Tom Hoopes’ move

I am aware that the departures from their posts this month of Tom Hoopes, Brendan McCaffery, and Fathers Jonathan Morris, Timothy Mulcahey, and Antonio Rodriguez, did not all necessarily occur in concert and for the same reason, to make them less available to the apostolic visitation.

In any event any suspicion about reasons can only be circumstantial.

I was aware from Tom Hoopes’ email that his move is in fact a “career change… talk[ed] about for years.”

The point I intended below is that, however meant, these sorts of movements inescapably make more difficult the work of the apostolic visitation.

The visitation is limited in its time, money, and investigative resources and will have to be selective in hearing from former Legionaries and former employees if it chooses to hear them at all.

I hope the visitation will manage to hear Tom Hoopes on how he worked for “repentance and change” at the Register, in the words of Father Raymond de Souza, before moving on in his career.

Legionary Movements

[Moved to the top and updated July 22: Father Antonio Rodriguez, for ages academic dean at the Legionary seminary in Cheshire, Connecticut, has removed to Switzerland. How will he now be able to testify to the apostolic visitation about the seminary?

Tom Hoopes, National Catholic Register editor, resigned this week. Together with Brendan McCaffery, Chief Operation Officer for Circle Media, let go last week, these represent decades and decades of experience at the highest level of Legionary operations in Connecticut. Will the visitation seek them out in Kansas or Les Avants-sur-Montreux or wherever or lose forever their testimony?]

[Updated] Life-after-rc the other day reported that there is evidence that the Legionaries have been moving members around possibly to make them less available for the apostolic visitation to interview.

History may be repeating itself: that’s certainly what the Legionaries did in the late summer of 1956 in the face of the first apostolic visitation. Legionary Brother José Domínguez, who had recently helped Father Maciel draft the fourth vow, was moved for the duration to Massa Lubrense on the southern extremity of the Bay of Naples. Brother Saúl Barrales spent nine months of 1957 in the Canary Islands. (See González “Testimonios y documentos inéditos” 278 and Berry and Renner “Vows of Silence” 182.)

In light of that, interesting:

Father Jonathan Morris, formerly vice rector of the Legionary seminary in Rome, is now on sabbatical for six months or more at Old St. Patrick’s in Manhattan. (exlcblog links to the Old St. Patrick’s bulletin with this information.)

Yesterday, July 16, the National Catholic Register’s accountant was let go. This may have been another cost-cutting move – in the downturn the Register became a bi-weekly -- though cost-cutting was not the purpose of the acquisition of Southern Catholic College announced yesterday as well.

Such movements would provoke an important procedural question for the apostolic visitation: will the visitators interview only Legionaries and employees currently in place or will they also seek out former Legionaries, those on sabbatical, and those no longer employed? It’s not as if Father Morris can hide in lower Manhattan, but how can Bishop Versaldi, whose responsibility includes Italy, interview him if he is not in Rome? How will Archbishop Chaput, whose responsibility includes the US, interview him if he is on sabbatical from a Legionary assignment?

Life-after-rc wrote, “surely the AV would recognise such an obvious tactic [as removing witnesses from the visitation’s path].” However, Sandro Magister says that the visitation is to report in the fall. That is discouraging if true, unless what is meant is some sort of preliminary report or first impression. Four or five months would not likely be enough time to sort through well planned Legionary survival strategies, however transparent they be.

Chilean visitator says apostolic visitation expresses “the affection of the Holy Father for the Legionaries of Christ”

Concepción, Chile Archbishop Ricardo Ezzati Andrello, the most recently named of the five bishops who are conducting an apostolic visitation of the Legionaries of Christ, has expressed in Spanish language interviews his opinions on some of the issues that face the investigation.

Archbishop Ezzati traveled to Rome on June 22 to be appointed by Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarciso Bertone to serve on the visitation, first announced publicly on March 31 and scheduled to have gotten under way on July 15.

In an interview with Chile’s national El Mercurio, published July 4, Ezzati spoke about his role:

"I accept [the appointment as apostolic visitator] as a service that the Holy See has entrusted to me, with much responsibility, humility and as a gesture that expresses the affection of the Holy Father for the congregation of the Legionaries of Christ. I assume it with humility, because the charisms of consecrated life are a gift of the Spirit to his Church before which only amazement and welcome are fitting, and with responsibility, because the Church wishes to respond properly to the charisms conveyed for the spiritual good of so many persons."

