she was Catholic – after all, she had offered him and the Brother room and board for the night. This presented further complications as the Pope had recommended the Monk to the Governor and to the Archbishop as an efficacious guide to young people. The monk was famous! The widow might recognize him immediately and offer what little substance she subsisted on, perhaps at the expense of her infant son!
“There must be a better way,” said the Monk under his breath. “I know, I’ll disguise myself as a wealthy horse breeder. Or perhaps as one of the King’s spies.” In the end, he decided to do both.
The widow answered the door, and the Monk, disguised as a spy disguised as a horse breeder, invited himself in for the evening. As he walked through the door, he could not help but notice how big and energetic the Widow’s toddler was.
“I bet he drinks a lot of milk,” said the Monk to the Widow as she nursed her son to sleep. “And milk is so expensive these days. If you marry me, I will give you your own cow to feed him.” Of course the disguised Monk had only the welfare of the Widow and her son in mind. The Monk had taken a special vow of charity, which sometimes required him to break his more traditional vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Nevertheless, the Monk knew that the Widow was a devout Catholic. She would never think of seducing a Monk (her name was not Lucretia), so to protect her conscience he kept his disguise. This was done out of Christian charity, which God had chosen the Widow from all of eternity to receive from the Monk.
The Widow was taken aback by the Monk’s offer. Despite his mustache weaved from horse hair, she could not help but notice he was three times her age. Nevertheless, she accepted his proposal in good faith – and given that our story takes place before the Council of Trent’s imposition of canonical form for marriage had received wide promulgation throughout the Church — the two exchanged wedding vows in the privacy of the hovel.
The years passed and the Monk traveled back and forth between the Widow’s cottage and the monastery. The widow never suspected the Monk’s true identity. She just assumed that horse breeding and spying for the King kept the Monk busy and away from home. The couple had two more children together.
One day, when the Monk was back from his business trips, the Widow walked into the barn and caught him painting portraits of her sons as the three males stood in a stall. This would not be so unusual except that the Monk and her sons were completely naked. She looked up to their faces: Her younger son looked terrified, her older son looked confused, and the Monk (wearing nothing but his fake mustache) looked guilty.
The Widow had passed the Town Crier on her way home from the market. He had described a suspicious monastic wanted in connection with disappearing cows throughout the county. It suddenly dawned on the Widow. This was no horse breeder. [DELETE EUPHEMISM OF YOUNGER SON PRACTICING HIS MILKING, SINCE WE ARE TO BELIEVE NONE OF THE EVIL WE HEAR IN MEDIEVAL LEGENDS] In fact, she was the one who had been milked – by the seductions of a renegade priest through some unspeakable sorcery.
“This is all a misunderstanding,” the Monk pleaded as the Widow invited him to jump over a cliff. “However, I will suffer this temptation to jump like Our Lord tempted in the desert by the devil.” He did not have much choice. The Widow was backed by her three sons, while none of the Monk’s brothers were around to cover up for him. (Which was quite a shocking scene given that the Monk was still naked.)
The Monk somehow survived the fall and he petitioned the Pope to allow him to recuperate in a special monastery, where he could spend the rest of his life in prayer and penance. It was not a bad life. The Pope had suspended the Monk’s faculties to preside over public prayer, including celebration of the sacraments. Out of zeal for this penance the Monk also forswore – for the good of the Church, of course – his right to private prayer.
The Widow and her sons returned to the cottage. There they noticed the Brother standing in the place of the cow given to them by the Monk.
“Where’s our cow?” the youngest lad said.
“You have a duty to remain charitable,” said the Brother. “We’ve taken the cow as payment for the seed your mother stole from the Monk who founded our monastery. How dare she take advantage of him while he was weakened from stomach pains. How dare you embarrass us by demanding the Monk’s cow back. That’s extortion!”
“But he promised us the cow after lying about being a Monk, bringing me into this world, and making me practice my milking whenever he was home,” said the lad.
“Extortion! Extortion!” cried the Brother as he covered his ears and ran toward the cliff.
THE END
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And on that note, it’s time to end this gong show of the grotesque.
SHUT. IT. DOWN.
Category: Legion of Christ/ Regnum Christi
REPORT: LC knew about Maciel’s son in 2008
This gets even more curious, given that up until now the LC has only admitted to knowing about the existence of one daughter, as discovered by Fr. Alvaro in an investigation after Maciel’s death. According to the San Francisco Examiner:
The Rev. Jesus Quirce, rector of the Legion’s Universidad Anahuac in Mexico City, sent a letter to The Associated Press and other news media on Thursday confirming that he had met with Raul Gonzalez several times in 2008 and 2009, though he said Gonzalez never mentioned being molested.
