This blogger waited for some dust to settle and decided to sleep on things- "consultar la almuada" as they say in Spanish- before commenting on the recent statements by the Legion. A line by line analysis could be done, and has been done on other blogs, but I have some points to make on a the big picture.
Readers of this blog will know how I feel about apologies, that I find them somewhat naive if they area simply apologies for what others have done. An apology is intimate and personal. If sincere, then the very person, each person, says that they are sorry for what that person has done. The comments on the posts below show that many readers are waiting to hear words of sorry from those who particularly harmed them.
We are ignoring the facts, folks. The fatal flaw in all of this is that the Legion wants to hold on to the hopeless idea that God used a flaw instrument like Maciel. There is no comparison in the history of salvation for the evil of Maciel, the trickery and the deceit of this man knew no bounds. Why the carve out for the Legion? If he lied all along and "founded" families and situations of continued abuse, what saves the Legion from being one of those? You can't just assume that the Legion is good. That needs to be proven. And all the good works? Well, we have a whole blog here and many others, and much testimony, which show that there are an inordinate number of bad works, too. Just take a look at the knowledge that high Legionary officials - superiors, from which flow the methodology, the will of God and all that crap- had of Maciel's life and sins, and have still not admitted to, preferring to lie about when and what they knew.
Bottom line: you can't just assume that the foundation is from God. You have to prove that. We have already seen that Church officials blew it big time in their support and praise of Maciel and his life and times.
There is no comparison to Christ and to Mary. That is blasphemy (and coming from me, that is a hefty charge indeed).
Until someone takes this bull by the horns, the suffering will not end.
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8 comments:
And it remains to be seen if anybody has the stones to take this bull by the horns. I'm not exactly confident in our church hierarchy, given their behavior in recent decades.
Good post, and I hold that the intrinsic meaning of the events outweigh whatever goods may have occurred. Theologically and historically it is very hard for one to use the fruits alone argument (here I am speaking to all who read this who feel all that pull to the good works going on in the LC/RC, who cannot see the forest through the trees because of it). As one post on Catholiclight.com made clear- proving a charism of an institute is like (analogy here) proving the supernaturality of an apparition. You cannot judge it by the fruits alone, but more by the events and apparition content on which those fruits seemingly were based. Additionally there is just too much written now in the Conciliar and Magisterial world about the witness of the founder and his imprint on the institute to suddenly blow it off as irrelevant to validity of charism. We have not even gotten to the need for a religious institute to be a public witness of holiness without stain before the whole Church which this order has failed in miserably.
At the end of the day- it is not movements or orders or apparitions that make us more holy, it is grace that does that. Only the sacraments give us the objective guarantee that they in fact cause it to come into being in our life if we are open. All other venues however are not always what they seem. Were they the instrument for or merely the material occasion on which I used more effectively theological faith, hope and love, practiced more frequently the sacraments, and delved into scripture- any one of which would have produced miracles in my world and the same would go for groups moving through the same steps.
To repeat: To certify a collective charism you have to go much further- you must look at the events which claim to be the source of it, and you must look at all the fruits good and bad. Thanks to this blog we have both eyes wide open enough to see how bad, bad can get. We have seen the "father of lies" running rampant here leaving no hisotrical source untouched. At least for me personally, even if too strong for many, my conclusion is this: I am at peace to say yes there is good around, but there is no way the Lord would ever found an abiding charism in this man: its dissolution or bust!
I have a problem with this part of the COMUNIQUE:
"For his own mysterious reasons, God chose Fr Maciel as an instrument to found the Legion of Christ and Regnum Christi."
1) Was he 'chosen' by God to 'found' the LC & RC? Was it truly a divine initiative? Everyone assumes so.
2) Did God "inspire" him with a spiritual charism? An apostolic charism? What are they? Are they intimately linked to the person of Fr. Maciel? Do they transcend him?
3) What part of Fr. Maciel's life, works and words are 'inspired'? What parts aren't? Who can decipher this?
4) The denounced 'reprehensible acts' are not isolated incidents in the life of a common sinner but extreme and prolonged moral deviations of the person. Is anything about his person, life, works and words credible? (Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.)
5) Were the present Constitutions really approved by the Church? Were the RC Statutes really approved by the Church? The Psalter of my Days is a fake..... What else is?
Anon at 2:48
Agreed. This statement made me want to throw-up. Some of these men have doctorates, licentiate degrees, and they cannot draw the slightest theological inference that there just might be some problems with that declaration. An instrument must be adequate to the message/charism, and as an above comment mentions, how can you ever try to reconcile a conciliar and doctrinal tradition on the importance of the witness of life of the founder with all of this man's perversions, mental disorders and deceit of every sort.