The purpose of the apostolic visitation, he said, is “to express, through encounter and dialogue, the fatherly closeness and esteem of the Holy Father, who only wishes the spiritual good of the Legionaries of Christ and the fruitfulness of their service to the Church and the world. I believe that the desire of the Holy See is that this visitation offer all those indications and assist them that they serve the fruitful development of that charism."

In fulfilling his mission as apostolic visitator, Ezzati said that "more than in my personal abilities, I trust in the grace of God and the assistance of the Virgin May."

In echoing remarks, published July 9, Legionary spokesman for Chile, Father Alfredo Márquez, welcomed Ezzati’s appointment. He said that the visitation will be “without any doubt a further step, from the hand of the Pope, in continuing our mission in service to the Church. We continue with our apostolic work with much serenity and with a renewed dream to spend our lives for souls." The appointment, he said, is “very important, because [Ezzati] knows the work of the Legion in this country and we know him and we know that he is a great man of the Church."

With his words Archbishop Ezzati interpreted the visitation as a confirmation of the pope’s good feeling, rather than an investigation into allegations of wrongdoing. The word “charism” has been often used by Legionaries to express their belief that they cannot be reformed, because their foundation has been irreformably recognized by the Church, regardless of shortcomings in the personal life of founder Father Marcial Maciel. There has long been a commonly held view in Catholic theology that approval of religious orders by the Church is an infallible judgment, though it has in recent decades been called into question by some theologians.

Ezzati’s interpretation will disappoint those who have called for radical reassessment, even abolition and refoundation, of the Legionaries. These have included Archbishops Collins of Toronto and O’Brien of Baltimore, theologian George Weigel, and former Legionary Father Thomas Berg.

In another interview, three years ago, Ezzati, then an auxiliary bishop in Santiago, adopted publicly a Legionary interpretation when explaining the meaning of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s Communiqué of May 19, 2006. The Communiqué suspended Maciel from public ministry, but its wording was so gentle that it was susceptible to alternative readings by pro-Legionaries as not in fact being a discipline.

In May 2006 Ezzati told El Mercurio that he thought reasonable the eight years that had elapsed between the canonical suit brought before the CDF in 1998 by a group of former Legionaries who accused Maciel of sexual abuse and abuse of the confessional and the day the charges were finally dealt with in 2006:
“The Holy See analyzes carefully the things put under its judgment. Through experience it knows that many accusations are true and that others are not. The respect for the rights of the person requires it to be very responsible, to use the greatest care in dealing with situations to reach conclusions that respect the truth and legal rights.”


Asked how the discipline would affect the Legionaries, he answered:
“Two considerations: one, what the Holy See’s Communiqué states: ‘the worthy apostolate of the Legionaries of Christ and of the Association “Regnum Christi” is gratefully recognized’; and second, what the Legionary declaration [in response to the Communiqué] states: ‘We renew our commitment to work with great intensity to live our charism of charity and extend the Kingdom of Christ serving the Church.’ I hope that the two considerations offer the Legionaries the stimulus necessary to look on with serenity and to commit themselves more and more to the task of making present the person and the message of Jesus in the world today, especially among young people.”

 

“The declaration …emphasizes three things: the fact of the denunciations, the affirmation of innocence by Father Maciel, and their compliance with the decision of the Holy See. It is a logical reaction and one of faith: there is the pain of the accusations made against their father founder, their conviction about his innocence, and their welcoming in the spirit of faith the decision of the Holy See.”

 

Asked what the discipline meant and whether Father Maciel was still entitled to a presumption of innocence, Ezzati answered:
“In the Church there are penal laws and medicinal laws. In this case, ‘bearing in mind Father Maciel's advanced age and his delicate health,’ [the Church] has chosen to invite Father Maciel on the way of ‘a reserved life of penitence and prayer, relinquishing any form of public ministry.’ It is good to remember that the fruitfulness of Christian life is not shown only in the great deeds and gestures that catch public attention. The sanctity that flourishes in enclosed monasteries, in the circumscribed lives of so many elderly, the pain of so many of those who suffer-- their contribution has a incalculable worth for society and for the Church.”

In speaking this way, he used the language characteristic of many pro-Legionaries at the time who interpreted the discipline minimally. These included Mexico City Archbishop Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera and the late American Father Richard John Neuhaus who said of the CDF discipline, “it should be noted that ‘penitence’ in this connection does not connote punishment for wrongdoing.”

