Tag: Legion

Okay, one more post – Maciel and Mama Maurita

One last post that I have been meaning to write for some time, on a topic that my fellow blog hobbits are now tackling. It concerns Fr. Maciel, family life, and the importance of truth. Giselle at Life-After-RC has posted the testimony of a parent who accuses Fr. Maciel of hurting his family life through Maciel’s lies, which touches upon why parents ought not treat Regnum Christi membership like a vocation on par with marriage (click here).
Meanwhile, ExLC treats us to some poetry in responding to my earlier post explaining how Fr. Maciel’s life undermines the teachings he advocates in his spiritual writings. Here’s ExLC’s poem:

Now here is the problem:
Who was Marcial Maciel?
Did he lie to his families about being a priest?
Or did he lie all along about being a founder?
And how can we ever know which one is the lie?
Or were they both a lie?

And of several thought-provoking weekend posts at RC Is Not My Life, one of them deals with this issue by comparing Fr. Maciel to television network executives in Jim Carey’s movie The Truman Show. What struck me was not only the author’s insight, which you can read here, but reader Simon’s comment in the ensuing discussion:

Based on what we now know about Maciel, there are really only two possibilities, aren’t there?
1. He concocted the Legion and RC to cover up for and fund his decadent lifestyle. The whole thing is a cynical joke, a scam. Marcial Madoff, L.C.
OR
2. Anguished by the internal contradictions of his own life, this man — so utterly lacking integrity, self-discipline, generosity, genuine piety or even a fixed identity — overcompensated. He created an organization that pressed its members to sacrifice their own personalities and stripped away their ability to discern vocations, express authentic human emotions, or even decide how to part their hair.
In the first possibility, Maciel made cynical use of authentic Catholic spirituality in order to achieve his evil ends, adding nothing distinctive.
In the second possibility, Maciel actively distorted Catholicism in response to his own bizarre interior torment, so that the result is doctrinally orthodox as a formal matter, but deeply screwed up at the level of formation and spirituality.

I’m not a psychologist. Nor do I play one on television. However, I’ve ministered inside the Church’s legal structure for close to ten years now. I’ve seen a lot in that time, and heard a lot from canon lawyers who are older, smarter and more experienced than me. Often the answer to this type of mystery can be found in the childhood relationship between a troubled priest and his mother – especially if the father was absent, abusive or had a poor relationship with his son.
This reminds of an incident when I was first getting started as a canon lawyer. Along with several other canon lawyers I happened to be at a workshop explaining the process whereby priests and religious seek to return to the lay state. The vast majority of those in attendance were over 40 years of age. The handful of under 35-year-olds sat together in the back.
The presenter, a respected priest and canonist, said during his presentation: “The trigger for older priests and religious wanting to return to the lay state is seldom a love interest. The most common trigger is the death of a parent, usually the mother. Let’s be honest: how many of us are here today because our mother wanted us to become a priest or religious? How many of us would have chosen this life had we not been sent off as teenagers to the minor seminaries by our mothers?”
A look of shock and horror came over our faces in the back row, among those of us who were under 35 and had not been alive prior to the Second Vatican Council. Surely the presenter was exaggerating the “bad old days” before Vatican II! But as we watched row-after-row of older clergy and religious nod their heads in agreement, regardless of whether they were liberal or conservative theologically, us younger canon lawyers recognized that the presenter was speaking the truth. For many, it was the mother who wanted the vocation.
Now I don’t want to get carried away on this point. It’s not a bad thing if a mother, suspecting that God may be calling her son to priesthood or religious life, fosters and encourages the potential vocation. In fact, this is a good thing – if the vocation or call to discernment are a true calling from God. Thus St. Monica’s prayed for St. Augustine’s conversion, and St. John Bosco had a close relationship with his mother, who adopted the orphans served by her son’s apostolate as her own. Similarly, St. Pius X’s mother urged him to stay in the seminary when, as oldest son, he considered dropping out to support his mother and his siblings after the death of his father.
A similar story is told of Fr. John Hardon, the noted Jesuit catechist and spiritual director to Mother Teresa, and an only child who was raised by his mother after his father died in a work-related accident when the boy was only one. Reportedly, Father had thought about dropping out of the Jesuit seminary to support his mother when she began to show the effects of old age. His mother urged him to continue with the Jesuits, if this is where he felt God was calling him.
In each of these cases, the vocation is clearly present. The individuals themselves felt the call to priesthood and religious life, and those charged with their formation confirmed it. Their mothers simply encouraged them, through word and prayer, to remain faithful to God’s call. They did not seek to impose a calling that was not already clear to their the son.
This is different from being pressured into the priesthood or religious life – especially when a child’s relationship with the other parent is poor or lacking.
Mama Maurita has passed away. So has Fr. Maciel. Therefore, this avenue of inquiry can only be speculation. However, three things cause me to suspect that Fr. Maciel’s founding of his movement is tied to his relationship with Mama Maurita:
1 – Fr. Maciel had a difficult relationship with his father throughout his entire life.
2 – Fr. Maciel held his mother, who happens to have been a fervent Catholic and the niece of a bishop and a canonized saint (and who wanted to be a religious herself), in particularly high esteem.
3 – None of Fr. Maciel’s reported children (at least the ones we know about) were born until after Mama Maurita’s death. On the other hand, most of the sexual abuse allegations involving seminarians and young men seems to take place while she was still alive.
Again, I am not a psychologist. Nor was I ever Fr. Maciel’s spiritual or formation director. And having met, I never acted for him in any capacity as a canon lawyer. So this is only speculation on my part. However, it is an avenue those in the LC/RC may wish to consider in pursuing the truth about their founder.

