With a more convoluted storyline than the most sordid Mexican telenovela, the cataclysmic unraveling of the Legion of Christ can only be described as a descent into lunacy.
The kind of madness that led Van Gogh to sever his ear while stalking Gauguin…
The detatchment from reality that allowed Munch to paint his hallucinatory ‘Scream’…
The denial and insanity that brought Colonel Kurtz to summarize his existence as “The horror, the horror”…
While investigators and journalists reveal new dimensions to Fr. Maciel’s long career as fraud and sexual predator daily, Vatican visitators try to discern fact from fiction in the Legion and the Legion’s leadership becomes ever more strident in its insistence that all is well and nothing should change.The Secretary General is on a whirlwind tour of LC centers spinning the yarn that there is a basis to the Legion that was not invented by the disgraced Founder and was never contaminated by his web of secrecy and falsehood. The word ‘mystique’ – not charism or constitution – has become the new shibboleth in the hasty reinvention of the Legion. La mística is what makes the Legion what it is… that vague, undefinable air that sets us apart… that prototypical seal somehow impressed on the collective consciousness of the Legionaries that preserves our identity and defines our cause…
Because of its ‘mystique’, the Legion can and should remain untouched by the scandal of its Founder’s life, the glaring questions about its internal structure and operations as a religious congregation and the lethal virus of doubt and distrust spreading silently through the ranks of its members.
This latest discourse is as puzzling as it is disingenuous. A desperate effort in the eleventh hour to preserve the status quo, business as usual, “aquí no pasa nada”.
At the same time, a book recently distributed internally, ‘Cristo al Centro’, offers an anthology of Fr. Maciel’s writings and sayings – unindexed and sometimes slightly retouched – mixed with quotations from other, less dubious sources as a thinly disguised attempt to revindicate the Founder’s contribution to LC spirituality. Now we can quote the Founder without mentioning his name, read some of the things he said and wrote without that direct and oh-so-uncomfortable reference to his person. They’re already talking about revisiting the writings of Fr. Maciel some years down the road when all this ‘persecution’ has blown over…
The Superior General has just sent an eighteen page letter meant, apparently, to motivate and strengthen the LCs in these difficult times. The meandering missive never even names the problems that are rocking the congregation to its core and basically offers three bits of advice to its confused, anguished and frustrated priests: pray, don’t read the newspapers and trust the superiors.
Trust the superiors? Like we all trusted Fr. Maciel, our Superior General, for nearly 70 years?
If their end game is to retain power and conserve the organization founded to camouflage the double life of its disgraced Founder… perhaps our trust would be better invested elsewhere. Just a thought.
Some of the commentaries swirling around these days express the fear that the Vatican may not take the visitation to its ultimate consequences. That the Legion with its flagship seminaries, huge ordination groups and impressive works of apostolate must be preserved at all costs for the good of the Church. And that perhaps there is not the resolve to overturn stones that would reveal knowledge, complicity or benefits received by high ranking Church personalities as part of Fr. Maciel’s web of influence peddling and manipulation…We can only hope and pray that the truth – full and unadulterated – will win the day in the end. The Legion is a shipwreck with many victims. Full disclosure, absolute transparency, a change in leadership, a General Chapter with strict Vatican oversight, a reformed constitution, the definitive eradication of all vestiges of Fr. Maciel’s personal imprint, and a heartfelt effort to help all those who have been hurt and betrayed are the lifeboat that will keep this surreal episode in the Church’s history from turning into an irredeemable tragedy.
Until then, the madness will continue and the Legion will persist in its denial and arrogance, turning into the exact opposite of what it claims to be.
Peace.