The Legionary interpretation of the CDF discipline was agnostic as to whether the CDF had judged Maciel guilty; characteristically omitted the words “independently of the person of the Founder” when quoting the Communiqué’s sentence, "Independently of the person of the Founder, the worthy apostolate of the Legionaries of Christ and of the Association 'Regnum Christi' is gratefully recognized."; and claimed that the discipline was no discipline, but only an invitation to the same prayer and penitence all Christians are called to.

A pro-Legionary stance would make Archbishop Ezzati the new Polidoro van Vlierberghe, the Belgian Franciscan missionary to Chile and future apostolic administrator and territorial prelate of Illapel, Chile. As apostolic visitator in the first visitation of the Legionaries from 1956-8, Polidoro became the advocate for Father Maciel’s versions of events and Legionary savior when the first visitator, whom he succeeded, had wanted radically to reform the Legionaries.

Another Chilean connection: longtime Legionary supporter and troubleshooter Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Vatican Secretary Emeritus of State and Dean of the College of Cardinals, forged his first links with Father Maciel and the Legionaries (as he did as well with Chilean President of the Republic Augusto Pinochet) during his years as apostolic nuncio to Chile, 1977-88. In those years Ezzati was in Santiago directing the Salesian seminary, serving as Salesian superior, and teaching at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.

Archbishop Ricardo Ezzati Andrello is 67, was born in Campiglia dei Berici, a town of Vicenza in the Veneto in northern Italy, educated by the Salesians in Italy and Chile, where he moved when he was 17, and ordained a priest of the Salesians at 28 in 1970. He has long taken an interest in and served on committees regarding education, catechetics, and religious life. He was appointed in 1996 bishop of Valdivia, Chile, in 2001 auxiliary bishop of Santiago, and in 2006 archbishop of Concepción. He was made a Chilean national by special act of Chilean Congress in 2006.

Archbishop Ezzati plans in the event to begin work as apostolic visitator the week of July 27, delayed by pastoral commitments, though he has already met in preliminary way with Legionary superiors in Chile.

Legionary Movement

[Updated] Life-after-rc the other day reported that there is evidence that the Legionaries have been moving members around possibly to make them less available for the apostolic visitation to interview.

History may be repeating itself: that’s certainly what the Legionaries did in the late summer of 1956 in the face of the first apostolic visitation. Legionary Brother José Domínguez, who had recently helped Father Maciel draft the fourth vow, was moved for the duration to Massa Lubrense on the southern extremity of the Bay of Naples. Brother Saúl Barrales spent nine months of 1957 in the Canary Islands. (See González “Testimonios y documentos inéditos” 278 and Berry and Renner “Vows of Silence” 182.)

In light of that, interesting:

Father Jonathan Morris, formerly vice rector of the Legionary seminary in Rome, is now on sabbatical for six months or more at Old St. Patrick’s in Manhattan. (exlcblog links to the Old St. Patrick’s bulletin with this information.)

Yesterday, July 16, the National Catholic Register’s accountant was let go. This may have been another cost-cutting move – in the downturn the Register became a bi-weekly -- though cost-cutting was not the purpose of the acquisition of Southern Catholic College announced yesterday as well.

Such movements would provoke an important procedural question for the apostolic visitation: will the visitators interview only Legionaries and employees currently in place or will they also seek out former Legionaries, those on sabbatical, and those no longer employed? It’s not as if Father Morris can hide in lower Manhattan, but how can Bishop Versaldi, whose responsibility includes Italy, interview him if he is not in Rome? How will Archbishop Chaput, whose responsibility includes the US, interview him if he is on sabbatical from a Legionary assignment?

Life-after-rc wrote, “surely the AV would recognise such an obvious tactic [as removing witnesses from the visitation’s path].” However, Sandro Magister says that the visitation is to report in the fall. That is discouraging if true, unless what is meant is some sort of preliminary report or first impression. Four or five months would not likely be enough time to sort through well planned Legionary survival strategies, however transparent they be.

Can the Legionaries be undone?

Former Legionary Father Thomas Berg said a few days ago: “[We] need to know from the highest Church authority whether there ever really was a genuine charism inspired by the Holy Spirit at work in the Legion and Regnum Christi or whether what the Church has witnessed in the sixty-eight year phenomenon of the Legion was rather God simply drawing much good out of a primarily human and deeply flawed enterprise.”

