Cassandra

Legionary professions at Cheshire

2009-08-29T14:05:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, August 29 a group of young Legionaries took their religious vows. Here are notes of a friend’s impressions after the ceremonies:

Today at 11am was the day of religious professions for the Legion in Cheshire, Connecticut, at St. Bridget’s Church, which is downtown Cheshire a few miles or so from the seminary. It was chilly and a little wet. Aside from knowing one of the brothers I was anxious to see also how they would handle the whole thing given the circumstances.

There were 23 brothers making first religious vows, 6 renewing their vows, and 6 taking their final vows. They made these vows in these three groups in the middle of Mass.

Father Corcuera himself presided, and said Mass, and gave the homily. There was also a bishop there in attendance, though he wasn’t introduced at Mass and nobody I asked really knew who he was. Many Legionary priests were there, of course, including, I think, the territorial leaders.

They still sprinkle in little commentaries at various points in the Mass they way they used to do with passages from Father Maciel. I didn’t recognize any passages from him today. One talked about how the parents were bringing up the gifts to the altar, symbolizing the sacrifice the parents make to give their children to religious life. There were many fervent Regnum Christ families, women in veils, families kneeling on the marble floor. The church was packed.

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. Here is what Father Alvaro said in his homily, I think pretty accurately as we brainstormed a little to see how much we remembered. We didn’t take notes, but some people were, hanging on his every word. He apologized for his English, but it wasn’t really necessary. He spoke pretty well in English, but some of it wasn’t necessarily perfectly clear.

He began the sermon by saying, thank you all for being here. What a note said to me at a Legionary house where I’m staying, I say also to you, thank you for being here. Thank you to the priests for making the Eucharist possible. Thank you families for being willing to be here. Thank you brothers who are professing, for your witness. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

He said, we are closer to God than ever, because everything works together for the good. We now have pains and difficulties and tears, but we trust in God. Jesus lost everything on the cross but gained everything. “Vale la pena!” The pain is worth it!

He said that he was reading about Saint Francis of Assisi last month. Francis once had a terrible temptation, he lost his happiness and thought God had abandoned him, but he learned that was when God was closest to him. A dark night of the soul, indeed. But the darkest night is when we know God loves us the most.

He talked about how on his recent visit to the Holy Land he prayed in the garden of Gethsemane in front of a 2000 year old olive tree that could have been there with Jesus. In his prayers that day he came to understand how much Jesus suffered. Jesus didn’t know how he could do it and he felt in that prayer that he didn’t know how he was going to get through all this. But suffering leads to the cross and to the resurrection.

He preached on the first reading, the one in which God calls Samuel and he says, “here am I Lord.” This is what the professing brothers have said to the Lord themselves. He joked, sometimes I wish I could go back to sleep until the Lord calls. But that’s not possible. This got a lot of laughter.

He said, I believe, we are sorry for not understanding the suffering of others. We accept our suffering and unite it to the suffering of others. We know that all suffering is united to the suffering of Christ on the cross. We are sorry for what we have done, past, present, and future, yes, even the future, because we know we are weak, and will always be in need of God’s mercy. We are always grateful to God for the Legion and for the Movement.

He ended by saying, and I think this is pretty much a direct quote, “Thank you all again. Thank you for being willing all to be in the same boat. In a storm, you love the boat even more.”

Of course the scandal was not mentioned directly, but Father Alvaro gave the impression in his words of being not so happy with the situation he was in – dark night of the soul, he wished he could just go to sleep, he doesn’t know how he’ll get through the Gethsemane -- and of being very, very grateful to those who are sticking with the Legion. He kept on saying, thank you from the bottom of our hearts. He does have such a beaming and smiling personality.

At the end of the Mass we said the “Prayer for the pope,” “…in your presence I renew my unconditional loyalty to your vicar on earth, the pope. In him you have chosen to show us the safe and sure path…”

Father Corcuera gave a conclusion more prepared than the homily. It was in Spanish and read in translation immediately also again in English by another Father. Again, paraphrasing I think pretty accurately, he said, again, thank you to everyone, from the bottom of our hearts. We ask pardon. And we begin asking forgiveness for ourselves by forgiving others. We love our superiors and thank them for their fidelity. We also forgive our superiors, even our general director. This got a big laugh.

He spoke again of the boat. One section of consecrated women have a model boat and keep thinking, you love the boat even more in a storm. We are safe as apostles in a storm with Christ in the boat. The devil is the enemy of the church and wants to destroy her. We read in the Apocalypse reading a couple weeks ago on the feast of Assumption that the devil swept the stars out of the sky. Let’s not let him sweep the stars out of the sky, but let’s let him sweep the stars all over the sky, so that they give more light to everyone.

He and the bishop walked out down the aisle. Father Alvaro spoke to almost everyone along the aisle, it took a while. One young girl a couple rows back, after meeting him, went, wow!

Cardinals and coverups

2009-08-20T10:29:00.000-07:00

Subtle Legionary theologians are working out the distinction between Father Maciel’s unedifying private life and Legionary “mystique,” their idiosyncratic word for religious “charism,” apparently less concerned with the damage their scandal more and more seriously is inflicting on the wider Church.

As exlcblog made us aware last week, Sanjuana Martínez reported in CIMAC that one of the babymommies alleges that Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican Secretary of State, is implicated in the payment of hush money. That would make for a stupendous scandal if the churchman organizing the apostolic visitation had been previously involved in silencing witnesses, especially after calling for “transparency” in the letter announcing the visitation.

I do not and will not believe that allegation without further evidence. But I wondered if either she or Martínez could have meant to name rather the emeritus Secretary of State, Angelo Sodano, whom we know to have been at the service of the Legionaries in the past.

Now Dean of the College of Cardinals, Sodano in 1999 intervened against the group of Maciel’s victims who were seeking a canonical hearing, according to their lawyer. In May 2005 Sodano’s Secretariat of State issued an unsigned document denying that the CDF investigation begun by Cardinal Josef Ratzinger was even underway, which the Legionaries then used to claim publicly that Maciel had been cleared, as in the May 29-June 4, 2005 story in the National Catholic Register, "Vatican Exonerates Legion's Founder."

In March 2006 Sodano was himself found sending a secret, misleading letter through a surrogate to make life difficult for Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, in the matter of the reappointment of Cardinal Camillo Ruini as Vicar of Rome.

Speaking of misleading leaks, the new reports of the massiveness of Father Maciel’s corruption make the shock professed by Legionary leadership in February seem insincere and their approach then seem just another in a long series of attempts at covering up: surface the one daughter, plausibly spin that it was a one-time indiscretion, and try to move on.

A source representing the thought of Cardinal Franc Rodé, head of the Vatican Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, and foremost Vatican champion of the notion of the existence of a Legionary charism, took this tack with Catholic News Agency in an article on February 8. “An official from the Congregation who spoke with Catholic News Agency” said that the Legionary crisis did not warrant outside intervention.

Those looking for conflicts of interest in the Congregation’s oversight of the Legionaries have noted the presence of Legionary Father Clemens Gutberlet on Rodé’s staff.

Then on Monday, February 23, 2009, Catholic News Agency reported confirmation by “Vatican officials” that Legionary leadership would “release a major statement in response to the controversy surrounding the double life of its founder and the future of the order. The statement will be released on Tuesday ‘or Wednesday at the latest’… The source told CNA that it will be a foundational document that will be decisive in determining future action…”

That leak (was it also from Rodé’s Congregation?) had been coordinated with the showing in some Legionary seminaries that same day, February 23, of a video of Cardinal Rodé encouraging Legionaries.

The source proved incorrect. That statement never was made. But the leak seems part of an attempt to assist the Legionaries to wrap things up quickly and handle the scandal on their own terms. The attempt had involved Catholic News Agency, based in Denver, the archdiocese of current apostolic visitator Archbishop Chaput.

The scenario in which the Legionaries would keep their independence from Vatican oversight did not prevail. Instead, the Legionaries’ statement was deferred and on the next day, Tuesday, February 25, Baltimore Archbishop Edwin O’Brien in his archdiocesan Catholic Review made his famous call for a review of the “very basis of the Legion movement.”

Pope John Paul and this sorry chapter

2009-08-18T09:15:00.001-07:00

What a trough of excrement to be tramping through! We read that a lawyer, whose child was molested in a Legionary school in Mexico City, is representing three of Father Maciel’s at least six children in a claim on his estate. Children have been paid vast amounts of money in exchange for their silence. A Vatican Secretary of State is reportedly implicated in the payoffs (though it doesn't seem to me the right one was named). Mothers were underage, one a consecrated woman of Regnum Christi. After statutory rape of the mother, Father Maciel in turn molested one of his own daughters.

I empathize with visitator Bilbao Bishop Blázquez Pérez, who cheerfully resents the ruination of his summer vacation by having to think about the horrible Legionaries of Christ.

The new revelations are good if the revulsion they occasion makes the abolition of the Legionaries that much more likely. There is no theological problem in recognizing that the Church’s official approval of the Legion was an error of judgment, farcical Legionary spokesman Jim Fair to the contrary, who trusts “we will be able to close this sorry chapter in the life of our Congregation, renew our service to the Church, and continue forward in our mission.”

The children’s lawyer, Jose Bonilla, said, “One must remember that the Legion surrounded and was at the disposal of the founder; practically speaking, everything was his.” Yes, that’s the point: sexual predators create an environment for themselves in which to operate and this is what the Legion most authentically was. Those who approved the Legion and fostered it up to now lacked the awareness to understand this. We trust the visitators and those who will dispose of the Legion do not.

The circus nevertheless threatens to distract from the issue more important than Father Maciel’s personal depravity, which, if not fully, we knew about already: accounting for the damage the Legionaries have done to the Church. What interests me is how the scandal now threatens to derail the legacy of Pope John Paul II.

Reportedly, John Paul gave Maciel’s daughter Norma Hilda Rivas her first Holy Communion at the Vatican. Bonilla claims that John Paul knew about the existence of Father Maciel’s children.

I will not believe that before I see evidence. Circumstantially I find it harder to believe that John Paul knew about Father Maciel’s children than that he was taken in by a randy trickster who would not have wished to destroy the illusion of his posture as a holy man. Father Maciel was endlessly introducing Regnum Christi members and others to John Paul.

The journalism of Jason Berry, from the ground-shaking 1997 Hartford Courant article (with Gerald Renner) through “Vows of Silence” in 2004 to his recent pieces in the GlobalPost, has been a crucial service that anyone interested in truth must thank him for. At the same time, he has used the scandal as a stick to beat John Paul over the head with.

What the Legionaries used to say in their vile and dishonest attempt to discredit Berry’s triumphantly vindicated journalism, that he is an enemy of the pope, was distortedly true insofar as Berry has expressed unsympathy for orthodox Catholic understanding in some matters. To have decoupled truth from Gospel witness in its members is one aspect of the disaster the Legionaries have inflicted on the Church. The National Catholic Register used the same voice both to proclaim pro-life and their loyalty to John Paul and to lie in defense of a serial child rapist.

Those of us who revere the writings of John Paul as prophetic for the new millennium must be willing to recognize his personal shortcomings as well as his holiness. We must appropriate, and not ignore and suppress, all negative Berry-esque material about the Legionaries and John Paul. We must live radically in the truth and nevermore cover anything up. It is simply a fact of history that John Paul the Great recommended to the Church a monstrous child abuser as “an efficacious guide to youth.” Shout it out and theologize it rather than let Jason Berry torment us with it.

John Paul himself acknowledged and apologized to many victims of injustice in the history of the Church. The Church may now acknowledge and apologize to the victims of John Paul’s credulity of Father Maciel and the Legionaries.

Let’s see these photographs that Jose Bonilla claims to have and know completely their circumstances, account for what John Paul was told and who said what to him and what he knew.

Let the cause for John Paul’s canonization get to the bottom of all of it before plans move forward for his beatification on the fifth anniversary of his death next April 2.

The Legion is not the only new religious movement that John Paul promoted. Let’s not shrink from the implications of discovering that John Paul’s approval of a movement did not of itself protect its members from becoming uncritical zombie followers of a narcissist.

Father Maciel is now clearly recognized for the monster he was. The discovery of any more children, victims, or imposture will change little. The Legion can be abolished and its priests dispersed to some more beneficial work. What is now at stake is the prophetic legacy of Pope John Paul, who in mistaken friendship gave his support to such a monster.

Is John Paul's temporal administration of the Church, which included his championing of the Legionaries, immune from a John Pauline purification of memory? It would be unworthy of John Paul's courageous legacy to say so.

Piece in the Colorado Independent

2009-08-04T14:08:00.000-07:00

“Denver Archbishop Chaput welcomed discontented Legionaries” has appeared on coloradoindependent.com.

See also the longer article about visitator Archbishop Chaput below.

Tom Hoopes’ move

2009-07-23T13:59:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-22T07:34:00.000-07:00

[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”

2009-07-20T11:05:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-17T17:17:00.000-07:00

[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?

2009-07-15T15:26:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-07-15T12:56:00.000-07:00

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.

The first apostolic visitation of the Legionaries of Christ: 1956-1959

2009-06-23T13:55:00.000-07:00

The Vatican’s second decision to conduct an official investigation, a so-called apostolic visitation, of the Catholic religious congregation the Legionaries of Christ was made public on March 31, not long after the 50th anniversary of February 6, 1959, the day Legionary founder Rev. Marcial Maciel counted as the day of his reinstatement after the conclusion of the first. Few know the full story of the first visitation: it concluded obscurely and Father Maciel and the Legionaries were able to misrepresent it for fifty years afterward. But the visitation did occur and actually concluded that Maciel needed to be removed from office and that the Legionaries needed reform. The Legionaries defeated that first apostolic visitation with untruth, appetizing presentation, and the help of curial friends. This is something that anyone interested in the honest outcome of today’s visitation needs to be aware of.

(This account of the first visitation draws substantially from Fernando M. González Los Legionarios de Cristo; testimonios y documentos inéditos (Mexico City: Tusquets Editores 2006), which has not been much discussed in English. González publishes documents of the case verbatim (some in facsimile) from two archives, one that of Father Luis Ferreira Correa, Legionary vicar general at the time, supplied by José Barba, and another made available to him by a source. This account also draws from Jason Berry and the late Gerald Renner Vows of Silence (New York: Free Press 2004), the standard account of the first visitation in English, which, however, González greatly supplements.)

(Accompanying this article is a timeline of the first apostolic visitation of the Legionaries of Christ.)

(Update 19 July: wxre has briefly summarized this article in Italian within the larger discussion of “Chi Era Realmente Marcial Maciel?”)

Cardinal Valerio Valeri, prefect of the Vatican Congregation of the Affairs of Religious, ordered the first apostolic visitation of the Legionaries in 1956. He was prefect from 1953 to his death in 1963 at 79. He had been the apostolic nuncio to France accredited during the war to the Vichy government and then forced from France after liberation by Charles de Gaulle, to be succeeded there by Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII.

Though by 1954 Maciel hoped his institute was close to definitive Vatican approval and Valeri was supportive enough in February 1956 to have approved the new name “Legionaries of Christ,” Maciel, aged 36 in 1956, was becoming incapacitated from addiction to narcotic painkillers Dolantin and Demerol. On January 3, 1956 Spaniard Legionary Father Rafael Arumí, 29, novice master at the Legionary College in Rome, found Maciel so unstable from drugs that he summoned from Mexico Father Luis Ferreira Correa, 41, rector of the Legionary apostolic school (minor seminary) at Tlalpan in Mexico City and Legionary vicar general. The crisis lasted for days. Arumí, Ferreira, and Spaniard Legionary Father Antonio Lagoa, 36, rector of the Legionary College in Rome, considered how to deal with the scandal and contemplated Maciel’s replacement as superior. Valeri was hearing such things from sources in Rome and Mexico and himself saw Maciel in poor condition detoxing in Salvator Mundi Hospital in Rome in spring 1956.

Two Legionaries took responsibility (treasonably, as Maciel saw it) for informing authorities: Ferreira Correa and Spaniard Brother Federico Domínguez, prefect of studies at Tlalpan, who as Maciel’s private secretary had observed him closely.

In a letter dated August 24, 1954, Domínguez, then 27, had reported Maciel’s shortcomings to the vicar general of the Mexico City archdiocese: he doesn’t follow the religious rule, recite the Breviary, or meditate. He disrespects confidentiality in matters of conscience. He uses “lies, distortions, exaggerations” and acts as if “the ends justify the means.” He lacks the spirit of religious poverty, travels first class, eats luxurious food rather than that prepared for the community, spends more time in the houses of women donors than in his own religious houses. He considers his desire for sexual gratification to be a urological problem. He gives himself narcotic injections and carefully conceals it. “Under the effect of the drugs, he makes magnificent plans of apostolate and [violating confidentiality] talks publicly about the private defects of those he is with. This is understood by the religious who don’t know what is going on as a proof of Father Maciel’s ‘spiritual clairvoyance.’”

Domínguez’s letter got back to Maciel, who then to help him discredit Domínguez sought out Belgian Benedictine Gregorio Lemercier, prior of the Benedictine priory he founded near Cuernavaca. Lemercier was an unlikely potential ally, a pioneer in the use of psychoanalysis in vocational discernment and religious life and a well-read exponent of liturgical renewal, who ten years later would himself fall foul of Vatican authorities. Maciel had miscalculated: if Lemercier first had the impression that Domínguez needed counseling, he soon gathered that Maciel himself was the problem and instructed Domínguez, then Ferreira, to report the drug and sex abuse they knew about before leaving the Legion, as they intended to do.

By summer 1956, four Mexican bishops knew at least something about the Maciel problem, the archbishops of Mexico City, Morelia, and Yucatan, and the bishop of Cuernavaca. Cuernavaca Bishop Sergio Méndez Arceo wrote cautiously on August 14 to Arcadio Larraona, Secretary of the Vatican Congregation of the Affairs of Religious, recommending Maciel’s removal and an investigation of three charges: “devious and lying behavior, use of narcotic drugs, acts of sodomy with boys of the congregation.” On August 31 Mexico City Archbishop Miguel Darío Miranda also wrote to Larraona agreeing that “immediate intervention is necessary” in the Maciel case and reiterating those three charges: “sins against the sixth commandment committed with members of the congregation,” drug addiction, and mendacity to achieve his ends.