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?

UPDATED: Jane is a meanie…

…if you’re thinking of recruiting young people into RC-sponsored apostolate without disclosing to their parents the current scandal surrounding Fr. Maciel. Earlier this week she asked a couple of good questions of a reader struggling with this issue:

A good question ask youself – why would you recruit people to something you cannot speak frankly about? That you feel has elements to it which you would like to keep hidden? [Emphasis mine]

This is a reminder that the best insights are often the most obvious ones. Christ declares in the Gospels that He is “The way, the truth, and the life,” while denouncing Satan as “the father of lies.”
Thus Christ’s mission is tied to truth. We neither serve Him nor build up His kingdom when we resort to lies, deceptions or half-truths. For the latter falls under the domain of the devil, as Christ clearly warns. So ask yourself this: Is this information you would conceal if you were recruiting for any non-LC/RC related apostolate? What if you were recruiting for your employment?
Given the context of this discussion, I find it ironic that even Fr. Maciel understood that lying is unacceptable to God and brings embarrassment upon the Church. As he himself states:

We should never lie for any reason whatsoever. It is a mortal sin when God is greatly offended by causing damage against religion, the Church or Authority, or when the name and good reputation of other people is considerably damaged… “Lips that lie are abhorrent to Yahweh” (Proverbs 12:22). (Bermuda 23 February 1962)

REM = Regnum Christi escaped musicians?

From a reader who wishes to remain anonymous because of his employment situation: “Pete – you picked the wrong REM song to describe the movement. Try ‘Losing my Religion’.” (See What’s the frequency, Alvaro?)
Hmmm….now that you mention it, other REM favorites include: Shiny Happy People, The End of the World, Everybody Hurts, I Took Your Name, Bang and Blame (particularly the verse “The whole world hinges on your swings/ Your secret life of indiscreet discretions”), I Believe, Just a Touch, and Imitation of Life.
I think I detect a pattern. Fables of the Reconstruction, Reconstruction of the Fables, Life’s Rich Pageant, Monster, Up, Reveal – even their album titles seem a tad suspicious. And they were formed in Georgia, within driving distance of Atlanta. Not to mention that Michael Stipe’s outfit in this video bears similarities to clerical garb:

RETROSPECT: Gerald Renner answers Fr. Bannon

Information surfacing about the life of Fr. Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ and Regnum Christi, has forced many to view Fr. Maciel’s writings in a new light. I think this is a good thing. However, let’s not forget those who worked tirelessly for years to bring these allegations to light. Many of these folks were dismissed by Orthodox Catholics as anti-Catholic media bearing a hidden agenda.
Like the police now kicking themselves over the missed opportunity three years ago to rescue Jaycee Lee Dugard, we as orthodox Catholics need to look at why we missed the opportunity during the Boston fallout to investigate the accusations against Fr. Maciel.
With that in mind, and surprised by Jose Bonilla’s allegation that Legion superiors have known about Fr. Maciel’s children for 15 years, I’m re-reading this article written by Gerald Renner in 2000. Renner is the Hartford Courant reporter who worked closely with Jason Berry to give voice to Fr. Maciel’s victims. His article is a response to the Legion’s following open letter dismissing his investigative reporting into the Legion.
Here are some passages from Renner’s letter that in retrospect take on new meaning, in my opinion. I’ve bolded certain parts that really stood out to me:

I was told I had to seek the permission of the national director, Fr. Anthony Bannon, to write anything. But he was never available, despite calls I made to him over the course of several years. I even visited the seminary personally one day to the consternation of the seminarian-receptionist and was again told I had to talk to Fr. Bannon.
Finally, one day in 1993, Fr. Bannon himself happened to pick up the phone when I called. He told me in no uncertain terms the order did not want any publicity and that he did not trust the press. The only way he would provide information for an article, he said, if he had the right to review it after it was written, something that is journalistically unacceptable.

Which raises the question: Did Fr. Bannon know anything at the time? If so, what? For an order this focused on recruitment and building the Kingdom, why would they shy away from free publicity? As Renner muses later on the piece, “Yet, the order wonders aloud in its open letter why it’s called secretive.”
Here’s another passage that I read differently now in retrospect:

I got a call from a man who said he had been a seminarian in the Legion at Cheshire and in a satellite seminary the Legion ran near Mount Kisco, N.Y. He said he and another novice had fled from the seminary without permission when their religious superiors kept rebuffing their pleas to leave.
It was such a bizarre claim that I was skeptical. Was this a religious nut or what? But he sounded stable. We had a personal meeting, and he repeated his story convincingly. He put me in touch with three other former novices. Two of them said they had similar experiences of being psychologically coerced by overzealous religious superiors. The third, who had been in a Legion-operated seminary in Mexico said he had to beg for his passport and clothes to go home after being repeatedly rebuffed.
I turned to Fr. Bannon for response only to be told by his secretary that the Courant was only trying to stir up “scandal” and that he did not expect Fr. Bannon to respond. Only after the article appeared did Fr. Bannon send a statement denying the accusations. His statement was published in the Courant.

And let’s not forget this passage in which Renner explains why Maciel’s earliest victims, like Jaycee Lee Dugard, didn’t avail themselves of an earlier opportunity to come forward: “But those making the accusations today were young boys in seminary in the late 1950s. They say they lied at the time to Vatican investigators to protect the man they called ‘Nuestro Padre.'”