Current Legionaries, by contrast, to justify their survival have been assuming the traditional theological view that the Church has already, infallibly and irreformably, recognized a genuine charism, when it twice granted the Legion an official approval, a decretum laudis.

The article below “Is Church approval of a religious order an infallible judgment?” sketches the history of that theological question.

I write that:
=Papal approval of religious orders dates from the time of Innocent III (1198-1216) and the controversy over Franciscan charism stimulated formulation of a doctrine of papal infallibility.

=Jesuit theologian Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) became a forcible exponent of the view that “the Pope cannot err in the approval of a religious order.”

=Widely held for almost four centuries, this was, however, never more than a theological opinion and theologians after the two Vatican Councils have now questioned more carefully the scope of infallibility to matters beyond those of revelation itself.

=The apostolic visitation of the Legionaries now underway can, it seems, reverse the decreta laudis if it chooses without affecting the theology of papal infallibility.

I thank Rev. John W. O'Malley, SJ; Prof. Sydney F. Penner; and especially Rev. Francis A. Sullivan, SJ for having helped me prepare this article. They are of course in no way responsible for any errors or for the opinions expressed.

Read “Is Church approval of a religious order an infallible judgment?”.

Is Church approval of a religious order an infallible judgment?

Before concluding the now underway apostolic visitation of the Legionaries of Christ into the unedifying private life of founder Rev. Marcial Maciel and its effects on his institute, the Vatican will face a dilemma: confirm an imposter as nonetheless conveyer of valid charism or revoke a religious institute’s formal approval. The Legionaries, to justify their survival as a congregation without a founder they can look back to as model, informally claim that the approval of their institute and constitutions was an infallible judgment by the Church. And indeed, the view that the Church’s approval of a religious order is irreformable has been a theological commonplace for centuries. But it is now no longer unexamined at a time when theologians question more carefully the scope of infallibility to matters beyond those of revelation itself, the “secondary object of infallibility” as it is called. Starkly has the case of the Legionaries posed in real life a longstanding question in the theology of infallibility.

The Legionaries are approved as a congregation of pontifical right, with a nihil obstat in 1948 under Pius XII, first decretum laudis in 1965 under Paul VI, and final decretum laudis in 1983 under John Paul II. In the way they speak, Legionaries assume that that judgment is irreformable and that their charism, embodied in the approved constitutions, is therefore a concrete reality outside all interference. As Legionary Director of Vocations Rev. Anthony Bannon told donors on March 18, “Our constitutions were approved 25 and a half years ago. At that time it was like the Church took what we were, our constitutions, our charism, out of our hands. It was seen as a charism that came from God… What the church has guaranteed as a valid charism, it also protects.” In an August 2007 lawsuit, the Legionaries claimed their constitutions “proprietary” and “for internal dissemination only” against ReGain, an internet discussion site on which the constitutions had been discussed openly and not treated with the respect due a sanctified object.

The assumption that the approval of the congregation is irrevocable underlies the serenity with which the Legionaries have met disgrace. Father Maciel’s duplicity embodied “the great mystery of how the Holy Spirit can play beautiful melodies on a broken instrument… We count on the closeness and support of the Holy Father and Cardinal Rodé and many other churchmen who appreciate [our] charism,” according to the post-scandal “Guidelines for answering some questions.” Legionary spokesman Jim Fair has said: “whatever our founder's failings, the Holy Spirit somehow delivered the charism to us through him.” Legionary Father Thomas Williams has said that the founder's writings are "an integral part of the charism of the order, which the Church has approved as authentic." Or as all this filtered down to one Regnum Christi member, who wrote, representatively I believe, in an internet comment, “Whatever happens, the Legion and Regnum Christi are approved by the Church. As a Catholic, I trust in the pope's infallibility and in God's mysterious plan.”

To understand what theology Legionaries rely on when they make such assertions and teach others to make them we need to go back in history. It was the Church’s legitimizing, of all things, a new form of religious life, the radical poverty of the mendicant friars, beginning in the late twelfth century, that stimulated formulation of the doctrine of papal infallibility, according to Brian Tierney’s Origins of Papal Infallibility (1972).

