The word is out and the rumors can't be explained away any more: Father Marcial Maciel, the late
founder and venerated leader of the Legionaries of Christ -- a Catholic religious order boasting over 800 priests and over 70,000 members throughout the globe -- reportedly led a "double life." While
Maciel basked in the strong support and friendship of the late Pope John Paul II, he kept a mistress and secretly fathered a child.
When I heard the news, I thought again about my old friends, Gerry and Michael, two Irish men I met in the 1980s who had left the Legionaries in bitterness and were discerning their future religious vocation. Today, they are well-loved and successful priests, but at that time they were still bruised by their experience with the Legionaries. They told me, shaking their heads, of the excessive rules that tightly governed the behavior of seminarians -- clothing required during showers, no vocal music allowed, etc. I believed their stories, but assumed they had the bad luck of drawing a ham-handed religious superior. Still, over the years, I kept their story in mind as I met a stream of Legionary priests and women from Regnun Christi, the order's lay organization. Some earned my friendship and respect, but others appeared to have been formed by that same narrow, overly scrupulous ethos that drove out Gerry and Michael.
I have written before about the tendency among some orthodox Catholics to embrace an almost robotic understanding of the faith. "Tell me what to do," they plead to their spiritual advisors. They want to be sure they are making good choices. But, in some cases -- maybe without realizing it -- they also want someone else to take the rap if the choice is wrong. They fear God more than they believe in his love and mercy. Or perhaps their tightly held faith becomes an excuse for refusing both to engage the complexities of daily existence and for accepting the radical freedom that distinguishes our human nature. Spiritual advisors know this tendency can be a problem: if the advisors are holy and mature believers, they help their advisees learn to grapple with complexity and then make their choice in dialogue with Christ. In his biography of John Paul II, "Witness to Hope," George Weigel describes the late pontiff's struggle as a priest and bishop to gently prod his students and parishioners to make their choices, rather than leaving the decision to him.
But what if an order's religious authorities manipulate this tendency to suppress the truth and construct a false reality in its place?
There is nothing new about a priest breaking his vows. The problem is Father Maciel's powerful and trusted position as the esteemed founder of the Legionaries. The American Papist, Tom Peters, who broke the story , argues that it won't be enough for order's superiors to finally acknowledge the truth about the founder, They will have to "name names" and reexamine the structure that allowed his double life to continue . One possible outcome, according to Edward Peters, is that the Legionaries who wish to remain together "dissolve" and "refound" the order.
Peters previously reported that in 2006, when Benedict XVI forced Maciel's early retirement, the pontiff also required the order to end the practice of "secret Legion vows." Reportedly, these private vows discouraged transparency and made it almost impossible to challenge the policies and actions of superiors. Now, critics will be asking whether these vows were actually designed to protect the founder -- and his collaborators within the order -- from scrutiny.
Phil Lawler, the journalist who covered the Boston Archdiocese's clerical abuse scandal from its early roots to the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law in his book,"The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston's Catholic Culture" worries that the Legionaries haven't learned from the U.S.bishops' past mistakes:
"Were any leaders within the Legionary order covering up evidence of scandal at the same time that they continued exhorting the faithful to revere Father Maciel? If so, are they still in positions of leadership? A year or two ago, the Legionaries might have answered such questions by saying, in effect, "Trust us." No longer. The bonds of trust are shattered, and can only be restored by candor."
A year ago, I attended a dinner party in New York with a mix of Catholic leaders. The conversation turned to the pope's disciplinary actions against Father Maciel; several people questioned whether the Legionaries could flourish in the wake of his disgrace. "All the founders of religious orders have been saints," said one friend, "and he is not a saint." Lawler, however, holds out some hope for the order's future prospects - but only if its superiors pay the price:
"[I]if the movement he founded is to thrive, and the good work done by many Legionary priests and Regnum Christi laymen is to continue untainted by scandal, anyone who enabled the founder's misconduct or, worse, profited from it, should be removed from duty."
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