Tag: Christ

Cough up the truth or choke on the pope

The French have saying that whoever eats of the pope will choke on him. This saying comes to mind as I survey those questioning the canonization process of Pope John Paul II in light of recent revelations about Fr. Maciel’s “double life.” The secular press and certain anti-papist strains within protestant fundamentalism aren’t the only ones questioning the appropriateness of John Paul II’s potential canonization. Adding their voice to the chorus this week are CrunchyCon’s Rod Dreher and Renew America and Liberal Traditionalist blogmeister Eric Giunta.
For the record, I believe Pope John Paul II probably was not aware of the evidence against Fr. Maciel. Given what we know about JPII, I put the odds of him knowing and not doing anything about it (and in fact continuing to praise Fr. Maciel publicly as an excellent example for youth) at about the same percentage as several young women, independently and years apart from each other, breaking into the hospital room of an elderly priest-founder and stealing his semen to impregnate themselves.
Possible? Yes. Probable? I’d sooner bet on the state lottery.
Having said that, this incident may still slow down Pope John Paul II’s canonization process. Because of the nature of canonization, it’s important that we know everything we can about the late Supreme Pontiff. Especially when allegations are as high-profile as those concerning Fr. Maciel. Thus the devil’s advocate will have his job cut out for him.
Nevertheless, over at the other end of the Church spectrum, some LC/RC supporters are still using the pope to try and shut down discussion of their movement’s charism. A recent example of this comes from Mark Polo in the comments section of the AmericanPapist blog. Mr. Polo writes:

The charism is not the same as the founder. The charism is the gift of the Holy Spirit, which at this point, is guaranteed by the Church in its approval of the Constitutions. While this is not an infallible act of Pope John Paul II, and Pope Benedict would be fully free to make changes or even remove this approval of the Church entirely, the assumption at this point has to be in favor of the validity of the charism. Any other attitude is really moving away from the respect that is due the Holy Father. (If we can decide that John Paul II was obviously wrong about this matter, and abused his power as Pope to approve these Constitutions, the next step is to start questioning everything else the Holy Father says. This is not a road I want to see people going down.)

Others commentators have refuted his errors in logic, so I’ll set those aside for now. The road that ought to be avoided is that of eating of the pope by continuing to invoke an approval of one’s founder and movement that was gained through deception of the founder’s piety. This was the deception used to gain papal approval, to provide oneself with the cover of Catholic orthodoxy, and persecute the founder’s victims while silencing the movement’s legitimate critics.
That being said, I am sure that many orthodox Catholics like myself, who are part of the Pope John Paul II generation of Catholic activists, will continue to defend our pope during this time. This is not to say, however, that we will be silenced by the mere mention of Pope John Paul II’s name, or that in his name our anger toward the LC/RC will dissipate.
Unlike other attacks against Pope John Paul II, this recent volley was completely avoidable. HAD THE REST OF THE CHURCH KNOWN THE TRUTH ABOUT FR. MACIEL. The controversy also could be cut short by the LC/RC coming forward with the truth and apologizing to Fr. Maciel’s victims.
Nevertheless, Fr. Maciel and his movement chose to invoke the pope as shield against serious allegations concerning the founder’s proclivity towards violations of the Sixth Commandment. An example of this can be seen in Sandro Magister’s 2003 interview with Father Miguel Cavallé Puig, LC – a Spaniard who at the time was part of the LC’s general secretariat (click here). In responding to former LC seminarians who accused Fr. Maciel of sexual impropriety, Fr. Puig states: “the true target of the accusations is not so much Father Maciel, but the church, and the pope.”
In short, Fr. Puig, like his founder Maciel, ate of the pope in the name of the movement. And for all we know, the movement may have bitten off a chunk of the Holy Spirit in proposing Maciel’s mother – Mama Maurita – for potential canonization. Do we have any outside corroboration of holiness and heroic virtue? Is anyone outside the LC/RC putting forward her cause? (Unlike the case of Gabrielle Lefebvre, whose cause has always been independent of the SSPX, Mama Maurita’s cause appears completely driven by the LC/RC and its supporters)
And thus the LC/RC finds itself choking on the very lie which it ate. Yet the movement’s supporters continue biting off more chunks of the pope, warning others of choking hazards in an attempt to stop them from noticing that the movement is choking.
Please, dear LC/RC member, I beg you. For the sake of Maciel’s victims, for the sake of your own members, for the sake of the Church and Pope John Paul II supporters embarrassed by your founder’s lies, please come forward now with the truth. You’ve eaten of the pope. So please cough up the truth and stop the choking.