Before Innocent III (pope 1198-1216), bishops would approve religious life in their dioceses. After him, the pope approved them for the whole Church, one among many ways in which Innocent regularized Church life, as, for another example, with the canonization of saints. Many groups experimenting with radial Gospel witness, lay and religious, confronted Innocent, who, organized and legal-minded, sought to keep them in the Church after examination and approval. His reconciliation by 1212 of elements of the separated Poor Men, begun in Lyons in the 1170s, was a turning point. Innocent’s administration assumed, if implicitly, that approval of religious groups was exclusively the responsibility of the apostolic see. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) forbade the further founding of new religious orders and the Second Council of Lyons (1274) confirmed the ban, suppressing any previously unapproved.

Francis of Assisi, whose radical poverty intended no obvious subversion of papal authority, sought approval for his new way of life from Innocent in 1210 and Gregory IX (1227-1241) granted approval formally with Quo elongati (1230). Successive papal bulls privileged the Franciscans, exempting them from episcopal oversight; if ever in conflict with a bishop, they could claim the support of the pope, who had authorized their activities. Nicholas III (1227-1280) solidified the Franciscan position with Exiit qui seminat (1279), something of a second foundational constitution, which approved the Franciscan way of life and affirmed it as the way of perfection that Christ had taught the apostles.

Was Exiit irreformable? John XXII (1316-1334) thought not. In Cum inter nonnullos (1323) he condemned the radical Franciscan theory of evangelical poverty, that neither Christ nor the apostles owned anything, which prompted Franciscan theologians, in defense of their charism, to defend Exiit as an irreformable judgment. If Franciscans needed a doctrine of papal infallibility to protect them from Pope John, they revived in its favor the innovative arguments of Franciscan Pietro Olivi (1248–1298), which, according to Tierney, were inextricably bound up with his desire to see Francis’ teaching authenticated. An infallible papacy protected Franciscan charism. As the notion of papal infallibility developed after the fourteenth century, the notion of infallible or inerrant papal approval of a religious institute developed as part of it, becoming the widespread theological opinion.

Dominican theologian Melchior Cano (1509-1560) disputed it and held, in writing about the authority of councils in De Locis Theologicis (5.5.5, 1563), that the Church could err in judgment on mores (both “morals” and “ways of living,” that is, the “secondary object of infallibility”):

The approval of religious orders surely pertains to mores… Undoubtedly some orders have been approved not only uselessly, but even harmfully. In so many orders and institutes religion has been so set back that, among the other remedies for evils, pious men would have rightly and properly expected also this one from a general council: after a few select religious orders have been kept, the others should be ushered off the stage. Church officials are sometimes wrong and imprudent about mores and sometimes the Church approves what it ought not to have approved.

Jesuit theologian Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) here thought Cano gravely mistaken and his cogent and long refutation in De virtute et statu religionis (2.15-18 (from 1608)) and De Fide Theologica (5.8.9 (1621)) remained normative in Catholicism for almost 400 years. Suárez is the foremost theologian of the view that “the Pope cannot err in the approval of a religious order.”

By approving an order, Suárez says, the Church, “after sufficient examination declares that this mode of life is holy, without any error or superstition, and that both in its end and in its means provides a way to perfection.” If earlier forms of religious life, such as that of Augustinians and Benedictines, had been approved locally by local bishops and possessed a universality in the observance of a rule, but not by a universal centralized government, orders after Innocent require papal approval because they were now “instituted for the universal Church, that they spread throughout the whole Church.” Universal approbation can only imply papal approbation.

For the authority of that approbation, Suárez cites distantly Augustine Epistle 118, “to dispute that what the universal Church is doing should be done is an act of the most insolent craziness.” He cites Aquinas in Contra impugnantes Dei cultum et religionem, “Since some religious orders… have been established by the Apostolic See [for many benefits and good works], anyone who tries to condemn one such clearly incurs condemnation himself,” which cites the 465 synodal allocution of Pope Hilary, “It is improper and hazardous for anyone rashly to judge divine constitutions or decrees of the Holy See.” He also cites the agreement of his contemporaries, Jesuit theologians Juan Azor and Gregorio Valencia.

Papal approbation of a religious order is infallibly authoritative because analogous to the canonization of saints, also assisted by the Holy Spirit. The contrary is unthinkable:

If the approval of sanctity by public Church declaration is necessary that saints be honored publicly and universally without danger of error or superstition, similar approval is no less necessary for a congregation and mode of life that the Church proposes as holy and useful for attaining perfection… This special privilege of the Pontifical dignity [approving religious orders] cannot be delegated; just as the Pontiff cannot delegate his power of canonizing saints or of defining some Catholic truth with the assistance of the Holy Spirit.