Ferreira had on August 23 written at length to the Mexico City vicar general about a number of cases of Maciel’s “impurely touching” apostolic school boys and subsequent explanation, when the boys had told Ferreira of this, that he had been in pain and must have been unconscious. He told the story of Maciel’s drug crisis in Rome in early January and wrote of Maciel’s lies and evasions and his theory of having a urological problem that required emission of semen.

The three letters from August 1956 – those of Méndez Arceo, Darío Miranda, and Ferreira Correa – document an important point: the charge of sexual abuse was part of what triggered the original investigation of Maciel. Maciel never admitted that, claiming, as in his book-length autobiographical interview with Jesús Colina, Christ is My Life (Manchester, New Hampshire: Sophia Institute Press 2003 (English version)), that what he called the “slanders” against him involved only drugs and lies. The standard understanding of this is conveyed, for example, in the Wikipedia article, “Sexual abuse scandal in the Legion of Christ”: “In 1956 the Vatican had him removed as superior and investigated allegations of drug abuse… There are no records of any members reporting sexual abuse at that time.”

Things moved quickly. On September 20 Larraona had the documentation sent to Domenico Tardini, Secretary of the Roman Curia, suggesting the Pope be informed and that Maciel step down and find help. Maciel’s suspension, signed by Valeri and dated the next day, was relayed through the Apostolic Delegation in Mexico, as Larraona had asked, sidestepping Cardinal Giuseppe Pizzardo, Secretary of the Holy Office, a Maciel friend.

Maciel arrived in Rome by October 1 and on October 3 wrote to Valeri, accepting his suspension by the Congregation respectfully, “with absolute submission and unconditional compliance,” and agreeing “to go to a clinic, suspended for that time from the exercise of my responsibility of superior general of the Institute.” All the same he claimed good health, enclosing as evidence a certificate from papal physician Ricardo Galeazzi Lisi (who as it turned out would be dismissed from papal service later in 1956 amid talk of gambling debts and caused distaste in 1958 by selling photos and stories of Pius XII’s dying days) and declared himself the victim of calumny. Maciel was exiled to Spain, restricted from Rome. Legionary administration for the time being was taken up by Lagoa, as College rector; Arumí, as novice master; and Ferreira, as vicar general, assisted by Domínguez.

On October 13 Valeri appointed as apostolic visitator Anastasio (of the Holy Rosary) Ballestrero, general superior of the Discalced Carmelites. Anastasio was 43, born in Genoa in 1913, a Discalced Carmelite priest from 1936. He served as general superior from 1955 to 1967 and would become archbishop of Bari in 1973 and of Turin in 1977 and a cardinal made by Pope John Paul II in 1979.

The Legion geared up to obstruct the visitation. In August or September, Maciel asked Legionary José Domínguez, Federico’s brother, to help draft an official religious vow for Legionaries to take, never to criticize a superior and to report those who do. Maciel explained this “second private vow” in a long letter dated September 15, 1956, addressed to all the Legionaries of the Front of Mexico. He wrote:

The vow in question is a formal commitment contracted with God which consists in: First, not expressing externally, in any way, either orally, in writing, or by physical gestures, anything which might result in the detriment of the person or the AUTHORITY of the Superior. Secondly, notifying your Superior as a soon as possible if you should realize that another member of the Institute has faulted against the vow thus understood….

The Private Vow has as its specific purpose the safeguarding of the criterion and principle of authority in the Legion and the making of a more efficacious government through the absolute ADHERENCE to the Superior as authority and as a person in order to ultimately obtain a compact and internal union as Christ ardently desired in the last supper: “That they all may be one… (John 17.21)”…

The Private Vow guards against all external criticism, not only [of] acts of government and authority of the Superior but also his entire human personality: temperament, character, physical, intellectual and moral defects and his way of proceeding in any area outside the exercise of his authority. Consequently the Superior MUST SIMPLY BE RESPECTED regardless of any negative aspect whatsoever….

The fruits of the vow were intended to be the “COMPACT UNION between Superiors and subjects,” “THE PRACTICE OF CHARITY,” and “SELF DOMINION.” He wrote:

I am well aware that because of the strong conflicting forces of our nature it is not an easy vow to fulfill. But it is Christ who has wished to inspire this providential means in his Legion and who will give strength to each and every one who makes it up and who forms its ranks so that this vow may be held in esteem and fulfilled as something that truly constitutes the heart of the Legion...

Though there is evidence for its existence in some form as early as 1950, the trademark Legionary “vow of charity” was a heritage of the very moment that occurred between the Mexican bishops’ letters asking for intervention and the appointment of an apostolic visitation less than two months later. The private vow was taken by Legionaries until Pope Benedict reportedly put an end to it in 2007.

The language of persecution and martyrdom came easily to Maciel, who grew up during the Mexican Cristero war. In August he told Juan Vaca, Legionary seminarian from Mexico, aged 19, and future accuser, “You know they are enemies. The devil has managed to put them inside the Vatican to destroy the Legion. If they destroy it, they destroy the work of God and your vocation.” In October he told seminarian Alejandro Espinosa, future author of El Legionario (2003), “Remember: you saw nothing, you know nothing, you heard nothing!” Before leaving for Spain, Maciel issued instructions from the clinic he entered in outer Rome: “Don’t tell them what they cannot understand and will misinterpret as a pretext to destroy the Legion.”

José Barba, another Mexican seminarian and future accuser, remembers Maciel’s tearful farewell speech on October 10: “I have been attacked and am subjected to a great test by my enemies… The Legion is said to be a good work, but what is the chance that the Legion, the tree, the branches, and the fruits are good, but I, the trunk, am evil? What sense is there in that?”

After Maciel’s departure, days before the arrival of the visitators, Legionaries of the time remember Lagoa calling them into assembly hall to tell them to be prudent, quiet, and faithful. Documents were secreted. Legionaries suspected of wanting to cooperate were moved away from Rome. José Domínguez, fourth vow drafter, was removed to Naples.

Ferreira and Federico Domínguez, who had reported Maciel to authorities, were marginalized. Domínguez said, “None of my old friends would talk to me. It was circle the wagons… The Carmelite was not getting any information from the people there.” Vaca admitted that, at the suggestion of Maciel himself, he would stir laxative into Ferreira’s morning coffee. Ferreira developed severe diarrhea, and, unable to discover its cause and sick for months, returned to Mexico in December.

Even from exile, Maciel managed a “mischievous presence” to his institute, in Alejandro Espinosa’s phrase. He would secretly meet Legionaries once a month on the outskirts of Rome or in a bus and joke, “I’m on a bus, not on Roman soil. I’m not disobedient!” The administration of Lagoa and Arumí served in some respects as a dodge for Maciel to continue to run the congregation.

Anastasio conducted his investigation of the Legionary College in Rome from October to February 1957, assisted by his own Discalced Carmelite vicar general, Benjamin (of the Holy Trinity) Lachaert. He interviewed each seminarian briefly and studied the Constitutions and the founder’s letters. Carmelite Father Ippolito (of the Holy Family) visited the Legionary apostolic school (minor seminary) in Ontaneda (Santander) Spain in the first week of December.

Conflicted young Legionaries were agonized, bound securely by vow of charity to the Legion and Father Maciel. If Maciel was a saint, as they believed, if the Church had approved the Legion, why was the Church now investigating? A Mexican seminarian, 19, José Antonio Pérez Olvera, remembers the visitator’s threatening him with excommunication unless he told the full truth, but lying even so: “I felt proud of my fidelity to Father Maciel. He was above canonical right, above the Church, its precepts, its magisterium. He had breakfast daily with the Sacred Heart… Still, my conscience would not let me rest… Canonically I was excommunicated.” “I lied,” says Barba. “I lied,” says Vaca.

Anastasio did not develop evidence about drug and sex abuse sufficient to render judgment. But in four months he nevertheless learned enough to reach harsh conclusions in his report, dated February 11, 1957. In the report, he recognized that the seminarians were reticent, uncomfortable, and coached and that he hadn’t gotten the full truth. The institute was “juridical chaos” with structures in violation of canon law and spiritually fragile. Its young members had been “fanaticized” by the founder, “but it is substantially healthy and well-intentioned and offers hope insofar as it can be freed from fanaticism. Which seems doubtful.”

Anastasio therefore recommended: return Legionary headquarters and schools to Mexico from Rome and Spain; allow the Legion new members only at the discretion of the Holy See; add Mexican episcopal oversight; forbid new initiatives; name an appropriate new superior from outside the institute; revise the Constitutions radically, abolishing the idiosyncratic Legionary vows. “Maciel must be removed from office as fundamentally and solely responsible for the many serious juridical irregularities and administrative abuses. Silence about the rest appears prudent for internal and external reasons, at least for the moment.”

Anastasio had worked briskly, taking time from administering his own order, filed his report, asked to be relieved, and must have thought that the work was done. But two new and less critical apostolic visitators succeeded him (for what reason is unclear) and they neutralized his recommendations.

On July 10, 1957 to succeed Anastasio in Rome Valeri named Msgr. Alfredo Bontempi, 62, rector of the Nepomucenum, the Czech Pontifical College in Rome. Born in 1894 in Castelfidardo, a town in the Marches, Bontempi served as rector from 1950 until his death in 1963. He would be ordained bishop and granted a titular see in 1962. After six months of his own experience with the Legionaries, Bontempi told the Congregation of the Affairs of Religious on January 24, 1958, that the Legionaries had warmed to him and that he was impressed by the “spirit of piety” in their seminary. He noted that the library lacked the works of Congar, de Lubac, and Maritain; he liked the vow of charity; he had told Arumí that his report would reflect favorably on the founder because “the tree is known by its fruits.”

Also appointed that day was a new visitator for Legionary houses in Mexico and Spain, a Belgian Franciscan missionary to Chile, Polidoro van Vlierberghe, 48, who from 1961 would become apostolic administrator and territorial prelate of Illapel, Chile. Polidoro became mouthpiece for Maciel’s versions of events: Anastasio should have been more balanced; ambitious Ferreira and the Jesuits had intrigued against Maciel; accusations came from bad sources; the institute has borne its sufferings with faith. In January 1958 Anastasio criticized Polidoro’s perspective to Larraona -- the Jesuits must be given a chance to respond to so serious an accusation, for one thing -- but did not prevail.

Though a 1964 curial summary of earlier documents noted that “the conclusions don’t appear to correspond to the logic of the facts,” the Maciel case was concluded along the lines of a compromise proposed on September 10, 1958, by Redemptorist Domenico Mozzicarelli, an official in the Congregation of the Affairs of Religious who dealt with apostolic visitations. Even if Maciel’s removal seemed advisable, the Legion was built on his “mysterious” personality and no new superior could replace his “heroic mysticism” or his ability to fundraise. Because of “its great good mixed with bad” the institute should continue. A smoldering wick should not be quenched. So a compromise: leave to Valeri when eventually to restore Maciel, reserve the right to further visitations, appoint the counsel general and financial officer required by canon law, and absolutely forbid Maciel from giving spiritual direction, much less hearing confession, or otherwise intruding on the internal forum of members of the congregation. (This last in accordance with 1917 Canon Law Code canon 530, which strictly forbade religious superiors from coercing a manifestation of conscience from a subordinate under obedience.) The Congregation of the Affairs of Religious wrote Cardinal Clemente Micara on October 13, 1958 reinstating Maciel on roughly those terms. On February 6, 1959 Micara wrote Maciel.

Pope Pius XII died October 9 and Pope John XXIII was elected October 28. It has never been clear why the reinstatement of Maciel was issued in the papal interregnum or why it fell to Micara, Cardinal Vicar General of Rome from 1951 to his death at 85 in 1965, to deliver it, or why he delayed it for four months. In any event, another curial summary from 1962 states that in settling the Maciel matter the Congregation of the Affairs of Religious could not go further than the Mozzicarelli compromise because of the “recommendations and interventions of high persons.” Who those were we don’t know, but in his autobiographical interview, Christ is My Life, for helping him survive the visitation Maciel thanks Cardinals Micara, Pizzardo, Gaetano Cicognani (Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura), Giovanni Piazza (Discalced Carmelite Secretary of what is now the Congregation for Bishops), and Federico Tedeschini (Apostolic Datary).

So Maciel and the Legion were cleared and moved on. The discontinuity in Vatican administration in October 1958 may account for why Maciel was never held to the stipulated restrictions on his ministry. After Maciel’s reinstatement, Ferreira left the Legion to serve in the archdiocese of Morelia (Michoacán) Mexico until he died in 2001. Domínguez transferred to Maynooth seminary in Dublin, in fall 1957 also left the Legion, eventually married, and lived in Los Angeles. Lagoa, at 80 in 2001, and Arumí, at 79 in 2006, both died as Legionary priests. In 2003 Maciel eulogized Lagoa as “close to me in the great trials and tribulations of the Legion: he remained faithful, unmoved, and he unconditionally bore witness to his love for Christ by fulfilling his mission.”

The investigators of today’s visitation – not yet named officially, but reported to be Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.; Alessandria, Italy Bishop Giuseppe Versaldi; Tepic, Mexico Bishop Ricardo Watty Urquidi, M.Sp.S; and Gregorian University Rector Gianfranco Ghirlanda, S.J. -- may wish to apply the lessons of history as they begin their work. And if fifty years ago the Vatican ignored the conclusions of its first visitator and missed the chance to abbreviate Father Maciel’s damaging career, it may well consider the consequences for the future of doing a superficial job of dealing with the Legionaries now, though the second visitation will doubtless be held more accountable than the first.

How the first visitation ended is itself an issue for the second. High Vatican officials were among those who enabled Father Maciel’s double life by annulling the recommendations of Anastasio in February 1957 and Mozzicarelli in September 1958. Since 1997, when Berry and Renner began to report the efforts of Vaca, Barba, and others to bring Maciel to justice for the abuse they covered up for him under duress forty years before, the Legionaries relied repeatedly in his public defense on what they claimed was his Vatican clearing after thorough investigation.

Addressing the first visitation with Jesús Colina in Christ is my Life, Maciel spoke untruthfully when he said, “no official written document ever reached me.” He wrote a resignation. Or when he said, “I was denied any possibility of defense.” or “the accusations [were] amply proven false.” González in 2002 managed confirmation from the then Discalced Carmelite superior general that Fathers Anastasio and Benjamin did serve as apostolic visitators in 1956-8. Colina, director of the Legionary affiliated Zenit news service, was journalist less enterprising when in the interview he allowed Maciel to refer to Bontempi and Polidoro, his supporters, as the “two visitators.” For emphasis Maciel noted that in 2003 Polidoro was (at 94) still alive. (He would live to be 97 and died in 2006.) In a letter to the Hartford Courant December 20, 1996, according to Berry and Renner, the Legionaries stated falsely that visitator Anastasio had died, though he lived until June 21, 1998, to age 84.

That Pope Benedict abolished the private Legionary vow of charity in 2007, 50 years after Anastasio’s recommendation, does not in itself guarantee that the visitators will hear the whole truth when interviewing Legionaries. The March 31 words of current Legionary General Director Álvaro Corcuera did promise welcome and cooperation to the visitation, but the two Legionary camps that have emerged since the revelation of Maciel’s daughter on February 3, the “full disclosure” group and the “carry on with the charism” group, are clearly the successors of the camps of 50 years ago, the small “cooperate with the Vatican” group and the loyal “circle the wagons and lie” group. There has not so far been much, let alone full, disclosure. Committed curial Legionary supporters Cardinals Franc Rodé, prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, and Angelo Sodano, Secretary Emeritus of State and Dean of the College of Cardinals, are the successors in our day of Pizzardo et al.

Baltimore Archbishop Edwin O’Brien, a Legionary critic, who himself served as an apostolic visitator of Catholic seminaries in America from 2005 to 2008 in an interview with National Catholic Reporter in April could not say he was confident that the Legionaries would cooperate fully with the visitation. “It depends on so many individuals being open, because it just takes a few to try to block it and to mislead,” he said.

To know history is to realize that Maciel’s fraudulence was already spelled out to Church authorities more than fifty years ago: the double life, excessive time spent with benefactresses, sexual abuse, coercive vocational pressure, cult of personality, arrogant superiority to the Church, financial irregularities, fanaticized members who need deprogramming. It is to recognize that many tropes in defense of Maciel are also more than fifty years old: it looks too good to be bad, it’s a new cross to bear, Maciel was unconscious or ill when he did it, judge the tree by its fruits.

History demonstrates what long institutional experience the Legionaries have of cultivating complaisant churchmen and resisting ecclesiastical oversight, covering up for their mysterious, charismatic founder, and justifying their institutional survival with effective fundraising and other goods mixed with bad. The visitators will have to be on their guard. What apostolic visitator Anastasio wrote in January 1958 remains true: “The problem of this visitation is precisely to try to avoid the passion pro and con. At least for now it’s necessary to prescind from personalities and judge deeds with a strictly juridical criterion.”

The first apostolic visitation of the Legionaries of Christ: a timeline

2009-06-23T13:44:00.000-07:00

(Drawn from Fernando M. González Los Legionarios de Cristo; testimonios y documentos inéditos (Mexico City: Tusquets Editores 2006))

24 August 1954 Legionary Brother Federico Domínguez, prefect of studies of the Legionary apostolic school in Mexico City, reports Maciel’s shortcomings in a long letter to Rev. Francisco Orozco Lomelí, vicar general of the Mexico City archdiocese: Maciel doesn’t follow the religious rule, disrespects confidentiality in matters of conscience, uses “lies, distortions, exaggerations,” and acts as if “the ends justify the means.” He lacks the spirit of religious poverty, travels first class, eats luxurious food rather than that prepared for the community, spends more time in the houses of women donors than in his own religious houses. He considers his desire for sexual gratification to be a urological problem. He gives himself narcotic injections and carefully conceals it. “Under the effect of the drugs, he makes magnificent plans of apostolate and talks publicly about the private defects of those he is with. This is understood by the religious who don’t know what is going on as a proof of Father Maciel’s ‘spiritual clairvoyance.’”