Sunday Legion roundup

I’m off to the in-laws for supper, but there’s lots of good discussion on the Legion of Christ (LC) and Regnum Christi (RC) on other blogs:
1 – Life After RC has posted LC communication director Jim Fair’s statement on recent revelations from Spanish-language new sources. You can read the statement here. Some commentators have asked whether the LC have a communication strategy. Sadly, in reading this statement it appears that the Legion has adopted the Clinton strategy during the Monica Lewinsky scandal (minus the heartbreaking apology after it had dragged on for a while): Admit only small bits of information at a time, and only after the media uncovers it first.
2 – Quoting from what appears to be LC constitutions, Pat Madrid asks: Who was Fr. Maciel’s moderator?
3 – Former LC priest Fr. James Farfaglia, who now pastors a Catholic parish in Texas, asks some pointed questions of current LC chief tomato Fr. Alvaro Corcuerra, L.C. here.
4 – Saving the best for last, ExLC blogger Landon Cody has blogged a pithy reflection on this past week. Chief among his insights, in my opinion, is the following:

The unfortunate part of all of this disaster is the fact that the day to day rules and regulations in the Legion and the Movement, the spirituality focus, and the identifying characteristics of the “Legionary Type” radicate in the pathological behavior of a man who created an institute where he could exercise complete power and control with no oversight or accountability, and live a life diametrically opposed to that of the gospel. The key is that the very institute and its rules and way of life was what permitted him to live this life on the margin of clerical respectability while using the typical modus operandi of an abuser: the search for complete power and manipulation. At the same time, the mirror image of this depravity of control became the Legion of Christ: an institute designed with a centralized, top to bottom control structure that Maciel micro managed and taught his successors to micro manage, complete with more rule books and norms and detailed minutia than any other order, congregation, or religious institute in the history of the Catholic Church.

Cody’s entire reflection is well worth a read, as is the ensuing the blog discussion. You can check it out here.

Defending Fr. Maciel from Damnatio memoriae

When the Fr. Maciel story first broke, I went on record publicly stating that the Legion of Christ (LC) and Regnum Christi (RC) could continue without renouncing its founder. I assumed at the time, based upon the American reaction of Fr. Thomas Berg, Tom Hoopes, Jay Dunlap and others of like mind, that the LC/RC would renounce the founder’s example (which is different than renouncing the founder), apologize to his victims and offer them restitution. And to their credit many of the movement’s American membership followed Fr. Berg’s example in doing so.
What I did not expect (at least after the first month) is for the movement’s upper echelons to try and carry on “business as usual”. After all, their modus operandi is what landed the LC/RC in so much scalding tequila to begin with. Which is why I puzzle at this recent Spanish-language interview with Lucrecia Rego, the founder of Catholic.net and a high-profile Regnum Christi member from Mexico. She remains one of Fr. Maciel’s most ardent apologists, having declared herself “Maciel’s other [spiritual] daughter” when the scandal first broke.
Life After RC has posted an unofficial translation here, of which I found the following excerpt troubling for two reasons: 1) It offers us a glimpse into the mindset of some of the movement’s higher echelons; 2) In attempting to defend Fr. Maciel, the interview confirmed my gut feeling that the LC/RC can only survive as a Catholic institution by completely renouncing their founder.
Anyway, read the following and draw your own conclusions:

What’s your opinion on the performance of the current leaders: Alvaro Corcuera, Luis Garza, Evaristo Sada? Do you agree with their having treacherously hidden these truths, deceiving the legionaries, and becoming accomplices themselves of the sins of the founder?
Lucrecia – To accuse the Fathers of such things is nonsense. No one is obliged to reveal another person’s sins. On the contrary, they would’ve been traitors had they revealed them. The fact that they kept it secret is a sign not of complicity, but of their faithfulness, fondness and respect. There’s nothing to complain to them about.
Jesus Christ gravely condemned the sin of scandal. Don’t you consider it scandalous that Fr. Maciel, being a priest, had a daughter, and that he then diverted vast sums of money from the Legion to provide for her?

Lucrecia – First of all, I must say that I find the whole story of the alleged daughter of Nuestro Padre to be quite implausible. An elderly many of 68… it’s very difficult at that age to even be capable of having a sexual relationship.
But let’s suppose it’s true… that, yes, the woman seduced him and was able to achieve (who knows by what means) said relationship and conception. Following this supposition, we cannot know the degree of culpability of neither the woman nor the priest because we don’t know the circumstances. Thus, there’s no scandal, because we don’t even know if the act meets the conditions to be a sin (full knowledge and full consent).
About the “large sums of money” that is said Fr. Maciel gave the mother of the girl… the press has mentioned the amounts of $5,000 to $10,000, which Fr. Maciel carried with him now and then. Are 10,000 dollars given now and then a scandalous amount to provide for a family? Absolutely not. It’s barely enough to ensure that the child (who has no guilt in the story) gets clothing, a home, food, and an education in a place that is dignified and decent. What we do know is that Nuestro Padre worked much for the Legion and that, humanly speaking, he had every right (as laborer and director of an enterprise) to dispose of some money for his personal expenses (in this case, providing for this implausible family).