Robert Bellarmine had noted in De Monachis 4 that the evangelical counsels obviously need no pope’s approval, but the individual modes of life in which those vows are undertaken do. Suárez continues that religious orders have a particular “charism” and that is why they need approval:

[An order requires] the addition of certain observances that make it a particular order or way of life… otherwise there would be no distinction between religious orders… But the danger of error is imminent in what is added through human intention. To avoid this Church approval is necessary.

Altogether Suárez concludes:

The pope’s approval [of a religious order] has divine authority from the special assistance of the Holy Spirit that he is believed to have lest he should err in so serious a matter and therefore the approval has an infallible certainty.

Nineteenth and twentieth century manuals of Catholic theology perpetuated the opinion Suárez had codified. Joseph Wilhelm and Thomas B. Scannell in 1906, reporting Matthias Scheeben's Handbuch der katholischen Dogmatik (1873-87) to the English-speaking world held that the approval of religious orders was one among “many truths… inseparably connected with matters of morals… so connected and interwoven with Revelation that they cannot be separated from it.”

Charles Coppens, SJ in A Systematic Study of the Catholic Religion (1903) says:

…whether the Church utters explicit definitions, or simply performs her quotidianum magisterium, her daily office of instructing the faithful, she frequently judges… that certain systems of education are or are not injurious to faith and morals, that certain societies are immoral, that others are laudable, etc.; else she could not efficiently guide her members in matters necessary to salvation.

Francis A. Sullivan, SJ in De Ecclesia (1962) on the eve of the Second Vatican Council wrote in the tradition of Suárez, to use his own English paraphrase:

the solemn approval of a religious order would be based on a doctrinal judgment that its rule was consonant with the evangelical counsels, and was such as would promote the striving for religious perfection. The underlying argument was that the harmful consequences of the solemn approval of a rule that was not consonant with the evangelical counsels would be such that the Holy Spirit would prevent such an error on the part of the magisterium.

Msgr. Dominique Le Tourneau in “Infallibilty” in The Papacy: an Encyclopedia (1994, English 2002) wrote recently in quite the same terms:

If the magisterium of the Church had no power over [truths within the secondary object of infallibility], it could neither preserve or conveniently explain the truths of salvation that make up its first object. The truths virtually revealed – or secondary object – are: truths of a spiritual order, such as the preambles to the faith, certain truths of a historical order, like the legitimacy of a council or its ecumenical nature; the objective meaning of an article; the canonization of saints; the solemn approval of religious orders; the recognition of a rite and so forth. The Magisterium is infallible in each and every one of its acts.

So to this day we hear the echo of Pietro Olivi: “It is impossible for God to give to anyone the full authority to decide about doubts concerning the faith and divine law with this condition, that He would permit him to err.”

This then is the tradition in which the Legionaries claim Church approval of their order irreformable. Theologians today, however, commonly recognize in that earlier view merely a long-standing theological opinion. Vatican I, confirmed by Vatican II, as is known, delimited the conditions for infallibly rendered judgment. Father Sullivan himself reconsidered the matter and 21 years later in Magisterium: Teaching Authority in the Catholic Church (1983) did not mention the approbation of religious orders as an example of a matter thought to pertain to the secondary object. He wrote there:

While the fact that there is a secondary object of infallibility is held by most Catholic theologians to be certain, there is by no means unanimity with regard to what is contained in this object… many manuals of ecclesiology prior to Vatican II reflected the broad description of the secondary object as ‘truths connected with revelation.’ The current trend would be to limit the object to what is strictly required in order that the magisterium might be able to defend and explain the Gospel.

The careful opinion of Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ (1918-2008) in Magisterium (2007) has been cited often amidst the Legionary crisis and found wide agreement:

Some authors [apparently Suárez and his followers] defend… a kind of ‘practical infallibility’ in papal actions such as the approval of religious institutes. Although the common teaching of theologians gives some support for holding infallibility in these cases, it is difficult to see how they fit under the object of infallibility as defined by the two Vatican Councils.

Sullivan, theology professor at Boston College and past dean of the faculty of theology at the Gregorian in Rome, called my attention in an email to John Paul II’s addition with Ad tuendam fidem (1998) of a new paragraph to canon 750 of the Code of Canon Law that describes the secondary object of infallibility as “each and every proposition required for the sacred preservation and faithful explanation of the deposit of faith.” Sullivan said that in his opinion “a decretum laudis [the formal approval of a religious order] as such is not a doctrinal statement, but it does imply a doctrinal judgment that the rule is consonant with the evangelical counsels. To that extent I think it would enjoy some ordinary, non-definitive magisterial authority delegated from the Pope to the Prefect of the Congregation of Religious.”