3 January 1956 Legionary novice master Father Rafael Arumí finds Maciel in a stupor in the Legionary house in Rome and summons from Mexico Father Luis Ferreira Correa, rector of the apostolic school at Tlalpan in Mexico City and Legionary vicar general. The crisis lasts for days. Arumí, Ferreira, and Father Antonio Lagoa consider Maciel’s replacement as superior and how to deal with the scandal.

28 January 1956 Franciscan Callisto Lopinot, a consultor to the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, writes to the Congregation of the Affairs of Religious that he knows from a Catholic doctor in Rome (Walter Behrens) that Father Maciel is addicted to narcotics.

February 1956 Cardinal Valerio Valeri, prefect of the Vatican Congregation of the Affairs of Religious, approves the new name “Legionaries of Christ.”

spring 1956 Valeri sees Maciel in poor condition detoxing in Salvator Mundi Hospital in Rome in the presence of Juan Vaca.

summer 1956 By June at least four Mexican bishops know at least something about the Maciel problem, the archbishops of Mexico City, Morelia, and Yucatan and the bishop of Cuernavaca.

14 August 1956 Cuernavaca Bishop Sergio Méndez Arceo writes to Arcadio Larraona, Secretary of the Congregation of the Affairs of Religious, recommending Maciel’s removal and an investigation of three charges: “devious and lying behavior, use of narcotic drugs, acts of sodomy with boys of the congregation.”

23 August 1956 Legionary Father Luis Ferreira Correa, rector of the apostolic school at Tlalpan in Mexico City and Legionary vicar general, reports in a long letter to Rev. Francisco Orozco Lomelí, vicar general of the Mexico City archdiocese, a number of cases of Maciel’s “impurely touching” apostolic school boys and his explanation that he was in pain and must have been unconscious. He reports the story of Maciel’s drug crisis in Rome in early January, specifying Dolantin, Sedol, and Demerol, and tells of Maciel’s lies and evasions and his theory of a urological problem that requires emission of semen.

31 August 1956 Mexico City Archbishop Miguel Darío Miranda writes to Arcadio Larraona agreeing that “immediate intervention is necessary” in the Maciel case and reiterating the charges: “sins against the sixth commandment committed with members of the congregation,” drug addiction, and mendacity to achieve his ends.

August or September 1956 Maciel asks Legionary José Domínguez, Federico’s brother, to help draft an official fourth religious vow, never to criticize a superior and to report those who do.

15 September 1956 Maciel in a long letter addressed to all the Legionaries of the Front of Mexico explains the “second private vow”:

The vow in question is a formal commitment contracted with God which consists in: First, not expressing externally, in any way, either orally, in writing, or by physical gestures, anything which might result in the detriment of the person or the AUTHORITY of the Superior. Secondly, notifying your Superior as a soon as possible if you should realize that another member of the Institute has faulted against the vow thus understood…

The Private Vow has as its specific purpose the safeguarding of the criterion and principle of authority in the Legion and the making of a more efficacious government through the absolute ADHERENCE to the Superior as authority and as a person in order to ultimately obtain a compact and internal union as Christ ardently desired in the last supper: ‘That they all may be one… (John 17.21)’…

The Private Vow guards against all external criticism, not only [of] acts of government and authority of the Superior but also his entire human personality: temperament, character, physical, intellectual and moral defects and his way of proceeding in any area outside the exercise of his authority. Consequently the Superior MUST SIMPLY BE RESPECTED regardless of any negative aspect whatsoever.

Maciel intends the fruits of the vow to be the “COMPACT UNION between Superiors and subjects,” “THE PRACTICE OF CHARITY,” and “SELF DOMINION.”

I am well aware that because of the strong conflicting forces of our nature it is not an easy vow to fulfill. But it is Christ who has wished to inspire this providential means in his Legion and who will give strength to each and every one who makes it up and who forms its ranks so that this vow may be held in esteem and fulfilled as something that truly constitutes the heart of the Legion.

20 September 1956 Larraona sends the documentation to Domenico Tardini, Secretary of the Roman Curia, suggesting the Pope be informed and that Maciel step down and find help.

21 September Msgr. Sapinelli, an official of the Congregation of the Affairs of Religious, asks Angelo Dell’Acqua, a deputy at the Secretariat of State, to send back to the Apostolic Delegation in Mexico City Maciel’s suspension as superior general. The document is signed by Cardinal Valeri. The relaying of Maciel’s suspension through the Apostolic Delegation in Mexico, as Larraona had asked, sidesteps Giuseppe Pizzardo, Secretary of the Holy Office, a Maciel friend.

3 October Maciel, having arrived in Rome by October 1, writes Cardinal Valeri, respectfully accepting suspension by the Congregation and exile to Spain, “with absolute submission and unconditional compliance,” and agreeing “to go to a clinic, suspended for that time from the exercise of my responsibility of superior general of the Institute,” though claiming good health and declaring himself the victim of calumny.

Legionary administration is taken up by Legionary Fathers Lagoa, Arumí, and Ferreira, as vicar general, assisted by Brother Domínguez.

10 October Maciel gives a tearful farewell speech to the congregation: “The Legion is said to be a good work, but what is the chance that the Legion, the tree, the branches, and the fruits are good, but I, the trunk, am evil? What sense is there in that?”

13 October Cardinal Valeri appoints as apostolic visitator Anastasio (of the Holy Rosary) Ballestrero, general superior of the Discalced Carmelites.

October 1956 to February 1957 Anastasio investigates of the Legionary College in Rome, assisted by Discalced Carmelite vicar general, Benjamin (of the Holy Trinity) Lachaert.

first week of December 1956 Discalced Carmelite Father Ippolito (of the Holy Family) visits the Legionary apostolic school in Ontaneda (Santander) Spain.

11 February 1957 Anastasio reports, concluding the Legion was “juridical chaos” with structures in violation of canon law and spiritually fragile; its young members had been “fanaticized” by the founder; “but it is substantially healthy and well-intentioned and offers hope insofar as it can be freed from fanaticism. Which seems doubtful.” He recommends: return Legionary headquarters and schools to Mexico from Rome and Spain; allow the Legion new members only at the discretion of the Holy See; add Mexican episcopal oversight; name an appropriate new superior from outside the institute; revise the Constitutions radically, abolishing the idiosyncratic Legionary vows. “Maciel must be removed from office as fundamentally responsible for the many serious juridical irregularities and administrative abuses. Silence about the rest appears prudent for internal and external reasons, at least for the moment.”

10 July 1957 Cardinal Valeri names Nepomucenum rector Msgr. Alfredo Bontempi and Franciscan missionary to Chile Polidoro van Vlierberghe as apostolic visitators for Rome and Mexico and Spain. Polidoro adopts Maciel’s versions of events.

15 January 1958 Anastasio criticizes Polidoro’s perspective to Larraona, but does not prevail. He writes, “The problem of this visitation is precisely to try to avoid the passion pro and con. At least for now it’s necessary to prescind from personalities and judge deeds with a strictly juridical criterion.”

24 January 1958 Bontempi tells the Congregation of the Affairs of Religious that he is impressed by the Legionary “spirit of piety” and has told Arumí that his report will reflect favorably on the founder because “the tree is known by its fruits.”

10 September 1958 Redemptorist Domenico Mozicarelli, an official at the Congregation of the Affairs of Religious, proposes the compromise that concludes Maciel case: leave to Valeri when eventually to restore Maciel, reserve the right to further visitations, appoint to the congregation the counsel general and financial officer required by canon law, and forbid Maciel from giving spiritual direction, hearing confession, or having access to the internal forum of members of the congregation.

9 October 1958 Pope Pius XII dies.

13 October 1958 Congregation of the Affairs of Religious writes Cardinal Clemente Micara, vicar general of Rome, reinstating Maciel on the terms of the Mozzicarelli compromise.

28 October Pope John XXIII is elected.

6 February 1959 Cardinal Micara writes Maciel, reinstating him.

19 June 2003 Legionary Father Antonio Lagoa, administrator of the Legion during the years of the apostolic visitation, who had died 5 September 2001 at 80, is eulogized by Maciel as “close to me in the great trials and tribulations of the Legion: he remained faithful, unmoved, and he unconditionally bore witness to his love for Christ by fulfilling his mission.”

The visitation so far: the four Legionary visitators

2009-06-18T11:03:00.000-07:00

I have been collating web gleanings and have posted sketches of the four reported Legionary visitators: Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., Alessandria Bishop Giuseppe Versaldi, Tepic Bishop Ricardo Watty Urquidi, M.Sp.S., and Gregorian Rector Gianfranco Ghirlanda, S. J. Some observations:

While closing Gateway Academy High School in Missouri last month, Legionary Territorial Director Father Scott Reilly, according to exlcblog, said, “there are two kinds of visitation, one high and one low. We are under the low one.” Whatever this may have meant, the group of reportedly assembling Legionary apostolic visitators could hardly be more high-powered or well-chosen. On paper, spectacular. Three bishops and the Gregorian rector. Three religious, including Watty, himself a member of a Mexican order founded in the 20th century, and a diocesan. Accomplished scholars, senior canon lawyers. Expertise in psychology and education. Benedict may have a plan.

Those who hope for real investigation of the Legionaries, not a whitewash, and real consideration of reform or even re-foundation might well feel cheered by the appointment of such a substantial group. None of them has been close to the Legion. Chaput provided haven for three unhappy Legionaries leaving the congregation. Elements of the visitation form a bit of a mob, actually, with Vatican Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone, who stepped over Legionary supporter Cardinal Franc Rodé, prefect of the Vatican Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, to announce the visitation. Bertone made Versaldi his vicar general while bishop of Vercelli. Ghirlanda and Bertone have been colleagues on several Vatican congregations. Versaldi and Ghirlanda are Gregorian colleagues. The Denver group of former Legionaries has Gregorian degrees.

It is sometimes suggested that the Jesuit connection to the visitation itself spells trouble for the Legion, but those who evoke the evil Jesuit perpetuate an unfair stereotype of which twentieth century conservative movementarians have been overly fond. Father Maciel himself complained of scheming Jesuits, but this is not to be credited any more than anything else he might have said.

Yet the names of the visitators have still not been announced officially, though reportedly they have been confirmed journalistically by Vatican sources. To Mexican press, as reported June 6 by La Journada and El Universal, two Legionary spokesmen, Javier Bravo, Legionary communications director for Mexico, and Osvaldo Moreno, stated that they have received no official word about when the visitation will begin or who the visitators will be. Until we know for sure who the visitators are and what, if anything, they will be doing, the word “transparency” used by Bertone in his March 10 letter announcing the visitation seems only a cruel sop thrown to Americans whom European ecclesiastics consider addled by democratic innovations like open courts and sunshine laws. There has been plenty of unofficial word. On the other hand, any thorough investigation of a worldwide congregation with branches of religious men, women, and laypersons is a massive project that will require some preparation.

For all their qualifications in religious life and formation, canon law, psychology, and education, none of the prospective visitators is a forensic accountant. If the visitation is now underway in some sense without the named visitators, it may be that the finances of Father Maciel personally and the Legion generally are now being audited as a necessary preliminary. Vatican visitors were said to have arrived at Legionary headquarters in Rome in early March, around the date of Bertone’s letter.

Nor is any of the prospective visitators a woman. This needs to be corrected if it signals unconcern for the welfare of the consecrated women of Regnum Christi, whose issues, such as their canonical status, their formation, the allegations of inadequate education and woman on woman abuse among them, should not continue to be overshadowed.

A woman, Mother Mary Clare Millea, superior of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, is heading another current apostolic visitation, that of orders of American religious women. Her visitation has, by contrast, been transparent and briskly paced, though it is a project larger even than that of investigating the Legionaries and she is the sole leader. Mother Millea was officially appointed December 22, 2008 by Cardinal Rodé. The visitation was announced at a press conference in Washington, January 30, 2009 and its first phase by news release February 20. Millea’s May 19 letter gave information about timetable and procedure, which she expects to take a minimum of 2½ years. One can see documents and get news about that visitation on apostolicvisitation.org. One can join an apostolic visitation facebook group. By contrast, the Legionary visitation was officially decided upon March 10 and announced March 31. More than three months later we have heard only officially unconfirmed press leaks of the visitators’ names.

It may be that the same Vatican forces that protected and enabled Father Maciel for decades and even now are hoping to obstruct the apostolic visitation of the Legionaries are causing delay more than any desire for care and thoroughness. For all their qualifications, will the putative visitators be brave and independent enough to explore the two investigative frontiers that stretch beyond the tedious specifics of Father Maciel’s private life? One, the distasteful rumors that the Legion all along has been the instrument of a group of wealthy Mexican families, and two, the distasteful rumors that some in the Vatican were complicit with the Legion and do not want themselves to be exposed by the visitation. Such rumors corrode the very human credibility of the Church, as has the response to the pedophilia scandal generally, and a creditable visitation must confront them for the good of the Church.

Those who fear a whitewash of the Legionaries rather than a real investigation do have reason:

=Though properly concerned with the canonical legal rights of abusive priests and the need for bishops to be pastors and not police, Bertone and Ghirlanda in May 2002 opposed the American bishops’ policy of disclosure, giving canonical reasons for keeping scandal private. Ghirlanda argued that parishes need not be informed when an abusive priest is moved there. The instance of Jeremiah Spillane, the Legionary priest transitioning into the diocese of Venice, Florida caught trying to seduce a 13-year-old boy in 1997, would provide the visitation with a case study of the matter.

=The language in Bertone’s March 10 letter (“I am pleased to remember that many people benefit from the works of education and apostolate which the Legionaries of Christ carry out…”) signaled Legionary survival from the start.

=Not even a churchman as senior as Baltimore Archbishop Edwin O’Brien, when asked on April 3 by John Allen, could say he was confident that the Legionaries would cooperate fully with the visitation. “It depends on so many individuals being open, because it just takes a few to try to block it and to mislead,” he said.

=Though there has been some consolidation (in May both the closure of Gateway Academy High School in Missouri and a round of layoffs of media and development employees and benefits trimmings), there has also been some expansion (an agreement to acquire Southern Catholic College, the cornerstone blessing of the Magdala retreat center in Galilee). The Legionaries are certainly proceeding as if the visitation is no threat to their future.

Life-after-rc’s Visitation thread reports that members of Regnum Christi are being told to think the visitation is a sign of Benedict’s approval, that it means no serious consequences, that it will help them be more who they already are. Well, to be fair, the same euphemisms have also explained the women’s apostolic visitation: it is a “positive effort to support and promote congregations.” Relying on a traditional theological view that says the approval of a religious order by the Church is an infallibly rendered judgment, they are confident that they cannot be re-founded or reformed and Legionary formators are happy to repeat to their seminarians Cardinal Rodé’s infamous, “if you deviate from your charism, I’ll kill you.”

=Last month, on his trip to Israel, Pope Benedict held a meeting at the Pontifical Notre Dame Center in Jerusalem, care of which John Paul gave the Legionaries in 2004 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Father Maciel’s ordination, and on May 11 blessed the cornerstone of a Legionary initiative, an extension of the center, the Magdala Center in Galilee. Legionary general director Father Alvaro Corcuera used a May 15 letter from Jerusalem to Regnum Christi members about his experience of the occasion to flatter Benedict and claim papal and curial support. Overall it documents the current Legionary tone of voice:

The first day of [Benedict’s] pilgrimage, with exemplary self-giving and dedication, here at the Notre Dame of Jerusalem Center he met with several Christian, Jewish, and Muslim leaders. He gave a message of unity and humility. His words strengthened people’s hearts, showing them that God is not a God of division, but of union. God is a loving Father who loves his children tenderly.

On that occasion God gave us a special grace… The Pope was very friendly; he blessed the cornerstone and was kind enough to give the gift of a beautiful tabernacle to this center, which belongs to the Holy See… Here, in person, we were able to pledge him our prayers, fidelity, and closeness. I told him that we were praying in a very special way at this time of his trip.

…On Thursday night, we went to Gethsemane to celebrate Mass and do our Eucharistic Hour, offering them for the intentions of the Church, the Legion of Christ and Regnum Christi, so that we will be what God wants us to be, and to thank him for the gift of our vocation. At Mass we read the text of Scripture that says that by his wounds we are healed (cf. Is. 53:5). Christ took off his cloak to cover us. When times come in which we want to say that we are unable to go on and we ask him if it is possible to take away the cup, Christ answers with an embrace. He draws us to his heart and tells us he loves us. What problem cannot be overcome when he holds us in his arms? It is our calling to welcome everyone without distinctions, and to be apostles of the good, of Christ’s embrace. To be apostles of the good, of everything that fills the soul with peace. How right the apostle St James is when he says that the man who does not sin with his tongue is a perfect man! (cf. James 3:2). And the fact is, when we are with Christ only good things come from our heart and our lips, bringing Christ’s authentic peace to everyone, without envy, rancor, or words that rob people of the marvelous gift of peace.

As we finished our Eucharistic Hour a married couple came up. It was providential. A group of pilgrims had arrived and were beginning their prayer. They told me that they were from Mexico, they were in Regnum Christi and they loved every day more the vocation God gave them, because it had helped them to discover Christ’s love and follow him more closely. What most impressed me is that they were the parents of a girl, full of God, who suffered an accident that left her unable to walk. Instead of resentment, I found nothing but love, a spirit of faith, prayer, zeal for souls, charity, kindness and self-giving. They told me that their vocation was to preach Christ, that they loved the Movement because they had discovered the one thing that we men and women need. How thankful we must be for so much love from God! The doctors had told them that their daughter would never be able to walk, and yet they told me that it is Christ who gives health, grace, love. And the daughter is starting to walk, but what is most important is that she is racing toward holiness.