Think of the precedent now if this is ignored by the Holy See: Well you too can be a founder-pervert, as long as your order grows under whatever pretext, holiness is no longer a requirement for the job. Saint Ignatius and the Howard Stern are pretty much on equal footing, and why dismiss new groups whose founders live double lives when this one worked- afterall the Church needs the charisms...
By faith we know the legion is inspired in some capacity by God because of the confirmation, even though unaware, it has received from John Paul by the raising of it to Pontifical status. It is not an accident or mistake that the institution exists. The authority of the church will discipher the difficulties. The one thing I've noticed in all the comments I've left on this blog is that there is a lack of faith in God and the Church. Believe it or not there are somethings that you can't solve, leave it to the Church instead of claiming you know everything.
LOL, we see how well it turned out when we left this issue to the Church in the 50's, and a molester escaped justice and went on to abuse countless more souls for over five more decades.
Our faith does NOT teach that pontifical status falls under infallibility.
Thank goodness for the folks who haven't acted as you suggest, waiting and seeing, allowing the grossest of abuses to continue unhindered with the obtuse notion that "The Church will take care of it all, not for us to judge"
Note bene: We ARE the Church. And I have complete faith that justice prevails in the end. But God works through US, and we have to do our parts to help effect that justice.
Laissez-faire is NOT a Christian attitude.
Funny that you mention lack of faith in God, because the LC/RC who can't let go of this outfit because "lost vocation, certain damnation" seem to have little faith in God. But they have absolute faith in Legion.
The days of checking our brains at the door and just listening to the words of a Pope (as I did, when I convinced myself that Maciel and his order couldn't possibly be that bad, or there is no way a Pope would call him an efficacious guide to youth if he was really a sodomizer and a fraud) are long past for those of us who were once lulled into a state of numbness about Maciel's horrors by the Vatican's 60 years of high praise and support of the man.
I believe we are acting out the "sense of the faithful." We are not supposed to ignore the voice of our conscience. The Holy Spirit moves through the faithful. To igonore this and "wait" for the Church to tell me what to do is to ignore my obligation to use this God-given sense. There would have been no AV, communique, etc... if we, the victims, had ignored the voice of our consciene...
DEFINITION: SENSUS FIDELIUM
Literally the "sense of the faithful." Just as the Spirit infallibly guides the magisterium so that it doesn't propose teachings that would lead the whole Church into error, so there is a flip side to the infallibility coin: The faithful, as a whole, have an instinct or "sense" about when a teaching is—or is not—in harmony with the true faith.
Two quotes from the Vatican web site from in "STATEMENT FROM THE CO-CHAIRMEN OF THE ANGLICAN-ROMAN CATHOLIC INTERNATIONAL COMMISSION"
a recognition that because of their baptism and their participation in the sensus fidelium the laity play an integral part in decision making in the Church (cf. Authority in the Church: Elucidation, 4);
And more of the story
29. In every Christian who is seeking to be faithful to Christ and is fully incorporated into the life of the Church, there is a sensus fidei. This sensus fidei may be described as an active capacity for spiritual discernment, an intuition that is formed by worshipping and living in communion as a faithful member of the Church. When this capacity is exercised in concert by the body of the faithful we may speak of the exercise of the sensus fidelium (cf. Authority in the Church: Elucidation, 3-4). The exercise of the sensus fidei by each member of the Church contributes to the formation of the sensus fidelium through which the Church as a whole remains faithful to Christ. By the sensus fidelium, the whole body contributes to, receives from and treasures the ministry of those within the community who exercise episcope, watching over the living memory of the Church (cf. Authority in the Church I, 5-6). In diverse ways the “Amen” of the individual believer is thus incorporated within the “Amen” of the whole Church.
I believe that it is this "sense" that plays a role in the changes in the Church disciplines that occur from time to time.
Anon at 5:45 "By faith we know the legion is inspired in some capacity by God because of the confirmation.."
There were plenty of particular goods from the patrimony of the Catholic Church that were present but not originating with the order that could have simulated a work that was inspired, but it is the events in all their truth that will require the whole idea of this ever having been inspired to be revisited.
It was Paul VI who raised it to Pontifical Status with the Decretum Laudis in 1965.
Pontifical Right canonically means the competency for its jurisdiction as a religious congregation falls directly and only to the Holy See, rather than a diocese. It is given when enough testimonies are collected regarding the benefits of the order by varying bishops and lay Catholics over time (note even here there is a dependence on the witness of the faithful) and basic guidelines are met by the Congregation for Religious.
The decision is not an act of its teaching office where infallibility can arise, but of its disciplinary-juridical one which carries no absolutes.
The virtue of faith with no defense of the content of what is to be believed serves the Church and the faithful very little. Authority and Truth are one in the true and living God and we should reflect that in our own witness. If there is a charism and divine will for the Institute in itself, one must work to demonstrate it within the full tradition of the Church.
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