A controversial new order gives the impression that the Church has apostatized and that they alone, inspired by the Holy Spirit, constitute the truth. Against the bishops they antagonize they claim for survival an infallibly granted papal support. Fourteenth century Franciscans or early twenty-first century Legionaries? Well, to their credit, the Legionaries never claimed John Paul for the anti-Christ, whose coming Pietro Olivi did fear any pope who relaxed Franciscan rule would hasten. Yet Father Maciel was no St. Francis. And here is one area where the Legionaries, while claiming the vanguard of the Second Vatican Council, maintain a theological view that prevailed before the First Vatican Council, with its counter-Reformation feel. The Council of Trent (in 1563) declined to hinder the Jesuits in any way, approved as they were by the Holy See. The Council of Constance (1415) had condemned the propositions of John Wycliffe that members of religious orders are not members of the Christian religion and that all religious orders were founded by the devil.

Historically the doctrine of papal infallibility has not been always discussed in the abstract, but by critics and proponents who have had a dog in the fight. Fourteenth century Franciscan theologians defended it to defend their existence and charism. John XXII opposed it to oppose a limitation on his sovereignty, his ability to reverse an act of his predecessor. Suárez was explicating papal approval of the Jesuits. In our day, those who feel that popes have decided incorrectly on, say, matters of sexuality and gender are motivated to discern the limits of infallibility’s secondary object. Conservatives who want the Legionaries abolished and re-founded are happy to cite that Avery Dulles passage. It is as paradoxical that rebellious Franciscans, not curial theologians, brought the theory of papal infallibility into the theological mainstream in the thirteenth century as it would be if the conservative Legionaries were to offer an irrefutable counter-example to the opinion that the secondary objects of infallibility include approval of religious orders.

Part of the drama of this apostolic visitation is the backdrop of that 800-year-old question. Baltimore Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien, an outspoken critic of the Legionaries, has said that abolition is something that the visitation may consider and Father Thomas Berg on leaving the Legion allowed that “the serious issues within the congregation will require its thorough reformation if not a complete re-foundation,” but neither was necessarily speaking with any more theological precision on the matter than the Legionary who tells you privately, it’s a good thing we were approved before all this came out, or repeats to seminarians the informal words of Cardinal Franc Rodé, “If the Legion stops practicing its charism, I’ll kill you.”

Father Williams himself has also said, “[We] need a reconfirmation by the church that [the Legion] is something that is good, that is a work of God, and that this has to go on, and not the contrary," though this is something more appropriately said to journalists than donors or the impressionable young. What did Pope Benedict imply on the matter when in 2007 he abolished the fourth Legionary vow never to speak ill of a superior, an element of the once approved constitutions added by an all too recognizable “human intention”? Young men and women who consecrated themselves within the Legion and Regnum Christi trusting it was “a way to perfection” without “error or superstition” and then left it abused, damaged, and faithless will think its Church approval to have been merely a fallible prudential judgment and be unimpressed with any defense of its charismatic constitutions as distinct from the way in which the constitutions were actually lived.

Many Legionaries are endeavoring to carry on with the charism, yet their charismatic obedience to the pope stops short of agreeing in advance to extinction if he should so decide. Evidently confident of their future, they have in recent months agreed to acquire Southern Catholic College in Dawsonville, Georgia, and watched Pope Benedict bless the cornerstone of their Magdala retreat house of the Pontifical Notre Dame of Jerusalem Center. They go on recruiting and accepting young candidates undaunted. When they link their own indefectibility to that of the Church, bishops and others who have felt the Legionaries prone to setting themselves as a parallel church will recognize a characteristic confusion. But if the visitation discerns that the Legionaries were founded “uselessly” and “harmfully” and that Legionary orthodoxy and good works have been merely the salesmanship of an “entrepreneurial genius,” in Archbishop O’Brien’s memorable phrase, and recommends an end to privilege for the foundation of a sexual abuser and hypocrite, the Church may, apparently, treat the approval of the Legionaries as reformable and reverse the decreta laudis without damaging the theology of papal infallibility, despite all the self-interested Legionary assumptions and assertions to the contrary.