…..Today, Friday morning, God gave us the grace of celebrating the Eucharist with the cardinals, bishops, and the Papal entourage, here in the Notre Dame Center. The consecrated women were present, and filled our hearts with their fervor and songs. The Gospel of the day was the one that sets the course for this second chapter in our history: “Love one another as I have loved you” (Jn. 15:12). That is the center of our life and what God is asking of us! This is our vocation, and our mission is to carry out this stage, living these words of Christ.

…..Mary’s closeness fills us with peace and fortitude. Humanly, we are aware of our weaknesses; however, Mary shows us that God carries out his works and his marvels, such as those we experience every day, in humility. How grateful we are to God for the charism we have received, into which we have to penetrate more deeply every day: knowing, living, and sharing God’s merciful love! We have all experienced its fruitfulness in our lives and so we are deeply grateful to him for it. May he grant us the grace of keeping and transmitting it faithfully. This is a time to explore deeply the one thing that is important so as to fill ourselves with Christ, and live and help others to live his commandment of love: this is how people will tell who we are.

In their press conference Javier Bravo and Osvaldo Moreno further demonstrated Legionary under-visitation spin. Bravo claimed that post-scandal defections from the Legion are few; that, with Mother Teresa’s Sisters of Charity, they are still the among the fastest growing congregations in the church; that “the charism of the Legionaries [the word they use to allude to their irreformable approval] comes from the model of the imitation of Christ. Father Maciel with his nature and his reality, with many successes, but also with his faults, was only an instrument. The congregation does not follow Father Maciel, but the model of Christ. The priests who are ordained do not seek to be like Father Maciel, they are following Christ.” The spokesmen echoed the language of Bertone’s March letter: “Even if he was the founder, the educational, social, and religious work goes beyond the figure of that priest.”

It is in a way comforting that when Legionary spokesmen mislead it is so easy to recognize. Bravo claims the Legionaries don’t need their founder as a model in the same breath he refers to Mother Teresa’s Sisters of Charity. But if they no longer take Maciel as a model, that is indeed authentic reform. The First Legionary General Chapter, for example, held in 1980 that “it has been ordained by God that the person and life or Our Father Founder cannot be separated from the life and spirituality of the Legion (469)” and that “the writings and conferences of Nuestro Padre should constitute, along with the Gospel of Christ, the principal source of inspiration… (184.1)”

The Legionaries act as if they can proceed without having to admit publicly or accept the consequences of anything. And they will get away with it if the visitation proves a whitewash. But it’s one thing for Benedict to send mixed signals, ordering a visitation one day and blessing a Legionary cornerstone the next, and another for him to allow the Legionaries, trying to maintain their statistical place as the Church’s foremost recruiters, to accept a new year’s class of apostolic school students, co-workers, novices, and vow takers before the questions of the visitation are settled.

Repeated statements, as by Bravo and Moreno, of “shock y dolor” at the February revelation dull the memory of how some Legionary superiors knew about it already by the summer of 2008 or how even Bravo himself, according to Proceso, said that the Legionaries knew the Vatican knew about it all even before Maciel died in January 2008. Bishops, theologians, recently former Legionary priests, concerned parents, all might prefer radical supervision or resolution before new classes are admitted, but their outrage will eventually cease to crash on the rock of Church administration.

Whether it is Father Reilly in St. Louis or Father Corcuera in Jerusalem, the Legionaries, all soothing, publicly downplay the possibility of hazard in the visitation. It’s unnerving to hear Legionary spokesmen, supposedly Catholic, defiantly paraphrase Nietzsche, as did Bravo when he said, “what doesn’t kill you makes you better.” (“Lo que no te mata te hace major.”) Legionaries whistle in the dark and claim it’s the music of the Holy Spirit. But maybe it’s just the music of Kanye West:

(Work it harder, make it better)
N-n-now that that don’t kill me
(Do it faster, makes us stronger)
Can only make me stronger…

Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.

2009-06-12T12:11:00.000-07:00

Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap. (Order of Friars Minor Capuchin)
Archbishop of Denver

Archbishop Chaput is 64, born September 26, 1944 in Concordia, Kansas. Through his mother, a member of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Tribe, the second Native American ordained bishop in the United States and the first Native American archbishop. Discrete Pittsburgh Steelers fan.

1965 joins the Capuchins, 1968 solemn religious profession, 1970 ordained priest.

1967 BA in philosophy, St. Fidelis College Seminary, Herman, Pennsylvania. 1968-9 studies psychology, Catholic University. 1970 MA in Religious Education, Capuchin College in Washington DC. 1971 MA in theology, University of San Francisco.

1971-1974 instructor in theology and spiritual director at St. Fidelis. 1974-1977 executive secretary and director of communications, Capuchin Province of St. Augustine in Pittsburgh. 1977 pastor in Thornton, Colorado and vicar provincial for the Capuchin Province of Mid-America, secretary and treasurer for the province from 1980, chief executive and provincial minister from 1983.

1988 appointed bishop of Rapid City, South Dakota.
1997 appointed archbishop of Denver, Colorado.

Bios: Catholic hierarchy Denver archdiocesan website

Archbishop Chaput is well known as outspokenly orthodox, particularly on pro-life, and a supporter of Pope John Paul. He has been a vocal opponent of American Catholics’ voting for pro-choice politicians and publicly criticized Notre Dame’s conferring an honorary degree on President Obama last month. He has energetically supported archdiocesan initiatives in the spirit of John Paul’s new evangelization.

In a radio interview with conservative evangelical Hugh Hewitt on August 20, 2008, he spoke about his archdiocese:
“…we’ve been blessed here. You know, the Holy Father came here for World Youth Day 15 years ago, and that really regenerated the spirit of the Church here. The diocese has about 525,000 Catholics at the northern part of Colorado. We have about 300 priests working here. Just nine years ago, we began a new seminary. Actually, we have two seminaries here. And I think in the last eleven years, we probably ordained 60 or so priests from that seminary for our own diocese and for other dioceses. So we’ve been blessed with vocations for the priesthood. We have a seminary, I think, that starts next week, and I think we expect it to be more than a full house. There’s a lot of new movements here among the laity, a lot of lay leadership. We have a new group called Endow, which is about promoting the thought of Pope John Paul II regarding the dignity of women, so it’s kind of a women’s support group that does wonderful work. We have Focus Fellowship of Catholic University Students, which is the Catholic version of Campus Crusade. We have a new graduate school of theology for the laity called the Yusen Augustine Institute, and we have our two new seminaries. So those are just some of the more obvious activities that are going on here. So we have a lot of enthusiasm for the faith.”

On the clerical sexual abuse scandal he said in the interview:
“… the Church is rightly accused of not acting earlier, not speaking out clearly, and not acting clearly on the issue of the abuse of children. And I think we have to accept the criticism when it’s true. But why would that then be a reason for us not to act, or to be slow to act, or not to be vocal about damaging things that are going on today? You know, it’s a common technique used by those who don’t like what we say, to shove our sins in our face, and we should repent from those sins and be sorry for them. But the fact that we’ve been sinful shouldn’t give up permission to neglect our responsibilities, and therefore be sinful again today. So the Church should repent, and it’s always the place to begin, to be sorry for what we’ve done wrong. But if that paralyzes us, we’ll just repeat another wrong in another context and another time.”

On his politics he said:
“…people sometimes pigeonhole me as a conservative, and I hope what I am is a Catholic. And I preach the Gospel honestly without compromise, and that cuts to the right and to the left, because the truth is supposed to set all of us free from our parties and from our prejudices or whatever. So I think people who want to follow the Gospel will offend people on all sides of the political spectrum.”

Chaput last year published “ Render Unto Caesar: Serving The Nation By Living Our Catholic Beliefs In Political Life ” (2008) about integrating religious faith and public life.

About the book he said in the interview:
“… two reasons why I wrote the book. One is some Catholic political folks asked me to, people who ran for office, and were having struggles because of that. But more importantly, I’ve grown tired of so many people in our culture saying to believers that they ought to be quiet, that there’s no place in the public square for the voice of faith. I wanted to make a distinction between separation of Church and state, and separating our faith from our politics. You can embrace the concept of separation of Church and state, but that’s not at all the same thing as separating our faith from our actions, from our political actions.

…our engagement in the world around us, whether it be political in that broad sense, or in a more narrow sense political, is about loving our neighbor. That’s why it’s foolish for Catholics to think they can enter into the political world without bringing their faith with them, because we’re required by our faith to engage the world so that human dignity will be supported, and the common good will be served. It’s a more complicated way of just saying we have to love our neighbors as ourselves. And God commands us to do that, so we just can’t work towards our personal salvation, or you know, just wait for God to save us. God also throws us back into relationship with our neighbors if we truly love Him.

…to tell a believer that he must be silent in public is like telling a married man he must pretend to be single when he’s at work. And if he does that, he won’t be married very long, because he’ll find somebody else, or his wife will be very disappointed in the fact that he doesn’t love her publicly. And I think our relationship with God is a relationship as a spousal love. You know, He loves the Church as a bridegroom loves his bride, and that it’s important for us to let people know that, not in a way that’s in their face or offensive, but then also to live out the consequences of that, which is to love our neighbor. We can’t say we love God who we can’t see if we don’t love our neighbor who we do see. And that’s political life. Political life is about loving our neighbor.

I think people deliberately misrepresent where we stand in order to scare other people about us. I know that Catholics are even cowered by that kind of talk, you know, that we hear the phrase separation of Church and state, and that attracts us, because we know that our country has been strong because it hasn’t had an established religion, or an established church. And so we ourselves hesitate when people accuse us of mingling Church and state. But again, I want to make that distinction – faith and politics is not the same as Church and state. I wholeheartedly embrace separation of Church and state. I don’t want the state to tell the Church what to do, and the Church isn’t about the business of telling the state what to do. But the Church is busy about telling our members to be good citizens, and to work in the public square to create an atmosphere that serves the common good, and protects human dignity.”

On American Catholics’ voting for pro-choice politicians Chaput wrote in “Render Unto Caesar”:
“My friends often ask me if Catholics in genuinely good conscience can vote for a pro-choice candidate. The answer is I couldn’t. Supporting a right to choose abortion simply masks and evades what abortion really is, the deliberate killing of innocent life. I know of nothing that can morally offset that kind of evil… One of the pillars of Catholic thought is this – don’t deliberately kill the innocent, and don’t collude in allowing it. We sin if we support candidates because they support a false right to abortion. We sin if we support pro-choice candidates without a truly proportionate reason for doing so, that is a reason grave enough to outweigh our obligation to end the killing of the unborn. And what would a proportionate reason look like? It would be a reason we could, with an honest heart, expect the unborn victims of abortion to accept when we meet them and need to explain our actions as we someday will.”

and said in the interview:
“…it’s hard for me to come to the conclusion there are proportionate reasons. But here’s a case where I’m certain there would be. If you have two candidates running for the same office, they’re the only choices, both of them are pro-choice, but one is much better on the other issues than the other. I think that you can choose the lesser of two evils with a clear conscience. You don’t have to. You can decide not to vote, or you can vote for a third person who couldn’t be elected. But in those circumstances, you would be voting for a pro-choice candidate, but not because the person is pro-choice, but because the alternative is a worse situation. I also know that, and this is the second point, I know many good Catholics who have given a lot of serious thought to the abortion issue, and will still vote for a candidate who is pro-choice. They’ll try to discourage that person from holding that position, they’ll work really hard within their party to get the party to change its platform if it’s pro-abortion. But they’ve kind of examined all the issues, and weighed them together, and still feel that in a particular situation, that the candidate that they are going to vote for who is pro-choice is a better of the two. And the Church, you know, says you can do that if you have a truly proportionate reason. And I hope they work hard at it, and I don’t always understand how they arrive at their conclusion. It’s hard to imagine in my mind anything worse than the destruction of more than a million unborn children in our country every year through abortion. But I think that sincere people really do arrive at those conclusions sometimes.”

Chaput’s words here were in dialogue with those of Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, then head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in a memo on denying Holy Communion to pro-choice politicians sent to Washington Archbishop Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and made public in July 2004:

“A Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil, and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion, if he were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate’s permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia. When a Catholic does not share a candidate’s stand in favor of abortion and/or euthanasia, but votes for that candidate for other reasons, it is considered remote material cooperation, which can be permitted in the presence of proportionate reasons.”

Archbishop Chaput in 1999 established a new seminary in Denver, St. John Vianney Theological Seminary, dedicated to rigorous, orthodox training in the spirit of Pope John Paul. The seminary is affiliated with the theology faculty of the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome.

Archbishop Chaput has long had firsthand information about the Legionaries. Some ten years ago he received into his archdiocese three former Legionary priests: Revs. Philip Larrey, Jorge Rodriguez, and Donal Leonard. The three were motivated scholars, had had a part in the founding in 1993 of the Pontifical Legionary university in Rome, the Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum, but reportedly came into conflict with the leadership of the order, including Father Maciel himself, for not binding themselves tightly enough to the congregation’s rules of life. Chaput took them in, according to Paul Lennon , to benefit from their pastoral expertise in Spanish language and Hispanic culture and because he believed they were good men mistreated by the Legionary system.

Larrey holds a licentiate and doctorate in philosophy (1994) from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and was dean of the faculty of philosophy at Regina Apostolorum. His scholarly interests include the philosophy of science and the history of Christianity. Currently he teaches philosophy at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome and the University of California Education Abroad Program Rome Study Center.

Rodriguez holds a licentiate in philosophy and doctorate in theology from the Gregorian and was dean of the faculty of philosophy at Regina Apostolorum. Currently he is vice rector of the Denver archdiocesan seminary St. John Vianney.

Leonard holds a doctorate in philosophy, taught philosophy of religion at Regina Apostolorum, and currently teaches philosophy part time at St. John Vianney. His interests include myth (his doctoral thesis was on Joseph Campbell) and new age and non-Christian religions.

Chaput’s having taken in a group of unhappy Legionaries reminds one of how Cardinal Archbishop James Hickey in the mid-1980s made Washington, DC a haven for departing Legionary Fathers Peter Cronin; Declan Murphy; Paul Lennon, later of ReGain eminence; and Kevin Farrell. Bishop Farrell, ordained a priest in 1978, had been a Legionary priest for 15 years before coming to DC in 1984. He was appointed auxiliary bishop there in 2001 and bishop of Dallas in 2007, another source for the visitation of authoritative firsthand experience of the Legionaries.

Archbishop Chaput is another heavyweight appointment to the apostolic visitation: prominent, energetic, decisive, even a bishop close enough to the situation to have received departing Legionaries and kept them in academic positions in his own seminary. What did they tell him about Father Maciel and life in the Legion? Has he been entirely unconcerned up to now?

Will a conservative be willing to discipline conservatives? The Legionaries and Regnum Christi have been staunch pro-life allies. If Chaput dislikes Catholic public silence about abortion out of misguided politeness, does he dislike conservative distaste for holding the Legionaries accountable out of a misguided desire for keeping ideological alignment? Does loyalty to the memory of Pope John Paul require polite silence about his having privileged a sexual predator as a new evangelizer?

Does Chaput agree with Baltimore Archbishop Edwin O’Brien that “this is not about orthodoxy. It is about respect for human dignity for each of [the Legion’s] members.”?

Perhaps the sexual and spiritual abuse of religious is itself a pro-life issue of a sort, to the contrary the resistance of conservatives to the “seamless garment” image on the grounds that its misuse can trivialize the greater evil.

Pseudonymous blogger outed

2009-06-09T08:24:00.001-07:00

Reduced by circumstance to pseudonymous blogging and burdened with the consequent self-loathing for my cowardice, I was as buoyed as terrified by yesterday’s discussion in the New York Times’ Opinionator on the outing of Publius. I would ask the enemies plotting to out me to consider the words of Jonathan Adler: “pseudonymous blogging can enrich the academic and policy blogosphere. While it enables some to hurl reckless charges and gross epithets, it also facilitates the engagement of more individuals in on-line discussion and debate. There are many understandable reasons why intelligent and knowledgeable people in various fields are reluctant to blog under their own name. Adopting a pseudonym is not necessarily a cowardly or sinister act.” I point out that I have never myself hurled reckless charges or gross epithets.

Rev. Gianfranco Ghirlanda, S. J.

2009-06-05T17:39:00.000-07:00

Rev. Gianfranco Ghirlanda, S.J. (Society of Jesus)
Rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University

Rev. Ghirlanda is 66, born July 5, 1942 in Rome. 1966 doctorate in Jurisprudence from La Sapienza University in Rome. Works in personnel for Fiat while in college. 1966 enters the Society of Jesus, 1973 ordained a priest.

Degrees from the Gregorian: 1973 bachelor’s in theology, 1975 licentiate in canon law, 1978 doctorate in canon law. From 1975 teaches canon law at the Gregorian, 1995-2004 dean of the faculty of canon law.

September 2004 appointed by John Paul rector of the Gregorian and reappointed by Benedict in 2007.

1993-2003 judge of the Roman Rota. Consultor of: Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (from 1987), the Pontifical Council for the Laity (from 1990), the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples (from 1993), the Congregation for the Clergy (from 1997), the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts (from 1997), the Congregation for Bishops (from 1999), the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (from 2003).

Gregorian newsletter bio March 2008 interview in Osservatore Romano

Rev. Ghirlanda has a huge bibliography of many books and more than 100 articles. His interests include how canon law relates to Church structure and life, how it applies to lay persons, religious, seminarians, associations, the hierarchy. He co-authored a 1983 commentary “De christifidelibus” on canons 204-207, which introduce and codify in law the theological question, who are the members of the Church? He edited a 1994 volume “Punti fondamentali sulla vita consacrata” (“Fundamentals of consecrated life”).