Fr. Maciel’s apologists will tell us not to judge Fr. Maciel, citing Our Lord’s injunction in the Gospel of St. Matthew, but Lucrecia appears to have judged the mother of Fr. Maciel’s daughter either a liar or a seductress. This is as far from Fr. Berg’s reaction (even before leaving) as one can get. And while we’re on the topic of Fr. Berg, Lucrecia also sends some charity his way:

Fr. Thomas Berg has declared that the Legion must renounce its founder in order to survive. What do you think of these statements?
Lucrecia – What can I tell you? Fr. Thomas is free to express his opinion, and I am no one to judge him. It saddens me, yes, that he’d express himself in such manner about Our Father Founder and of our current directors, because he, having been 23 years in the Legion, is who he is only thanks to the Legion, which wouldn’t exist had Fr. Maciel not founded it. I think he should show some gratitude, regardless of how disappointed he might feel.

What we see here in my opinion is the movement’s institutionalization of Fr. Maciel’s narcissism. It’s not the Holy Spirit, the Church or the intercession of St. Joseph and the Blessed Mother that made Fr. Berg who he is. Neither the saints nor the Church’s teaching. It’s Fr. Maciel and the Legion, this high-profile RC member asserts. Was it in Fr. Maciel’s name that the bishop laid hands on Fr. Berg and raised him to holy orders? You get the point. Everything still centers around Fr. Maciel and the LC/RC, and the LC/RC only insofar as they center around Fr. Maciel. Outside of Maciel’s reach no salvation. Lost vocation, sure damnation.
This is why the LC/RC must sever themselves completely from Fr. Maciel. Since the Legion likes to invoke catchy Latin phrases, Roman military imagery, and thoughts of subjection to Rome, give serious consideration to the ancient Roman practice of damnatio memoriae.

Be a cofounder to the family God gave you

Over the past week, several Regnum Christi members (both current and past) have shared with me their heart-wrenching experiences as more accusations arise against Fr. Maciel. Most of these Catholic are mothers of families, although some fathers and singles have written me as well. The big question, I keep hearing, is the following: What do we do to help those left behind, those who refuse to believe any of the allegations, and who don’t want to discuss the truth?

Simply put, we pray for them. That’s all we can do. They have had over six months to digest what’s happening, and to make sense of this information. If they still are not ready to do so, or if they have done so and arrived at a conclusion different than your own, or wish to await the outcome of the apostolic visitation, then we must respect their consciences. Perhaps some may still change their minds, at which point they will come to you.
However, don’t remain idle until then. Here is something else you can – and should – do. That something is to become a cofounder and formator to the family God gave you. Your family is your first priority before God. Spend more time with them, enjoy their company and lead them to Christ.
God works in mysterious ways and the message to focus on family was hammered home to me on at least four occasions this week:
1 – The first was Tuesday evening when many of the new accusations against Fr. Maciel were still breaking. I was tempted to work on it well into evening, given the queries I had received, but my wife was physically exhausted. She has held the family together for the past six weeks while I was away doing ministry for all of July and then catching up with my day-to-day apostolate upon my return in August. So she and the baby went to bed, and the other kids and I went to the auto races like I had promised them.
I used the time driving to and from the racetrack to pray several decades of the rosary with my children, teaching my three-year-old the words to the Hail Mary. Come Wednesday morning, the LC/RC still had its problems. However, my wife was feeling rested, my children were telling all their friends what a good time they had, and my three-year-old was running around in a pull-up praying to the Blessed Mother.
LESSON: You have one priority as a parent when it comes to apostolate. That’s your family. Become a cofounder with Christ to the family God has blessed you with.
2 – Had a short conversation sometime this week with a friend of mine who use to dabble with schismatic traditionalism. He has since returned to the Church, but we spent years hammering each other online. However, our conversation this week had nothing to do with traditionalism. We simply exchanged pointers for ministry among friends and family, how to bring them closer to Christ despite the challenges of today’s culture, and how to overcome personal hurts to evangelize. He signed off telling me how spiritually rewarding it felt to be a father to his children, introducing them to their prayers and Church teaching. This is something he never felt as a keeper of liturgical minutiae. Nevertheless, the arguments we engaged in a decade ago are still waging, despite the fact neither of us participates in them any more.
LESSON: There will always be a surplus of apostolate in the outside world, as well as religious arguments and people willing to argue them. So don’t neglect your immediate family and friends.
3 – My parish pastor approached me about starting a catechetical program for young married couples in the parish. “You write for every Catholic publication in Canada and the United States promoting family,” he said. “And you travel all over the place promoting family. But young couples and families in our parish are falling away from the practice of the faith because I have nobody to put together a family religious education program in the parish you attend every week with your own family.” Point well taken.
LESSON: If there’s not enough apostolate in your family to keep you busy, there’s plenty in your local parish.
4 – I was reading one of St. John Chrysostom’s homilies on the New Testament after having read several messages from people discussing how much pressure they had felt to send their children to apostolic schools, or enroll them in this or that apostolate directed toward young people. “Don’t leave your children’s spiritual education to monks,” the Church father and doctor said, before exhorting parents to raise their children in the ways of the Lord.
LESSONS: A) There is much spiritual wisdom and advice in the saints and Church fathers that you can rediscover in your free time. 2) The Church has always recognized parents as the primary educators of their children, particularly in spiritual matters. Don’t neglect your own children’s religious education to boost your checkmarks on the apostolic deeds column.
In the end, pray for those who are taking the news hard, and keep a shoulder open for them to cry on when they need it. However, do a careful examination of your current priorities when it comes to apostolate and the prioritization of your time. Your family should come first. You should first become a cofounder to the family God gave you. This is what Christ has called you to do.