You can read the full report here.
Questions for me
In yesterday’s AP picks up Maciel incest allegations thread, Bill White asks me some good questions. Namely…
– Any thoughts about the historical and sociological roots of the modern wave of religious sexual abuse?
– Did it start just a couple of generations ago, or has it been with us the last two millenia or more?
To answer Bill’s second question first, clerical sexual misconduct has been with us since the beginning of the Church. It tends to come in waves. This is why tradition built up a whole body of canonical jurisprudence to prevent and punish molesters among the clergy. Had Marcial Maciel been living in the Middle Ages, he would have risked public execution for witchcraft.
Similarly, retiring to a monastery for “prayer and penance” is a tradition as old as monasteries themselves. I suspect this may be where the word “penitentiary” came from as a synonym for prison. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to conclude that monasteries were exclusively for grave sinners. In times where the secular clergy were infested with perverts and the power-hungry, pious celibates would band together and found monasteries to escape the debauchery (often sexual, financial and political) among their secular counterparts. Regardless, the Church has always struggled with the issue.
That being said, let’s look at Bill’s first question. From my experience with the recent sexual misconduct crisis to face the Church in North America, and now Ireland, I’ve come to take a dim view of the Church’s minor seminaries. Basically, ripping young teens from their families while they’re going through puberty – a time when they need the example of Mom and Dad and healthy relationships between the sexes – is a recipe for disaster down the road. Often one emerges from these seminaries a grown man intellectually and physically, but still a teenager emotionally and in terms of mental maturity.
Many of my clients were older priests who had gone through the minor seminaries, and who in their first year of priesthood had committed one or two inappropriate acts with sexual overtones against teenaged boys. This is behavior that a parent or coach would normally correct if exchanged among teens of roughly the same age, but feel no need to approach law enforcement authorities over if the two parties had been roughly the same age. I’m talking things like rolling up your wet towel in the dressing room after a shower and whacking your team-mate in the arse. It’s immaturity when exchanged between two 15-year-old boys. It’s creepy when coming from a grown man who also happens to be clergy.
So the young priest is dragged before the bishop, is rebuked severely, and shipped off to a grueling assignment away from youth for the next year or two (such as chaplain to local Catholic nursing home). He comes back to parish ministry, and ministers for several decades without further incident or complaint. However, come the sex abuse crisis, the Church opened all the old files and these priests now found themselves shipped off to “prayer and penance” because of these types of incident during their first year of priesthood. And no, I’m not justifying what they did at the time. But I feel many of these incidents might have been avoided had these priests spent their teen years with their families, rather than in minor seminaries. After all, St. Joseph and the Blessed Mother and the local synagogue were good enough for Our Lord Jesus Christ during His formative years.
That being said, the question has taken a more gruesome turn if recent allegations are true. As noted by Randie in the comments section of Life-After-RC (click here), “Maciel’s son said his abuse began when he was 7 years old. I hope we can stop splitting hairs over whether MM was a pedophile or an ephebophile.” And this is without considering the incest angle, as well as the allegation Maciel photographed the abuse of his own children.
Which is why at this point my reaction as a father to young children trumps my reaction as a canonist or Catholic journalist: SID – SHUT. IT. DOWN.
Questions for individual LC and RC
It is one of the most fundamental principles of sacramental theology and Christian ministry. One cannot give what one has not received. Thus one must first receive what one wishes to give. In practical application, this is why the priest, at Mass, first consecrates and then consumes the Eucharist. Then he invites the ministers of Communion to receive before inviting the rest of the congregation. Likewise, in the Church, a religious community receives its charism from the founder or the Church, before passing it along to the faithful ministered to by the community.
With this in mind, and knowing what we now know about Maciel, I invite each LC and RC to ask himself the following questions:
– What has the Church received from Maciel?
– What have the LC and RC received from Maciel?
– What have you personally received from Maciel through LC and RC?
– What have your family and friends received from you as a member of LC or RC?
Questions for Jason Berry
Speaking solely as a concerned parent and as a former Catholic journalist, and not as a canon lawyer, someone needs to have a little talk with Jason Berry, co-author of Vows of Silence. Politely ask Mr. Berry – no, beg him for the good of the Church – to pop the following questions to his contacts and share their responses with the rest of us:
– Who in the Church and LC knew what about Maciel?
– And when did they know it?
Please get this information out now, before the Apostolic Visitation comes to an end next month. The information cannot be whitewashed if it is already public.