Rev. Ghirlanda caused controversy in May 2002, a time when American bishops were preparing to vote on policy to address the clerical pedophilia scandal. As dean of the canon law faculty at the Gregorian, in Civiltà Cattolica, the Jesuit bi-weekly journal, semi-official because reviewed by the Vatican Secretariat of State, he published “Doveri e diritti implicati nei case di abusi perpetrati da chierici” (“Duties and rights involved in the cases of abuse perpetrated by clerics,” May 19, 2002, 341–353). Ghirlanda wrote, according to the summary in the New York Times that:

--Catholic bishops should not turn over allegations or records of sexual abuse by priests to the civil authorities,

--a priest who is reassigned to a new parish after being treated because of a history of sexual abuse should not have his ''good reputation'' ruined by having his background revealed to the new parish and that it would be better simply not to place the priest in a new parish if the bishop lacks confidence about the priest,

--though American bishops have been sued in civil court for failing to remove abusive priests, “from a canonical point of view, the bishop or religious superior is neither morally nor legally responsible for a criminal act committed by one of his clerics,” but that if a bishop knew of accusations and failed to investigate, or if he failed to remove a known abuser from the ministry, then under canon law he would have some legal and moral responsibility.

The Times summary continues:
“[Ghirlanda’s] article takes issue with another practice that has become common for American bishops handling accusations of sexual abuse by priests. For more than 15 years, the bishops have been sending accused priests to clinics to be evaluated by therapists and to undergo treatment. Father Ghirlanda wrote that an accused priest should not be forced to take psychological tests because it is a violation of his right to privacy under canon law.

Father Ghirlanda, who is also an appeals court judge and a consultant to several Vatican agencies, said that under canon law a bishop is not responsible for the missteps of his priests. He wrote that the church was not like a corporation, and the relationship of bishop to priest was not that of employer to employee.”

The Jesuit journal America reported on Ghirlanda’s article:
“Recent statements… have underscored reservations in Rome over the direction U.S. bishops are taking as they formulate a national policy on clerical sex abuse. In particular, [Roman] officials believe it would be wrong to oblige bishops to report all sex abuse allegations to civil authorities, a policy that has been adopted by an increasing number of U.S. dioceses.

For these canon law specialists [like Ghirlanda], the crux of the issue is that bishops should be functioning as pastors, not policemen. They believe that when bishops start acting as reporting agents for the state, they compromise their own pastoral goals—one of which is to retrieve an errant priest and rehabilitate him spiritually.

[Ghirlanda] said bishops—unless clearly negligent in investigating and correcting abuse situations—generally are not morally or legally responsible for the actions of their priests. Although he was speaking from the perspective of church law, his point underlined Vatican perplexity over the U.S. legal system and the fact that dioceses have been sued because of the actions of a single cleric.

Father Ghirlanda also cautioned on three procedural matters: that it was not good pastoral practice to notify civil authorities of all priestly sex abuse accusations; that psychological testing should not be required of suspected clerical abusers; and that if he reassigns a past abuser to active ministry, a bishop should not tell parishioners of the past abuse.

Father Ghirlanda said the question of notifying civil authorities risks confusing the church’s investigative role with that of the state. “My position is this: If a bishop is questioned [by the state] he should respond. If he is not questioned, he should not report,” he said. Instead, he said, the bishop who receives a report of clerical sex abuse should conduct his own investigation, if necessary removing the accused priest quietly and temporarily from ministry. The bishop’s investigation should be undertaken with concern for the victim and the church community, but also for the accused priest, he said. “Even if a priest is guilty, the bishop remains the pastor of that priest.””

The US bishops did not accept Ghirlanda’s position. The San Francisco Chronicle reported May 19, 2002:

“Catholic bishops in the United States say they intend to continue turning over to secular authorities the names of priests accused of child sexual abuse, despite [the article by Ghirlanda].

"The bishops are determined to make sure that they don't have people who would abuse children in the priesthood," said Sister Mary Ann Walsh, the associate director of communications for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "The church needs to be a safe environment for all Catholics, especially for children, and the bishops will do what has to be done to make sure it is a safe environment."

Ghirlanda's positions fly in the face of the general practice in the United States. Many bishops use psychological testing to evaluate priests, and virtually all seminaries in the United States require psychological testing of applicants. Most states -- including California -- require clergy to report allegations of child abuse to state officials for investigation, and Walsh said bishops adhere to those requirements.”

At their June 2002 meeting in Dallas the US bishops did vote to require themselves to report allegations of sexual abuse by their priests to civil authorities.

Ghirlanda’s article seemed part of a concerted Vatican effort to discourage the American bishops from adopting this policy. As summarized by Garry Wills in the New York Review of Books, August 15, 2002:

“To understand the risk involved in the Dallas strategy, one must recall the drumbeat of signals coming from Rome urging the bishops not to "give in" to the press or to prosecutors seeking to punish priests:

In February, Tarcisio Bertone, the close associate of (and occasional spokesperson for) Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger on the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [[secretary of the Congregation at the time, now the Vatican Secretary of State, the one who announced the apostolic visitation of the Legionaries in March 2009]], told the magazine 30 Giorni that the civil authority has no right to demand that a bishop turn over his own priest.

On April 23, [Pope John Paul] urged the United States cardinals in Rome to remember that offending priests may experience "the force of Christian conversion, that radical determination to turn from sin and return to God, which reaches the depths of the human soul and can work an uncommon alteration."

On April 29, Archbishop Julian Herranz, head of the Pontifical Council for the Interpretation of Legislative Texts, [[now retired, made cardinal in 2003, of Opus Dei]] addressing the Catholic University of Milan, said that the press in America had prodded bishops into making unwarranted settlements against the Church, which has no obligation to turn priests over to the secular authorities.

On May 16, Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras, often mentioned as a candidate for the papacy, at a press conference in Rome, compared the treatment of Cardinal Law to Communist trials, Decius's persecution of Christians, and the tactics of Hitler and Stalin. He said he would be prepared to go to jail rather than harm one of his priests, and that priests should be pastors, not agents of the CIA or FBI.

On May 19, Gianfranco Ghirlanda, a Jesuit canon law expert and judge on a Vatican court, the Signatura Apostolica, wrote in Civiltà Cattolica that any priest's privacy should not be invaded by a requirement to take psychological testing, and that a bishop who is convinced that an offending priest has reformed may assign him to a new parish without telling those at his new post.

On June 1, the Jesuit priest Giovanni Marchesi wrote in Civiltà Cattolica that the Pope had shown courage in publicly addressing the pedophile problem, and that the press had taken unfair advantage of his openness to indulge in "a morbid and scandal-mongering inquisitiveness." The press was trying to get even, said Father Marchesi, for the Pope's criticism of the Gulf War, rather than addressing real problems in the world, like the crisis in the Middle East.

On June 10, a favorite of the Pope, recently made a cardinal by him, the Jesuit Avery Dulles, warned the bishops not to take positions in Dallas that the Pope would just have to reverse. Dulles is not a bishop, so he did not have a vote in Dallas, but he was allowed to sit on the floor by courtesy of the bishops, and he rose to attack the Charter before the bishops voted on it—he opposed the broad definition of sexual abuse, the "adversarial" relationship the Charter would create between bishops and priests, the "unconscionable" requirement to report allegations to civil authorities, and the willingness to open diocesan files even "without legal compulsion."”

Conservatives too responded to Ghirlanda’s article:

Leon Podles , author and blogger on sex abuse in the Church, wrote on May 18, 2002:

“Children who have been abused will often become self-destructive, even to the point of suicide. If a parish is not told that a priest has committed sexual abuse, parents have no way of knowing that a child’s erratic behavior may be a sign that he has been abused. Ghirlanda places a priest’s right to a good reputation, even when it is undeserved, above the safety of children.

Ghirlanda and Herranz reveal that a clericalist mentality is present at the highest levels of the church; the laity are unimportant, the priest is everything. His rights to a career and an undeserved good reputation are to be upheld, even at the cost of children’s innocence and sometimes even their lives (remember the suicides). This poisonous clericalism is enough to make a Protestant of a Breton peasant -- and it may lead to a rupture in the American church, if Catholic parents realize that the Vatican and bishops disregard the safety of their children.”

Canon law professor Edward Peters wrote on May 30, 2002:

“The claim that bishops and religious superiors are neither morally nor judicially responsible for acts of their clergy seems difficult to reconcile with Canon 128 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law that states: “Whoever unlawfully causes harm to another by a juridical act, or indeed by any other act which is deceitful or culpable (actu dolo vel culpa posito), is obliged to repair the damage done. (British trans.)” The Americans render the operative phrase “with malice or negligence”. Either way, the canon (one, incidentally, that greatly expands the scope of ecclesiastical liability for malfeasance in office over its 1917 Code counterpart, Canon 1681) is a clear enunciation of the obligation of persons in the Church (there being no exemption for bishops in this regard) to make good harms unlawfully caused as a result of their actions or omissions.

The pertinent claim is that the some bishops (not all, but at least some) placed priests known to them to be pederasts or homosexually active in positions wherein they could and did sexually abuse minors. A man who knows his hound snaps at children must not allow such an animal to run free through the neighborhood…

Of course, in these dark days, some wish to impose to a “strict liability” standard on bishops in all priestly sex abuse cases, holding bishops financially responsible for harms caused by their priests notwithstanding the bishop’s lack of knowledge of the danger. This is wrong and unjust. Others, in cases of some genuine liability on the part of the bishop, wish to exaggerate that liability out of anger or greed. This is opportunism. Both approaches should be rejected.

But I believe it is a mistake to make the blanket claim that there is no canonical basis for episcopal liability for harms arising from priestly misconduct. There is a basis for such liability in canon law. Only a fair, case-by-case, examination of the facts will determine whether such liability is warranted in a given case, and if so, how much compensation should be awarded.”

George Weigel wrote in 2004 in “The Courage to Be Catholic” (127-8) that it was “no sin against charity” to call Ghirlanda’s positions “legalistic.” They were evidence of “a cast of mind in the Vatican that Americans find hard to understand, and that in fact makes it difficult for officials of the Holy See to come to grips with problems like the crisis of 2002 in the US… If current canon law is admirable in its assumption of innocence and in its concern to protect priests from the arbitrary exercise of ecclesiastical power, current canon law as interpreted by Father Ghirlanda and those like him is manifestly inadequate to deal with the problem of clergy sexual abuse. Something has to change.”

Another Ghirlanda Civiltà Cattolica article, “Gli Omosessuali e L’ammizzione Al Sacerdozio; Gli Aspetti Canonici” (“Homosexuals and admission to the Priesthood, Some Canonical Aspects” March 3, 2007, 436 - 449) made news in March 2007. If Ghirlanda in 2002 cautioned bishops who asked for psychological evaluation of a pedophile priest about the priest’s canonical rights, he saw a role for it in implementing the 2005 “Instruction Concerning the Criteria for the Discernment of Vocations with regard to Persons with Homosexual Tendencies.” According to a CNS summary of the article, he said that “in applying the Vatican's directive against admission of homosexuals to the priesthood, seminary authorities should make use of psychological sciences to distinguish between ‘deep-seated’ and transitory homosexual tendencies… the use of psychology was a complex but necessary means of establishing the true nature of homosexual traits…. Psychological evaluations alone can never substitute for the informed decisions of bishops and seminary authorities, but such testing must be taken into serious consideration.”

Rev. Ghirlanda is among the most senior canon lawyers in the Church and indeed, as rector of the Gregorian, among the most senior scholars. As such, he is a spectacular appointment to an apostolic visitation that might well consider thorny canonical issues relating to a congregation and movement with a membership of men religious, consecrated women, and lay persons, and assess the academic competence of a congregation aspiring to teach and conduct many schools and universities.

At the same time, no one cheered by Cardinal Bertone’s use of the word “transparency” in his letter announcing the apostolic visitation in March is entirely happy to remember his and Ghirlanda’s signaling Vatican opposition to American bishops’ policy in May 2002.

Ghirlanda’s legal views on protecting the good name of pedophile priests in the end proved unpersuasive to the bishops and a range of Americans both conservative and liberal, who were content to see bishops cooperate with civil authorities in the matter of child abuse. Was Ghirlanda merely advocating proper due process for the accused? If so, let’s have due process in all aspects of the apostolic visitation. Will he be advocate for Legionary malefactors and for keeping their deeds private and discrete as preliminary to their carrying on with as little interruption as possible? If so, let’s have a complementary advocate on the visitation for the spiritual and physical victims of Legionary malefaction, who may well be among those who think that the Legionaries require thoroughgoing re-foundation. If George Weigel felt Ghirlanda’s interpretations of canon law “manifestly inadequate” to the crisis of 2002, will they prove adequate to the Legionary crisis of 2009, which involves not only sexual impropriety, but financial and spiritual impropriety as well?

The move of an abusive priest to a new assignment without informing those involved is itself an issue for the visitation in the US possibly to face. In 1995, a Legionary priest, Jeremiah M. Spillane, was transferring out of the Legion and into the diocese of Venice, Florida. According to the Tampa Tribune, he was recommended to the diocese as “a priest in good standing… Father Spillane has... manifested no behavioral problems that would indicate he might deal with minors in an inappropriate manner." He was assigned to a church and high school in Sarasota, Florida.

In February 1997 he was arrested for attempting to commit a lewd or lascivious act and seduction of a child by computer, after arranging over the internet to meet a 13-year-old boy for sex, though this turned out to be a police sting. Spillane pleaded no contest to the charges and was ordered into a sex offender program. Spillane remains on the Florida list of convicted sex offenders .

Legionary Father Owen Kearns expressed public shock at these events, but it was never clear how Spillane could have progressed so quickly in the techniques of predation in his comparatively short time away from the Legion.

Irish timeline additions

2009-06-05T16:47:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the eminent Paul Lennon for contributing to the Legionary timeline some early Irish Legionary history from 1961 to 1971, drawn from his personal experience and his 2008 memoir "Our Father, Who Art in Bed."

Bishop Giuseppe Versaldi

2009-05-26T10:51:00.000-07:00

Bishop Giuseppe Versaldi
Bishop of Alessandria

Alessandria is a city in the Italian area of Piedmont, southeast of Turin, southwest of Milan, a suffragan diocese of Vercelli, where the famous anti-Arian St. Eusebius was bishop from 340-371.

Bishop Versaldi is 65, born July 30, 1943 in Villarboit, a municipality of Vercelli. June 1967 ordained a priest. 1972-6 earns degrees in psychology and canon law at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.

1976 founding director of diocesan family counseling in Vercelli. President of the Federation of Regional Piedmontese Counselors of Christian inspiration. From 1977 pastor in Vercelli.

From 1980 teaches psychology and canon law at the Gregorian. 1981 admitted as advocate to the Roman Rota. Professor of anthropology at the Studio of the Roman Rota. 1985 referendario, 1990 voter, and 2007 member of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the highest Vatican court.
 
1994 appointed vicar general of Vercelli by Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, which he remained through 2007.

Appointed bishop of Alessandria, April 2007.

Bios: Catholic hierarchy diocesan website

Bishop Versaldi is a publishing scholar and practitioner in both psychology and canon law. Some bibliography:

“Elementa psychologica matrimonialis consensus” in the Gregorian’s journal Periodica de Re Morali Canonica Liturgica 71 1982, 179-209 and 231-253 studies, as blurbed, love in matrimonial consent and seeks to integrate John Paul’s theology of marriage with psychology.

“The dialogue between psychological science and canon law” in Burke, Grocholoewski, Pompedda, and Versaldi “Incapacity for Marriage; Jurisprudence and Interpretation” Acts of the III Gregorian Colloquium, RB Sable, editor (1987).

“Psychology And Marriage Consent” in Forum 6 1995 79-102 (Malta archdiocese canon law review) 1995

“The Contribution of Psychology to Canon Law” in a volume celebrating 25 years of the Institute of Psychology of the Gregorian University, “A journey to freedom: an interdisciplinary approach to the anthropology of formation,” edited by Franco Imoda, SJ (Peters 2000), former Gregorian rector and psychologist. The volume asks, “Can psychology & religion engage in constructive dialogue? Has psychology a contribution to make in Christian formation?”

“Cristo modello degli sposi; Come possono i coniugi imitare Cristo non sposato?” (“Christ as model for spouses. How can a married couple imitate the unmarried Christ?”) (EDB 2003) Blurb: With the experience of a pastor and teacher, Versaldi attempts to combine the perspectives of critical exegesis, gender studies, theology, and psychology in posing the question, how can the love of Christ for the Church, which is a nuptial/virginal love, become a model of conjugal love?

“Origins and Bases of a Study of the Human Person,” in Manenti, Guarinelli, Zollner “Formation and the Person: Essays in Theory and Practice” (Peeters 2007), which, as blurbed, gathers the foundational concepts that characterize the approach to the person, as human and as Christian, which has been developed at the Institute of Psychology of the Pontifical Gregorian University during 35 years.

“L'uomo debole a la capacità per autodonarsi: quale capacità per il matrimonio” (“The capacity of the weak human person for self-donation; what capacity for marriage?”) Ius ecclesiae 19 2007 567-588.

Spoke on a 2008 conference panel on the psychological implications of the 2005 “Instruction Concerning the Criteria for the Discernment of Vocations with regard to Persons with Homosexual Tendencies” (with other Legionary visitator Gianfranco Ghirlanda who spoke on the Instruction’s canonical aspects).

As practitioner of both psychology and canon law and scholar of the intersection between the two, Bishop Versaldi would bring intriguing qualifications to the visitation. He studies the human person philosophically in the manner of John Paul, has considered the canonical implications of homosexuality on the priesthood, and is an expert on the psychology of vocation, and, with years of experience on the Roman Rota and as family counselor, on how emotional and mental difficulty affect the validity of sacramental marriage.

He is qualified to take up many questions the moment demands: those of the juridical and emotional effects of the pan-sexual Father Maciel on his institute, the effects of the cult of his personality, the validity of vows and sacramental ordination in an atmosphere of an unhealthful, coercive, manipulative and disintegrating psychological approach, and altogether the clash between John Paul personalism and the traditional religious emotional self-annihilation as practiced in the Legion.