Truth will free you from possession

“Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” – Jesus, (John 8:32)
“I am the way, the truth, and the life” – Jesus, (John 14:6)

Both of Our Lord’s sayings come to mind as I ponder recent revelations concerning Fr. Maciel. What’s damaging to the Legion is not the revelations themselves. Reasonable people, Catholic or not, have long ago concluded Fr. Maciel was a fraud and a scoundrel. So what’s damaging to the Legion is that they were not more forthcoming with the truth about their founder, or with an apology to his numerous victims.
In a word, the scandal here is the coverup. The attempted coverup, for so many years, is why the Legion appears so helpless as the facts unfold.
Two autumns ago, while camouflaged in the Northern Ontario wilderness waiting for a bear to sniff out day-old doughnuts at the foot of the tree-stand, I read a report of a true exorcism. It had taken place around the turn of the 20th Century. I believe the report was written by a priest who played a role in the exorcism.
The possessed was like most LC/RC members I have met during my lifetime. She was a devout Catholic, she prayed her rosary regularly, and she had a strong desire to receive the sacraments and grow in holiness. But something stood in the way of her spiritual growth.
That something was a devil (ironically, when pushed by the priest to name himself, I believe the devil claimed to be the Legion who Christ confronted in the Gospels) along with the condemned soul of the possessed’s father. The latter was an immoral scoundrel in life, who had attempted to rape his own daughter. When she rebuffed his incestuous advances, he cursed her to the devil. And upon his death he joined the devil in his daughter’s possession. Thus even in death the father continued to impede his daughter’s relationship with Christ.
Why do I mention this? Besides the obvious metaphor, another important bit of information was revealed during the actual exorcism. The exorcist began casting out devil and demon, but they entrenched themselves even more strongly in the woman’s body. They then made it known that they wouldn’t leave without a fight. Thus they attempted to sow discord among the exorcist and his human assistants by blurting out their past sins.
Shocked, one of the assistants asked the devil why he hadn’t mentioned a major sin in the assistant’s life. Apparently the sin was known in the community.The devil resisted answering the question, if I recall correctly, until the exorcist ordered him to do so in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
“Because you have confessed it before the priest and received absolution,” the devil said. “Those sins are cut off to me.”
In other words, we may bear temporal consequences for our sins even after confessing them, but they are cut off to the devil. The evil one can only hold power over us through that evil in our lives that remains unconfessed before God. Thus Christ really is the truth, and truth really will set you free.
Now analogies can only carry so far, and I would be a fool to claim that every member of the Legion of Christ and Regnum Christi is possessed by the devil. Heck, it would be just as foolish for me to claim the majority (or even a large minority) are possessed. However, although far from an expert in demonology and exorcism, I believe the Legion of Christ as an entity may be haunted by a demon. This demon may be spiritual, or it may be psychological, or perhaps it is both. I’m not an expert, I don’t know.
But this demon is Fr. Maciel. As long as the truth of his sins remains hidden, the devil will continue to hold a certain power over the Legion and Regnum Christi, working the evil of Fr. Maciel’s sins in the shadows, and impeding the spiritual growth of the Fr. Maciel’s spiritual children.
There is but one means to expel this demon: Embrace the truth and make it known. Renounce Fr. Maciel, his sins, and his influence over the movement. (And part of this process must include an apology to Fr. Maciel’s victims, along with offers of restitution.) Embrace the truth, embrace Christ who is the truth, and use the truth to bring freedom to countless members of LC/RC seeking sincerely to serve Christ.