Pressing canonical issues to be examined include alleged breaches of canon law in Legionary life such as violation of the internal forum and violation of the confessional. It has been alleged that Legionary “apostolic schools” dodge canonical norms for minor seminaries as do “spiritual dialogues” norms for spiritual direction. Examination of the canonical status, or rather limbo, of Regnum Christi consecrated women, who allegedly lack appropriate legal recourse, is an exceptionally important priority for the canon lawyers of the visitation.

Bishop Versaldi may have enough seniority and security as a Vatican jurist to explore the cover-ups within the Vatican itself that protected Father Maciel and the Legionaries decades ago, recently, and even currently.

Versaldi seems not among the Vatican Legionary protectors. He is close to Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone, who appointed him his vicar general in Vercelli, and who succeeded Legionary supporter Angelo Sodano as Secretary of State in 2006 and supplanted Legionary supporter Cardinal Franc Rodé, Prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, in taking the lead in the visitation. Versaldi is a colleague of another visitator Gianfranco Ghirlanda, who has taught canon law at the Gregorian through Versaldi’s years there as student and teacher. According to La Journada, Versaldi is the closest friend of Pope Benedict among the visitators.

Who are the apostolic visitators?

2009-05-19T16:33:00.001-07:00

I do not know when (or if) the men reported to be the choices for apostolic visitators of the Legion will be named officially. Perhaps they are at work already. But, until then, we may speculate about what qualities and background they would bring to their visitation.

Here is a sketch of Bishop Ricardo Watty Urquidi, who would be responsible for Mexico.
Here is a sketch of Bishop Giuseppe Versaldi of Italy.
Here is a sketch of Rev. Gianfranco Ghirlanda , rector of the Gregorian University in Rome.
Here is a sketch of Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput.

Margarita in a comment below has contributed the visitators' contact information.

Bishop Ricardo Watty Urquidi, M.Sp.S.

2009-05-19T16:19:00.000-07:00

Bishop Ricardo Watty Urquidi, M.Sp.S. (Missionaries of the Holy Spirit)
Bishop of Tepic, Nayarit, Mexico

Tepic is the capital of the Mexican state of Nayarit, in central Mexico on the Pacific coast, some 150 miles northwest of Guadalajara.

The Missionaries of the Holy Spirit is an order founded in Mexico City in 1914 by Venerable Félix de Jesús Rougier, with some 400 priests and religious and 57 parishes in 7 countries: Mexico, United States, Italy, Costa Rica, Spain, Chile and Colombia.

Their spirituality emphasizes the cross and Christ as priest and victim.

Their mission: “The only one who sanctifies is the Holy Spirit. Therefore, as his missionaries, our first task is to work with him in the sanctification of all, helping each person to perform their particular mission.

“With the Church, we concern ourselves to know and understand the world we live in: its history, its culture, its aspirations. We want to make our own the hopes and the joys, sorrows and anxieties of the men and women of today, especially the poor, and with all to struggle to build a world more just and human, where we can live as sons and brothers according to the plan of God.”

Bishop Watty Urquidi is 70, born 16 July 1938 in San Diego, California, of Mexican parents, moves with his family to Mexico City in 1951. At 13 enters the apostolic school of the Missionaries of the Holy Spirit, in Tlalpan, Mexico City, at 18 enters the novitiate of the congregation, drops the American and keeps his Mexican citizenship.

1962-4 taught at the minor seminary of the diocese of Alajuela, Costa Rica and Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. 1968 ordained a priest in Mexico City. 1971 parish priest at San Marcos, Mexicaltzingo, Mexico City and superior of the Community of the Holy Spirit. 1974-80 vice-superior, Province of Mexico of the Missionaries of the Holy Spirit.

1980 appointed auxiliary bishop of Mexico City, under Cardinal Ernesto Corripio (archbishop 1977-94). 1989 appointed first bishop of new diocese of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, on the American border. 2008 appointed bishop of Tepic.

For the Mexican Bishops Conference (CEM): 1980-1983 President of the Commission for Religious. 1983-1988, 1994-2000 President of the Commission for the Institutes of Consecrated Life. 2004-2006 President of the Commission for the Laity.

Bios: Catholic-hierarchy Tepic diocesan website

As bishop of Nuevo Laredo from 1989-2008, Watty Urquidi was noted for his committed concern for the rights of migrants and outspokenness against violence in his border diocese from drug trafficking and organized crime.

On 13 January 2008 celebrating Mass with other bishops of border dioceses for the Day of the Migrant in Laredo, Texas he homilized: "The church is a family without borders." By virtue of baptism, "we have a gift to serve the needy, the poorest. Unfortunately there are more today than at any other time."

He participated in the preparation of the pastoral letter on immigration “Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope; A Pastoral Letter Concerning Migration from the Catholic Bishops of Mexico and the United States ” (January 2003).

Horacio Garza Garza, Mexican Congressman from Nuevo Laredo, was an assassination target in February 2007. Watty Urquidi characterized the attempt on Garza’s life as an aggression against the community… The bishop called for an end to unlawful detentions, kidnappings and wanton killings, adding that these aggressions “are an attack on humanity and God.”

Watty Urquidi asked for a Christmas 2007 truce from drug violence:
Bishop Watty is urging drug lords and other criminals in Nuevo Laredo to stop kidnapping and killing, at least during the holy Christmas season, a traditional time of peace and family. "It's grotesque the way violence is unleashed with kidnappings at the national and local levels. It must stop… Depriving someone of life is a reprehensible act. These people live with material goods that make them lose their conscience.”

Their actions are inhumane, the Catholic leader said, and they should seek forgiveness from He who would save their souls. It would be best to stop all criminal activity, Watty added, but at least during the time of Jesus' birth, there should be a truce. Watty described those who live a criminal life as slaves, but he added that they can leave that life behind to start “a life that's satisfying, free and healthy.”

State police have stepped up their patrols and are prepared to take quick action against those who commit crimes during this Christmas season, officials said. Bishop Watty said he can't verify whether the government is meeting its obligation to defend the safety of its citizens, but he said he recognizes that additional forces have been brought to Tamaulipas with the hope of quelling the violence that has marked criminal activity all along the border.

"The more than 5,000 members of the Army and law enforcement can help us live with more tranquility," Watty said. "We hope they can do more, and we have faith that their strategies will help bring peace to our cities and streets."

The bishop said it's urgent to eradicate the evil that his sifted through those groups of men, and sometimes women, who are embedded in violence. He also said that members of the media bear some responsibility for fomenting fear among the public when they provide gruesome reports on criminal activities. The Catholic faithful must continue to put its faith in God and the church, and prayer is needed to release the hatred that so often rests deep in the hearts of criminals, Watty said.
from the Laredo Morning Times 17 December 2007

Experience with conflict resolution: in 1980, according to milenio.com , he mediated a dispute between members of the Church of the Candelaria in Mexico City and the Dominicans.

Participated in a round-table discussion on “The Continental Mission, participation and integration of the Ecclesial Movements and New Communities” at the 2008 Second Congress of Ecclesial Movements and New Communities in Bogota.

Watty Urquidi takes an interest in voter participation. In November 2007 he encouraged the faithful of Nuevo Laredo to vote, “We cannot permit absenteeism to defeat responsible participation, because that degrades and weakens democratic processes. Let us rise from our comfort and our inertia, and indifference and fulfill our civic duty at the polls.”

In April 2009 he sheepishly confessed to the press of Nayarit that he forgot to change his voting registration from Nuevo Laredo to Tepic and was looking to make sure he could register to vote on July 5.

Bishop Watty Urquidi would bring to the visitation the experience of having been himself in a religious order from age 13. He was attending the MSpS apostolic school in the same Tlalpan borough of Mexico City, in the same 1950s, where Father Maciel was behaving inappropriately in the Legionary apostolic school.

He has himself formed and taught young religious seminarians and himself is a member of a Mexican religious order founded in the first half of the 20th century, but one with a more placid record of recruitment and service than the Legionaries.

With five terms within the last 30 years as President of the Mexican Episcopal Commissions on religious life, he could scarcely have wider experience of consecrated life in Mexico.

According to ciperchile.cl, he is independent of the pro-Legionary Mexican clergy and bishops. Mexico City Cardinal Archbishop Norberto Rivera Carrera (from 1995) is prominent among them.

The Mission Society of Mandeville as Legionary prospect

2009-05-18T06:11:00.000-07:00

Exlcblogger wants to make sure you know the story from Pete Vere and life-after-RC of the Mission Society of Mandeville in Jamaica and how it was founded from the wreck of the Sons of Mary. An analogy of hope for the wreck of the Legionaries.

…Have you had the traumatizing experience of leaving your own Congregation, or contemplating doing it, heartbroken yet still full of zeal of the Church and not knowing where to go or where to start? Perhaps you could relate well to the Mission Society of Mandeville, a vibrant community of priests and brothers found in Jamaica, West-Indies (the Caribbean). An ex-Lc visited them some time ago.

This Mission Society was Founded by the first Bishop of Mandeville, the Most Rev. Bishop Paul M. Boyle, former Superior General of the Passionist Order upon the urging of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in Rome almost a decade ago. It is a diocesan Society of Apostolic life which has received a number of diocesan approvals as well as a Decree of Encouragement from the Bishops of the island nation of Jamaica, including the President of the Episcopal Conference.

The initial members of this missionary society went through something very similar to what the LC's are going through. They belonged to the Sons of Mary, a Canadian group which basically "went mad" and is now in schism with the Church because of false mysticism and other warped attitudes too long to describe here. Having also known the Sons of Mary, this ex-LC also knows that there were some healthy spiritual characteristics in the Sons of Mary that were identical to the LC's. Indeed in the mid 80s, the Sons of Mary were the only religious with which the members of the LC's could mingle freely. Their devotion to the Eucharist, to the Blessed Mother and their faithfulness to the Pope were akin to that of the LC's.

At any rate, the Sons of Mary were an international group serving in Italy (in two dioceses) in France, in Canada the United States and Jamaica. Once the group went "off the deep end" a group of these religious left the Sons of Mary "en bloc" in an act of faith, desiring to continue to serve the Church as priests and brothers and yet maintain what was "salvagable." The trauma they felt was deep. The separation from their institute cut them to the innermost recesses of their being. Yet out of this "death experience" came new life! I am sure that some of you out there would find in them a sympathetic ear. Perhaps some of you would want to join them.

God helped this group of brave men that this ex-LC personally knows. Indeed the Bishop of Mandeville for a few years before these sad events concerning the Sons of Mary took place was nurturing the idea to found a Society dedicated to Mission for Life in the Caribbean. When the tragic events affected this group, he decided to go ahead with this dream and found a Mission Society. He "seized the day" and he asked these ex Sons of Mary if they wanted to engage themselves in forming a new group. After prayer and discernment, these first few members agreed to the Bishops' proposition. The Bishop then officially founded the Society and gave the Society its statutes. The first elected Superior was the very Rev. Monsignor Michael Palud who is presently the Vicar General of the Diocese of Mandeville. He is also the official translator of the Bishop's Conference of the Antilles Region. He can be reached at msgrmichael@gmail.com. They have a website: www.themissionsocietyofmandeville.org.

Later, after the Foundation, other members joined. Most of the members of this society are tri-lingual and speak English, French and Italian. A number of them also speak Spanish and Portuguese. The Society runs a secondary school, a home for abandoned children, a retreat house and a number of parishes. A few months ago, Cardinal Dias of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples wrote to another Archbishop in the Caribbean telling the Most Rev. Robert Rivas, O.P. archbishop of Castries to look to The Mission Society of Mandeville for help for his Diocese. Just consider...because of the similarities, maybe that could be a solution for some of you out there. Think about it, think about the potential this might create for the good of the Caribbean church ! I have a feeling that you would be received with open arms.

Timeline additions

2009-05-16T19:06:00.000-07:00

Thanks to those of you who have commented on and added to the Legionary timeline, exlcblogger publicly. Let’s all keep adding. As one of you said, a “timeline is a good way to view MM's life in its entirety, to avoid considering the mistress and daughter as mere evidence of a one time lapse, but rather as a lapse among many lapses that spanned a lifetime and was really part of a lifestyle.”

I have added the death of Servant of God, Maura Degollado Guizar, “Mama Maurita,” Father Marcial Maciel’s mother, on Christmas Day 1977. Can any of you confirm that Father Maciel was away for a number of days at the time and missed her funeral? Father Maciel seemingly missed the canonization of his great uncle, Rafael Guízar Valencia, perhaps for ill health, on 15 October 2006.

Another friend writes about the color film documentary made of Father Maciel’s ordination in 1944, how extraordinary the arrangements must have been to pull off a color film in Mexico at the time, and how he saw the film several times in his years in the Legion. “The camera man keeps panning up above Maciel, where there is the actual, original image of Our Lady of Guadalupe and a strong light, I think it's sunlight through a window. When I saw it, I always thought the camera man thought he saw some sort of miraculous sign going on with the strong light and was trying to capture the miracle on film, sort of like Fatima or something. Also creepy about the version we were shown in Novitiate, is that they used Maciel's voice narrating how the ordination took place. There is slow, sort of new age/mystical type music in the background while Maciel's slow, relaxed voice explains what happened that day.”

To those who task me with disrespecting luminaries Mary Ann Glendon and George Weigel by casting their words back at them: I understand how much good they have done and how anyone can make a mistake, but do they understand the spiritual agony they inflicted from their privileged places when they imputed unorthodoxy to those who found it perfectly obvious that the Legionaries, their well-sounding words to the contrary, were manipulative and corrupt?

President Ashcroft and the Legionaries

2009-05-04T06:21:00.000-07:00

A brief story in the Atlanta Journal Constitution on Friday contained several remarkable statements by Southern Catholic College President Dr. Jeremiah Ashcroft about the school’s emerging new affiliation with the Legionaries. He said it will be beneficial because the Legionaries are one of the few Catholic religious orders that is growing and because they have a strong associated lay order. He said that “concerns over negative reports about the order were alleviated when Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory of Atlanta, a college board member, affirmed the affiliation as a good move.” He said, “Our sense of [the apostolic visitation] is that it is a good thing by Rome and will result in an even stronger order.”

I wish reporter Christopher Quinn had made a little more of his opportunity to converse with President Ashcroft. Can Ashcroft prove the growth of the Legionaries with valid statistics or is that an unexamined cliché? Is he aware that there has been and may well be further attrition in the order and in Regnum Christi as a result of the now widespread knowledge that the founder was a fraud? The Legionaries are under investigation for sexual and financial corruption and this recommends them? How can Archbishop Gregory assure him that the Legionaries will continue to exist after the visitation when his brother archbishop in Baltimore Edwin O’Brien has said that that in itself is an issue for the visitation to consider? Does Archbishop Gregory claim the same powers as Cardinals Rodé and Sodano to keep the Legionaries from harm, no matter what they do?

If Legionary Vocation Director Rev. Anthony Bannon was telling donors in March that the Legionaries could barely afford heating oil this winter , where’s the money coming from to bail out the College? Or was Father Bannon exaggerating a little? Can Ashcroft guarantee that the Legionaries have given up their Founder’s attitude that the primary goal of Legionary schools is recruitment ?

I wonder if President Ashcroft will converse with me, a pseudonymous no-account, but concerned and well-intentioned.

Visitation Material 3: Fish Tank Education

2009-04-30T05:45:00.001-07:00

As we contemplate the Legionaries as liberal arts educators, let’s none of us forget Father Maciel’s infamous statements in the Second General Chapter of the Legion of Christ December 1992. After referring pro forma to the primary importance of the “human and Christian formation of children and adolescents,” he admitted that the primary goal of Legionary schools and universities is “the expansion of Regnum Christi.” His cherished image for Legionary centers is “a fish producing ‘tank’ where fishermen are able to devote themselves to an intensive and unquestionably successful harvest” (“‘un estanque’ donde se cultiven los peces para que los pescadores tengan la oportunidad de dedicarse a la pesca con intensidad y con certeza de éxito.”). Now that the Legionaries have reformed and moved on, they will doubtless have purified themselves of their founder’s repulsive attitude, but, for the sake of students at Southern Catholic College who wish to avoid the harpoon, perhaps the apostolic visitators should ask and make sure.

The texts:

Works of apostolate of the Legion of Christ
Educational Works

333. When Our Lord God gave us the opportunity to begin our primary apostolic work, in 1954, we opted to start an educational center. From that moment I clearly saw that this would be the path that God set out for us. First and foremost its primary importance was, is and will be in the human and Christian formation of children and adolescents. Secondly, this would allow us to be in contact with a wide range of people — through the relationships with parents and teachers — which would serve to form and bring into the apostolate lay Catholics. I was thinking especially, as we look back now, about Catholic leaders. For this reason we launched the Cumbres Institute rather than a poor little neighborhood school which would have been a much more simple and manageable affair. Thirdly, I was convinced that these schools would become an important source for vocations for the Movement and for the priesthood. Lastly, I was also thinking about the economic support these institutions would be able to offer for the maintenance of the congregation's houses of formation.

341. I hope that in this way the image I have always cherished of our apostolate centers becomes a reality: a fish producing “tank” where fishermen are able to devote themselves to an intensive and unquestionably successful harvest. («un estanque» donde se cultiven los peces para que los pescadores tengan la oportunidad de dedicarse a la pesca con intensidad y con certeza de éxito.)

343. Therefore, let us consider one my greatest concerns as founder — that of our educational projects. I have discussed this many times and perhaps things are improving somewhat, but it still pains me to see that our schools and universities are not fulfilling their primary goal: the expansion of Regnum Christi, especially through the recruitment of leaders and the cultivation of vocations for the Legion and for the consecrated life of the Movement.

344. Allow me to take advantage of this exceptional opportunity the General Chapter has offered me to once again insist on this: the meaning and goals of our schools — like all apostolic work of the legion and the Movement — must not be worn down by operating solely as teaching facilities. They will not accomplish their true goal in God’s plan for us if they do not bring a large number of students, parents, family members of students and teachers into Regnum Christi. I have said it many times: for us these schools serve primarily as an open means of recruitment and of the recruitment of leaders.

Legionary expansion has always been “fist to mouth”

2009-04-30T05:43:00.001-07:00

The March 18, 2009 remarks of Legionary Director of Vocations, Rev. Anthony Bannon, on a teleconference with donors are evidence for Legionary attitudes to money and expansion that put their potential acquiring Southern Catholic College in an interesting light.

His remarks:

We’re faced with the challenge that results from the present economic situation, world wide and here in the US. Many of our constant supporters are themselves facing immense difficulties in balancing their own budgets and meeting their own commitments. They’re always giving to us from their generosity, a lot on fixed incomes and doing so heroically. All of us are facing difficult times… There’s an immediate effect in the ability of our most fervent and constant supporters to continue that support.

We’re finding that and we know it’s not a decrease in any interest in what we’re doing, but it’s the reality around us. If any of you listening have ideas for us or know avenues to find the support that we need, we’d be very grateful in knowing about that, if anyone is in a position to help in an increasing way, that of course would also be of very great help to us.

The seminarians continue themselves doing a lot of the work in our formation houses, a lot of the maintenance, a lot of the cleaning of the house, a lot of care of the gardens, but then there are so many that we get a good amount donated food in several of the seminaries. We keep on doing all those things to stretch the help that you give us as much as possible, but the challenge is definitely greater than what it was before.

We were blessed that the price of oil came down a bit, because we were facing in our seminarians an impossible situation really at the beginning of winter, but the prices did fall back a little bit, so that wasn’t as bad as we thought it was going to be, although it still is quite bad, quite a challenge for us.

We have at the same time been expanding. If we were just in Cheshire, just had the number of novices we had some years ago, if we hadn’t had to start off philosophy and theology down in New York, we wouldn’t be doing too bad, but it’s because of expansion, because of what that has meant to us in rising costs, upgrading our buildings, that expansion, that’s where our problems are, so we’ve had to go into debt, because of our development and gaining that debt now is quite a challenge.

Since we were started, it has been divine providence that has kept us going, and divine providence has not been expressing itself in miraculous money appearing out of nowhere, but in the miracle of the generosity that God puts in the heart of all of you who are listening to us.

We are a relatively recent congregation and we’ve been in expansion all of these years. We’ve never really caught our breath and we’ve never really reached the situation in which we know in 2008 that we had the budget for 2009, the money in the bank and ready to operate. We have been at times from fist to mouth, basically.

We don’t have a cushion but we’ve been creating programs that over time will create a cushion but these are programs that require a commitment and the money that comes in to them, like our annuities program, we can’t spend immediately. So where those are going will help us more in the future….

We’ve been cutting down to basics, down to essentials and are a little concerned about deferred maintenance in our buildings….

Legionary Visitation Material 2: Academic Incompetence

2009-04-24T15:42:00.001-07:00

That the Legionaries now have a memorandum of understanding to buy Southern Catholic College in Dawsonville, Georgia raises a number of questions (are rumors of their access to limitless Mexican money true? the Vatican is now investigating them: have they no shame?) But the question that interests me is: what do they know about conducting a liberal arts college anyway?

It’s regrettable the Legionaries shut down the Regain discussion board with a lawsuit in 2008. The board could have served as a good supply of investigatory leads and witnesses for the apostolic visitators. But I have a good memory of what people used to post there about what terrible educators of their own the Legionaries have been.

Former Legionary Todd J. Carpunky, now a corporate and finance attorney and graduate of Florida State and Michigan Law School, wrote on the board January 22, 2004:

The Legion tells us how great our "intellectual" formation is... anyone who has attended a true "top-notch" institution can tell you that the Legion's intellectual formation doesn't even compare. Is the Legion's intellectual formation terrible? No. It's better than a lot of places. By the same token, Howard Johnsons are better than a lot of run down motels... but Howard Johnsons are not a Ritz Carlton.... If the Legion were ranked with the rest of the Universities in the world, it would be in the fourth tier (of four tiers).

A Prof. of mine in Salamanca (a Legionary) was often incorrect in his Latin. I would point it out. The Rector later told me to not correct him when he made a mistake, that he was TEACHING us. I asked the Rector what I should do... he said "just take notes and write it down even if it's wrong." There is no intellectual challenge in the Legion; there's no questioning. Things are to be taken as they are given. What kind of truly intellectual formation is that? The vast majority of Legionaries who have left tend to find out that the formation they received was subpar and irrelevant for moving on with their lives....

(Todd gave me permission to quote him by name. Other Regain board correspondents I will call by their Regain user names.)

exlc1998irish, an Irish former Legionary who had studied in Spain wrote:

The Legion tells its prospect recruits (or their families) that in the Legion they will get the best possible education, far superior than that which they would ordinarily get. This is far from the truth. While there is great intensity in the classroom and study hall, maximizing efficacy so to speak, the education received is often substandard, teachers being usually LC Brothers who haven’t even finished a degree in anything. (April 10, 2005)

exlc1998irish was frustrated when as a pre-university student in Spain he had to sit for a state literature exam without having read Celestina or knowing who Bécquer was. “Of course I failed literature because I had no idea... I was quite angry because I felt I had been given a substandard education and expected to get top marks.” (January 30, 2005; May 15, 2004)

Another former Legionary felt unprepared for graduate theology work in a US school after Legionary theology studies: he had never before so much as read, digested, or briefly reviewed a scholarly book.

Regnum Christi consecrated women were notably victimized by Legionary anti-intellectualism. lia792, a consecrated woman studying in Rhode Island, was disappointed not to be reading books, but to be learning how to demonstrate how clever we are before we try to recruit someone:

... in culture class, we learned about all kinds of writers, but we never read any of them. I can recognize the names of the famous Spanish writers, but I can't tell you what they wrote since I was never exposed to any of it. There was no place for literature in our studies. (May 14, 2005)

bigtex wrote of what she learned of how Regnum Christi taught consecrated women:

...they hadn't actually read any… books although they were aware of the titles and authors. I was confused until they explained that [their] literature class had involved memorizing the title, author, and plot summary of a long list of classics. They also memorized one sentence which summed up the moral lesson to be learned from this book. (October 11, 2005)

lia792 wrote how wide reading was disallowed:

the thing about books was that the director pretty much controlled what was allowed in the center and what wasn't, and from Rome they made the big decisions.... On an individual level, your spiritual guide decided what YOU could and couldn't read. For example, I asked permission to read the Bible from cover to cover, and that request was denied me because my spiritual guide thought it would be a waste of time to read some of the books. (May 14, 2005)

carragher, a former Regnum Christi consecrated woman, felt that when she started a university degree outside Regnum Christi

my 4 years of formation would be a good asset to my uni studies. In some ways I had an advantage, but for the most part, I really was starting from scratch.... university is all about researching and writing, is it not? Two things that we did none of in formation. I never wrote a single research paper in the whole four years I was in the 3gf. I hadn't even heard of the MLA or APA formats, didn't know how to cite works, do a bibliography, nothing academic whatsoever.... we were never taught the fundamental purpose of university: to become a critical thinker. Of course it was explained that there was no time, the sense of urgency, the mission and the souls were waiting for use to be prepared, etc. therefore there was no time to waste writing or researching because all we needed had all been said or done; we just needed to learn it, rehearse it, believe it, and regurge it. (January 29, 2005)

So too exlc1998irish:

A companion of mine, who was in the apostolic school in mexico and continued on to begin philosophy, left after ten years in the legion. He returned to mexico and had to go back to preuniversity level education to be able to enter university. He has recently graduated from university after spending last seven years in education after the Legion.... I also had to sit further pre university exams to bring myself to level necessary for entry. So not only are their educators substandard, but the level of education expected is as well. (April 10, 2005)

People wrote of their experience of Legionary anti-intellectualism in elementary schools across the country. quidquo, who had taught with a Master's at Cypress Heights Academy in Louisiana, resigned. She wrote:

They disregard everything that the teacher learned in professional training and force him or her to teach legion pedagogy. The teacher knows that the pedagogy doesn't produce strong readers, and begins to ask questions for the sake of the students. The recruiters begin to complain about the teachers "methods" to other parents because he or she is not totally compliant to the real mission of the "school." What is the real mission? The real mission is not stated to parents; the real mission is recruiting new members.... Cypress Heights, like other Legion Schools, is doing such a poor job because they put parents with no experience in charge. Powerful administrators have very little experience in the classroom, and they have no business in administration.... Their operation is corrupt. The school plays lip service to a real education. I began to wonder why they avoided teachers with high credentials. They often claim they can't afford good teachers because they have budget problems. But I have seen teachers who had good credentials, but were willing to work for the legion because they thought it was a good cause, discredited in front of parents by legion members The RC/LC operation looks wholesome and good at first look, but they are not true leaders or educators. They offer what I call a "double." It looks like it is flawless, but is deeply shallow and corrupt underneath. (March 18, 2005; July 22 and 24, 2006)

National Consultants for Education is the central authority for Legionary elementary schools. Bismarck wrote of them:

The Legion educational practice takes decision making out of the hands of even local administrators and decides what is said in morning meeting, grading policy, report card structure, textbooks, what is taught and how it is taught.... Teachers and administrators accustomed to the practice of discussion and decision making leave the Legion system. Thus Legion schools tend to have all the charm of schools in the old Soviet system. (July 24, 2006)

jeeves wrote from Highlands School about a colleague who said:

...the NCE is filled with shockingly uneducated people. They were supposed to be developing curriculum, but were in his view, stunningly disinterested in the life of mind. (May 28, 2005)

kat wrote of the "larger problems surrounding honesty and integrity" and the Legion's "unspoken agenda" :

If you don't understand this and you're not on board with their vision, then you will eventually be disillusioned and frustrated. This disillusionment happens to unsuspecting new hires -- teachers or administrators -- who come in without really understanding what's going on.... talented people won't put up with Legionary roadblocks and they will quickly figure out that the PRIMARY mission of the school may not fit in well with what they want to accomplish in their subject area or with what they are comfortable with as a professional. (August 28, 2005)

All told, there is widespread evidence that as students and educators in Humanities, the Legionaries are unprofessional, utilitarian, incompetent, and uninterested in the life of the mind. If a teacher in their schools is uncomfortable, then the Legionaries reply with their sanctimonious motto: "God doesn't call the qualified, He qualifies the called."

Good priests need not be scholars and teachers: the Church may well need a movement and an order for the intellectually and culturally unadventurous. But the Legionary imposture, as these posters made plain, comes of falsely claiming dullardy as academic excellence and of aspiring to found schools and universities with the goal of empire-building and self-legitimizing rather than admitting that you're just not an intellectual order.

I think I’ll reconsider sending my children to Southern Catholic College.

A Legionary Timeline

2009-04-06T16:17:00.000-07:00

Please enjoy and help build up the Legionary Timeline to the left...

Legionary Visitation Material: Not just Father Maciel

2009-04-02T19:20:00.001-07:00

“…with truth and transparency, in a climate of fraternal and constructive dialogue…” Cardinal Bertone, Vatican Secretary of State 10 March 2009

That Pope Benedict has decided on an investigation of the Legionaries of Christ in itself decides nothing. The Visitation could lead as easily to the abolition of the Legion as to a whitewash (as seems to think one Legionary superior , who explained it to his Regnum Christi charges, “To further show [Vatican] support, the Holy Father has decided to order a visitation of the Legion to help us to move forward vigorously. The Holy See wants to show its trust in us and offer us a chance to show the authenticity of the gift that we have to the Church.”).

If I had a voice, I would want to offer advice to the Visitators.

The questions about Maciel himself personally are not unimportant: child? children? “mistress” (as people keep assuming) or (more likely?) statutory rape victim? money misused? young men abused? and so on. But much more important are the questions about the effects of these sins on the congregation. As Toronto Archbishop Thomas Collis put it last week, “there’s something not just personal in Maciel, but this whole thing needs to be looked at. It just needs to be brought to the light.”

Scores of Maciel’s abuse victims may well emerge, but just as important is accounting for abuse victims of others in the congregation. Maciel may have mishandled funds, but more important is acknowledging vendors local to Legionary houses whose bills Legionaries don’t pay.

I dislike the “bad founder, but the Legionaries are such good priests and do such good work” theme, which runs through the 2006 CDF Communiqué, the words of the same Archbishop Collins, and Bertone’s letter. It suggests that Maciel had no influence on those who revered him as Nuestro Padre and blunts the impulse for the more far ranging work of accounting of the effects of his sins on the congregation. These good priests disengaged their spiritual discernment on his behalf and in their good work they perpetuated his sinful structures of deceit and infantilization in the name of Christ. Don’t we believe in the communion of saints? Can’t we harm one another even with the sins we successfully conceal?

I also dislike the Legionary “pray for us as we bear our cross” theme. They should take responsibility for having fallen foul of a charlatan. There were truth tellers about trying to warn them, but whom they dismissed as lying conspirators, liberals, enemies of the Church.

Those who truly bear the Legionary cross are those spiritually nearly murdered by sexual abuse, those for whom faith and prayer are difficult after spiritual abuse, those whose development in adolescence was stunted by religious commitment made immaturely, those who have been victims and those who have been scandalized by the victimizing.

I hope the Visitators will speak with them, though many won’t be found for interviews in Legionary houses.

Apostolic Visitation Announced for the Legionaries of Christ

2009-03-31T12:48:00.000-07:00

The Legionaries of Christ today made public a letter from Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone informing Legionary Director General Alvaro Corcuera that Pope Benedict XVI “has decided to carry out an Apostolic Visitation to the institutions of the Legionaries of Christ through a team of prelates,” in the aftermath of the scandal surrounding Rev. Marcial Maciel, the Legionary founder. Intentionally or unintentionally, the letter was dated 10 March 2009, Maciel’s birthday, which the Legionaries used to celebrate as a feast day of first rank.

“Apostolic visitation” is technical Vatican language for an investigation by an outsider to the congregation. The appointment of visitators, then, does not represent a judgment by the Church on the Legionaries, but the recognition that something is wrong in the congregation that must be investigated as preparatory to putting it right.

The stated purpose of the visitation will be, in Bertone’s words, that “with truth and transparency, in a climate of fraternal and constructive dialogue, [the Legionaries] overcome the present difficulties.”

The Legionaries also made public a letter in response from Corcuera, dated 29 March, which welcomed the visitation with gratitude and promised cooperation. Corcuera also said, “We are deeply saddened and sorry, and we sincerely ask for forgiveness from God and from those who have been hurt through this.”

According to the Legionary website, the team of senior churchmen who will serve as visitators has not yet been named, will commence work sometime after Easter, and will continue work for some months.

Some official Legionary or Vatican response to the scandal has been awaited since after it broke February 3.

It is significant that the matter is being handled by Secretary of State Bertone, and not by Cardinal Franc Rodé, prefect of the Vatican Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, which oversees Catholic religious orders, and who would have been expected to take the lead. But Rodé apparently forfeited his objectivity by serving in the past as a partisan supporter of the Legionaries.

Rodé’s initial intention, reported February 8, had been to let the Legionaries work the scandal out for themselves without intervention. Rodé was then involved in the Legionaries’ attempt to issue an independent statement about their future on February 24, an attempt that was rebuffed. In early February both Germain Grisez and George Weigel called for an investigation independent of Rodé’s Congregation, which they thought could not be trusted with it.

The only way to read courtly Vatican documents is with exquisite nuance. Several things to consider:

Bertone praises the Legionaries and signals their survival in terms similar to those used in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s Communiqué suspending Maciel from public ministry in May 2006 (“Independently of the person of the Founder, [their] worthy apostolate… is gratefully recognized.”): “I am pleased to remember that many people benefit from the works of education and apostolate which the Legionaries of Christ carry out in various parts of the world, moved by your desire to establish Christ’s Kingdom according to the demands of justice and charity, among intellectuals, professional people and those engaged in teaching and social action…”

He also signals that serious problems will be addressed. The visitation will promote “broadmindedness and an unsullied heart” and require “truth and transparency.” The post-scandal Legionary talking point: “There are some people who, out of respect, sensitivity, Christian mercy, profound gratitude, etc., don’t want to go into details about Nuestro Padre’s behavior…. We should respect and encourage this attitude, as much in ourselves as in others. The starting point is the acknowledgment and gratitude for all the good we have received.” seems now superseded.

Corcuera used the word “charism” in his letter, praying “that [God] will grant us the grace to continue to seek the holiness to which He is calling us, and that we will be able to bring to its fullness the charism He has entrusted to us.” The Legionaries have maintained that the approval of their congregation and recognition of their charism represents an infallible judgment by the Church, a judgment they rely on for institutional survival, but something the Visitation now must itself judge.

Bertone himself avoided the word “charism” in mentioning whatever be distinctive to the Legionaries: “Pope Benedict encourages you to continue seeking the good of the Church and society by means of your own distinctive initiatives and institutions.” The post-scandal talking point: “Cardinal Rodé [told us], ‘the Holy Father told me: “Tell them that I know them, I esteem them, and I appreciate them. Tell them that my blessing accompanies them; tell them to follow with great conviction the path marked out by the charism given to the Regnum Christi Movement, and to be great witnesses of Christ and of his Church in today’s world.’”’ has now been refined.

Also significant is Corcuera’s reference to “the grave facts in our father founder’s life that already were the object of the investigations by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which were concluded in May of 2006, and those which have come to light more recently.” At the time the Legionaries maintained publicly that Maciel had not been disciplined, but effectively cleared, as the Church had declined to conduct a trial. The post-scandal talking point: “There never was a trial, however, and the competent authority did not issue a verdict.” is more unrealistic than ever.

The Legionary website explains that “during the time of the Apostolic Visitation our life and apostolate will follow their ordinary course.” Business as usual, in other words, something the Legionaries have become good at, while ignoring the serious issues that have swirled around them for decades. The visitators may make that a little more difficult.

A Petition for Legionary Transparency

2009-03-26T17:01:00.000-07:00

A petition on ipetitions.com calls for a thorough review of the Legionary organizational charism and full disclosure in a public statement.

High points and discussion points in Archbishop Collins’ interview

2009-03-26T04:58:00.000-07:00

Toronto Archbishop Thomas Collins answered questions on Tuesday night March 24 on Salt and Light Television’s Catholic Focus about the Maciel revelations.

Some high points:

"Cardinal Ratzinger was the main one responsible for rooting this out and getting his officials to deal with this issue before he became pope, to his extraordinary credit, for the good of the Church."

Very much so. Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, has acted deliberately over more than four years in the matter of Father Maciel, reopening the case as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in December 2004, concluding it in May 2006 with Maciel’s suspension as a priest, and doing away with the private Legionary vow in 2007. But if we credit Ratzinger do we inescapably debit Pope John Paul for having honored Maciel?

"The whole culture of the place seemed to be a little bit strange, very controlled, and there’s some policy issues you had in terms of who could hear whose confession and about criticism of the founder, which were very problematic in the group."

The Archbishop confirms his knowledge of other abuses in Legionary life to be investigated aside from the founder: coercive spirituality, the private vow (now abandoned after Vatican intervention) never to criticize a superior and to report on those who did, and required sacramental confession to a religious superior (a serious violation of canon law).

"I think certainly at the minimum there has to be a massive reordering of the Legionaries of Christ for the sake if nothing else of those good and true and wonderful Legionaries of Christ and Regnum Christi people, who have put their trust in this and have done great work for the Lord, and who have been betrayed…. there’s something not just personal in Maciel, but this whole thing needs to be looked at. It just needs to be brought to the light…. Another possibility [for the future] would be to shut it down and start anew. That’s been suggested, I don’t know if they’re going to do that."

and

"We’re servants of Jesus. Jesus is God. These people who are his servants must be transparent. And they must not make themselves the center."

The Archbishop calls for transparency and full disclosure of the scandal and a radical reappraisal, even abolition, of the order, open to the possibility that the approval of the Legionary constitution was not an infallible recognition of charism by the Church. In this he joins Baltimore Archbishop Edwin O’Brien and Sydney Archbishop Cardinal George Pell.

Some other points:

"This structure set up by Maciel provided some opportunities [for Regnum Christi members to do good apostolic work]. These are the good things within the Legion. I think there’s an enormous amount of good there."

and

"I’d be very concerned about the structure they set up that would make it possible to live such a double life."

This inconsistency points to the larger question: how can a “fraud” have communicated a holy way of life to his institute?

"I feel very sorry especially for those wonderful good people who have sought with earnest hearts to serve in Regnum Christi and as priests of the Legion, just to serve Jesus, who have been betrayed by this."

But many of the same people enabled the abuse and perpetuated its effects on the members.

"I can’t think of any, but I’m sure there’s been a founder in the past who went off the track."

Can anyone, historian or theologian, tell us whether or not in the history of the Church there has in fact been a founder of a viable religious order as thoroughgoing a hypocrite as Father Maciel?

"There’s something unhealthy about that kind of [hero worship of the founder] at any time. We should honor great people and we canonise great people and we look to them as heroes. It’s fair enough for Jesuits to love St. Ignatius, and Dominicans to love St. Dominic, and Franciscans to love St. Francis, but there’s a limit. This is simply a saint."

In light of the Maciel scandal, what exactly should be the proper Catholic limit to adulation of a charismatic founder in other new religious movements as well?

Thanks altogether to Archbishop Collins for his cheering words.

Toronto Archbishop Collins's remarks

2009-03-24T13:13:00.000-07:00

Toronto Archbishop Thomas Collins on March 24 on Salt and Light Television’s Catholic Focus addressed the Maciel revelations in these words:

There have been real concerns about Father Maciel for years. And I have always been interested in this, because the Legionaries of Christ are quite significant in many different ways within the Church. And I’ve been trying to find out what’s been going on. This particular type of problem I’ve not been aware of. I was trying, as bishop out west, to get information on this. I had some extreme reservations about Maciel.

For other reasons, there seemed to be something wrong there. And in fact Cardinal Ratzinger was the main one responsible for rooting this out and getting his officials to deal with this issue before he became pope, to his extraordinary credit, for the good of the Church. So I think there’s clearly a problem there and the whole culture of the place seemed to be a little bit strange, very controlled, and there’s some policy issues you had in terms of who could hear whose confession and about criticism of the founder, which were very problematic in the group.

On the other hand, people are attracted to it, good people, good young priests. I’ve met many Legionary seminarians and priests, who want a strict religious order, faithful to the Holy Father, earnest, zealous, giving their lives for Christ and I’ve met many, many, many, wonderful Legionary priests who are just doing that and in Regnum Christi, the lay movement, I’ve met with people who are there and I used to get to know them when I was out in Edmonton, who do wonderful things. Their only desire is to serve the Church, to try to be faithful and true. This structure set up by Maciel provided some opportunities to do that. These are the good things within the Legion. I think there’s an enormous amount of good there.

But as you get in towards the center there with the founder, there’s some massive problems and now about a year after his death all this comes out about how he was clearly leading a double life, there’s no denying it.

I feel very sorry especially for those wonderful good people who have sought with earnest hearts to serve in Regnum Christi and as priests of the Legion, just to serve Jesus, who have been betrayed by this….

I can’t think of any [precedent for a sinful founder]. You think of the great founders of orders, frequently they’re canonised; it’s the integrity of their life. But God can write straight with crooked lines. If somebody who is leading a double life and is disreputable in his own personal life can speak, love Jesus, serve the Lord, give yourself to Christ, and people respond to that, well, they respond to that, but truth be told, there’s a lie there in terms of the person’s integrity, the person’s life. But what people are responding to are things which are in themselves noble and worthy.

That’s the good thing in this whole reality. But I would be concerned not only about the problems with the founder, because that can happen -- I can’t think of any, but I’m sure there’s been a founder in the past who went off the track. The problem is if someone’s leading that kind of a double life, I’d be very concerned about the structure they set up that would make it possible to live such a double life.

So that whole thing has to be totally reviewed and cleaned up. And I would wonder too how a person could lead a double life, without the community being aware. I think certainly at the minimum there has to be a massive reordering of the Legionaries of Christ for the sake if nothing else of those good and true and wonderful Legionaries of Christ and Regnum Christi people, who have put their trust in this and have done great work for the Lord, and who have been betrayed….

I would say [the ones questioning their involvement in the movement] might consider leaving Regnum Christi, that would certainly be one thing, or priests in the order, good and faithful priests, I’m sure that many of them will consider leaving the order and starting fresh in an order or in the priesthood in a way that doesn’t have these real questions over it.

On the other hand, I think that the work they do is good. And the work they have done is good and they should be proud of that, but there’s something not just personal in Maciel, but this whole thing needs to be looked at. It just needs to be brought to the light….

O yeah, that’s a major problem [over emphasis on the founder]. It’s a natural thing, they find somebody they think is a legitimate saint, somebody -- you read their writings, o my! this is wonderful, and you go around saying, this is only thing there is. And that’s excessive, even good people, there’s a problem there. When you get a cult of personality that’s over the top, that’s not a healthy sign. There’s something wrong there.

Even in legitimate groups where it turns out the founder is a perfectly good person, I think it’s always not a bad thing to tone down the cult of personality. Only Jesus walks on water. We have a Messiah. All of those founders who are canonised or not yet canonised saints that’s precisely their view of themselves and they look upon themselves as humble servants serving the Lord. And it’s a natural hero worship among people to go over the top in that. But it’s always dangerous in the Church when any leader is treated with that kind of approach.

They [set themselves up for a fall]. It turned out that this man was a fraud, in terms of his own life. There’s something unhealthy about that kind of a thing at any time. We should honor great people and we canonise great people and we look to them as heroes. It’s fair enough for Jesuits to love St. Ignatius, and Dominicans to love St. Dominic, and Franciscans to love St. Francis, but there’s a limit. This is simply a saint.

We’re servants of Jesus. Jesus is God. These people who are his servants must be transparent. And they must not make themselves the center….

I don’t know [where we go from here], I’ve just been learning about this in the newspapers. I don’t have any inner knowledge of what steps are being taken. I really don’t know what is being planned. There are several things that could be done. One of them would be to send in someone to take over the order, to appoint a papal representative to simply take over the order and clean it up for the sake of the good people in it who deserve to have their order fixed. So that’s one thing that could be done. Another possibility would be to shut it down and start anew. That’s been suggested, I don’t know if they’re going to do that.

Sometimes in cases like this, this is where it’s good to have the pope and to have the Holy See. When there are problems in a local area, sometimes they can fix themselves, and we hope that might be the case. Subsidiarity is one thing we have in the church where we always start with the local level first. But if they can’t fix themselves, then you go to a higher level and some way of doing that needs to be done. I don’t really know what’s being planned.

***

Archbishop Collins has in the past been friendly to the Legionaries both in Edmonton, where he was archbishop from 1999 – 2006, and in Toronto since then.

In January 2005 he told the Edmonton archdiocesan Western Catholic Reporter that he met regularly with Regnum Christi and that the group is doing good work in the archdiocese. "The Regnum Christi people have been most cooperative; very, very cooperative. And they are very zealous, active parishioners and I have great admiration for their work.”

The Legionaries were the subject of numerous positive accounts in the Western Catholic Reporter.

The Regnum Christi website covers his May 2007 visit visit with members of Compass, a Regnum Christi university apostolate, at the University of Toronto.

Father Bannon's remarks

2009-03-19T13:04:00.000-07:00

Legionaries of Christ Director of Vocations, Rev. Anthony Bannon, LC, with the first few minutes of a teleconference “town hall meeting” on March 18 at 8pm Eastern, addressed the Maciel scandal in these words:

The unexpected events that I mentioned have to do with the news about the serious failings of our father founder, that came to us as a total surprise, that have been very difficult to accept, but accept them we must.

This phone conference is not a news conference on these events. The time is not yet mature for such a conference, because the Legion is in constant contact with the Holy See. There are elements and facts that still need to be investigated, and any steps in this regard have to be taken very prudently without rushing. But I just wanted to assure you, for those of you who had questions or were wondering about it, we are working on it.

I do want to express emphatically that we are deeply sorry and apologetic to anyone who’s been hurt by these actions, hurt or scandalized. We are sorry for any victims. We know that our directors are quietly trying to get in touch with possible victims. We are deeply sorry for any scandal that has been caused.

Many of you in this regard over these past few weeks have gotten in touch with us to tell us you’re praying for us specially at this time so let me express my extreme gratitude to you for your support and your prayers over these past weeks.

One of the main reasons many of you have supported the Legion is our fidelity to the Holy See. I want to assure you, that that point of our spirituality is not about to change, nor will it never change, I hope. Especially in this situation, anything the Holy Father sees appropriate to ask of us, anything he wants of us, we will do that and we will do it happily.

So this brings back to the first point I wanted to share with you today. As a matter of fact, our trials have been a blessing. You and our supporters have always been very kind to us, many people who have seen the formation we give our young men praise us. Over the years we’ve received many accolades from many quarters, from people in authority in the Church and in public life. Our apostolates have been growing tremendously. All of this is good, but we are only human and therefore all of this is also a danger. The danger is that we focus on ourselves, we get overconfident, that we begin to feel superior, in a word, there’s a real danger of us losing our focus.

The present situation has helped to bring us back where we belong. This new experience of our weakness has brought us right back to the center, the core of what we are as priests and religious, and what we’re doing in our seminaries. It has made us review our actions to make sure that we keep Christ and no one or nothing else at the center of our lives. There is a greater and more specific awareness that it is Christ that we are following. It is him we are seeking and no one or nothing else.

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, but it was taken for all practical purposes out of our hands and out of our founder’s hands. For the 25 years that have gone by not even he could change them, without going through a process. In other words, what the church has guaranteed as a valid charism, it also protects, and the Church has said it’s a valid charism, a valid path to holiness, and a valid work of apostolate.

Our apostolic movement Regnum Christi was approved explicitly 4 and a half years ago, in a similar fashion, which means that both in the formation of our seminarians and in our communities of apostolate we will work from and toward what the Church has approved in order to make it a reality in our lives. It means an even greater effort to examine ourselves to make sure we are what we are supposed to be, what the Church expects us to be, in precisely what the Church has approved. This is very beneficial for us, as I was saying.

Independent Legionary statement is now unlikely

2009-03-18T18:08:00.000-07:00

This is a piece I wrote on March 15.

The new scandal involving Rev. Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, which broke on February 3, divided among themselves both Legionaries and senior Catholic churchmen over the future of the order. Now six weeks later, the side that wanted an order still independent and reliant on what it took to be an infallible Church approval of its charism is ceding to the side that wants Vatican intervention and radical reform. Some Legionaries now understand that their own statement of full accounting, promised but overdue, is now unlikely to be made, because the order is no longer in a position to decide on its own authority how much to reveal about the founder’s secret life or to determine its own future.

The “pro-independent Legionaries” side was set back on February 24, the day their statement about founder and future was expected and then failed to appear. The day before, February 23, Cardinal Franc Rodé, head of the Vatican Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, which oversees Catholic religious orders, and longtime Legionary supporter, had encouraged Legionaries by video.

That same day Catholic News Agency reported the imminent release of a “major statement,” information leaked to them by Vatican officials. CNA, relying on an unnamed official from Rodé’s Congregation, had on February 8 previously reported Cardinal Rodé’s initial intention to let the Legionaries work the scandal out for themselves without intervention.

Instead, the Legionaries’ statement was deferred and on the next day, February 25, Baltimore Archbishop Edwin O’Brien in his archdiocesan Catholic Review called for a review of the “very basis of the Legion movement.”

The Legion likes to cultivate Vatican patrons. Two senior Legionary supporters have been Cardinal Rodé, who for more than two years after Father Maciel was disciplined in May 2006 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the body with responsibility for investigating charges of abuse by priests) has often publicly declared his belief in a valid Legionary charism communicated by Maciel, and Cardinal Angelo Sodano, former Secretary of State and dean of the College of Cardinals, who in 1999 sought to impede Cardinal Josef Ratzinger’s CDF investigation of Maciel and whose secretariat in 2005 issued an unsigned document denying an investigation was even underway.

Mexico City Archbishop Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera has also long been a Legionary friend. He defended Maciel in 1997 as the victim of a conspiracy and in 2006 supported the Legionary misinterpretation of the CDF’s suspension of Maciel. As primate of Mexico, he would likely be involved in any future for the Mexican order.

O’Brien had decided in early 2008 to ban the Legion from Baltimore for their “lack of pastoral transparency” and the “undue pressure” sometimes applied to recruits “in a context of secrecy,” but was talked out of it by three Vatican cardinals, as he told National Catholic Reporter’s John Allen last June. But now Sydney Archbishop Cardinal George Pell has joined O’Brien on the “pro-intervention and reform” side. Pell called publicly for Vatican intervention while in Oxford, England, March 5-6, it was reported this week in the (London) Catholic Herald.

As the first cardinal to say this publicly, one also rumored on Catholic blogs to be under consideration for appointment as head of a Vatican Congregation, Pell lent added seriousness to the notion of an independent investigation or Vatican takeover of the Legionaries.

Pell is also someone who knows from experience about accusations and judicious procedure for resolving them. In 2002 he was himself accused of having abused a child and was exonerated.

The seeming ineptitude of Rev. Alvaro Corcuera, the order’s Director General, and the order’s senior leadership has contributed to the failure to keep the Legionaries independent of Vatican intervention. What Corcuera wrote, for example, in a February 4 letter on the scandal, “I am grateful to [Father Maciel] for being the instrument God used to give my entire life meaning… it would be impossible to find enough words to thank him." seemed inappropriate to the occasion and angered some Legionaries. Some, including American Rev. Thomas Berg, wanted immediate, full public disclosure of Maciel’s wrongdoing, which even now has been admitted to only in the most general terms, and an independent investigation.

Maciel picked Corcuera to succeed as Director General in January 2005, after Maciel declined reelection and stepped down. This was a month after the CDF reopened the investigation that would lead 18 months later to Maciel’s suspension as a priest. Corcuera, it was suspected at the time, was intended as a complaisant surrogate through whom Maciel might still direct the Legion from exile. Now, however congenial, he is thought entirely overmatched by the crisis.

Vatican intervention could take several forms. Rumors of a “visitation” surfaced in Italian and Spanish press 10 days ago. “Apostolic visitation” is technical Vatican language for investigation by an outsider to the order. This could be entrusted to Rodé’s Congregation, within whose immediate responsibility the matter falls. However, Rodé’s objectivity is compromised by his past support of Maciel and the visitation might be organized elsewhere. More radically, a “pontifical delegate” could be appointed immediately without further investigation, technical language for the complete takeover of the order by a chosen representative of the pope.

A Vatican decision on the Legionaries’ future may take time. The Church will consider the preservation of lay Legionary apostolic networks in Latin America, which are among the few it has there, and the personal destinies of some 700 Legionary priests, 2000 seminarians, and thousands of members of Regnum Christi, the affiliated lay association.

Add to that the unwelcome media response to two recent decisions -- the appointment of a bishop to Linz and the remission of excommunication of an SSPX bishop – and the Vatican will be thoughtful in how it proceeds.

Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, has acted deliberately over more than four years in the matter of Father Maciel, reopening the case in the CDF in December 2004, concluding it in May 2006 with Maciel’s suspension, doing away with the private Legionary vow in 2007, and he may well continue to be slow and sure.

My pieces on Spero News

2009-03-17T12:31:00.000-07:00

Since February 3 five pieces have appeared on Spero News:

“Legion of Christ delays explanation of Rev. Maciel” on March 9.

“Legion of Christ's Lenten journey towards Truth” on February 27.

My reaction to the February 25 remarks of Baltimore Archbishop Edwin O’Brien on the Legionaries of Christ on February 26.

My review of Jason Berry’s Vows of Silence documentary on February 26.

“The Shame of the Legionaries of Christ” on February 10.