Call for Action Against Facilitators

From a comment on xlcrc.com by Anthony concerning a post by Fr. Karras on his blog:

Consider this second excerpt:

"I will take this a step further – and believe me, it has been a long, dark and painful journey to this point – and say: who among us, Legionaries of 20, 30, 40 years or more – being of sound mind and discerning conscience – would have endured even one minute of the teaching, preaching, discipline, spirituality, methodology, spiritual direction, ‘questions’, conferences or writings of Fr. Maciel had we known that at the very time he was hypnotizing us with his lies he was sexually abusing seminarians, fathering children, running around on the congregation’s dime, duping popes, cardinals, bishops and benefactors…

It was our ignorance that held the Legion together. The LC is founded, not on the supposed sanctity and inspiration and charism of its Founder, but on the gullible and impressionable idealism of his hapless followers."

I can tell Fr. Karras who would have endured Maciel's chicanery: precisely the people who have facilitated his wickedness, used him to obtain positions of power in the congregation, persecuted those who sought justice for the abused and attempted to maintain their authority in spite of all their wrongdoing. It was not simply the ignorance of gullible Legionaries that held the Legion together but the deception and duplicity of those who are currently in control of the Legion. These people need to be stripped of power and held accountable for their crimes. These people are not of advanced age or frail health. Canonical action should be taken against them.

Fr. Karras on the Legion of Christ and the Investigation

If anything, the orchestrated ignorance of the LCs, 3GF and RC members regarding the apostolic visitation of the congregation provides an eerie backlighting for the event itself. The members of the movement, clergy and laity, have been scarcely informed and left unprepared. A strategy of ingenuous smiles and simulated serenity is firmly in place. As if the Vatican appointed visitators will be so overwhelmed by the choreography that they’ll overlook the dark recesses of the plot and the hidden horrors of the screenplay.

The LC would almost certainly prefer to be left alone to work out its own solutions. The visitation is an embarassment and an undesired intromission into its private laboratory where truth and lies can be arbitrarily fabricated or erased through the alchemy of spin and secrecy.

But the LC is wretchedly incapable of curing itself.

Case in point: how can the LC continue at this present moment to ordain deacons and priests? How can it promote to religious profession the young novices that obliviously inch toward their vows? How can the Legion now so aggressively recruit new candidates to fill its vaunted houses of formation?

Read it all here.

Whither the Spirituality Books of the Legion

...some of Maciel's writings still available to buy from the LCs... click here

According the Fr. Karras:

But while Fr. Maciel masqueraded as the saintly founder, the admirable priest, apostle and ‘suffering servant of Yahweh’ that all the LCs sought to emulate in their own vocation, his writings were veritable treasures that we meditated and quoted, memorized and preached.

Once we found out who he truly was, those same writings have turned into the cruelest of jokes, a most unholy parody of true spirituality and religious tradition, a sacrilegious satire that should make us all ashamed of having once proudly called ourselves ‘co-founders’.

The bathwater dissolved whatever baby there was long, long ago.
So throw it out with no regrets.

Extreme Makeover: Legion Edition

Once again, The Exorcist does a much better job than most in getting to the point. Exlcblogger can't help but copy the entire post here.

There is just so much more to this than merely business as usual for the Legion of Christ and the Regnum Christi, and those who use this platitude are not only fooling themselves, they also perpetrating an injustice with those young people whose parents are stupid enough to let them join this mess this summer.

Take over, Fr. Karras:

There was a time when it was severely frowned upon to refer to writers other than the Founder in our preaching, spiritual exercises and private reading. We were instructed to quote him often, to dedicate certain meditations to his person, virtue and vocation. We were to read his letters during adoration and as part of the liturgy of the hours. We were to engage in studies of our own spirituality much like Jesuits have studied Ignatius and Salesians have studied Don Bosco.

Now? Not so much.

For those of us who have lived through it, it is nothing less than mind-boggling.

Recalling the years and years of our lives as LCs during which EVERYTHING was centered on the person of Fr. Maciel now feels like trying to remember the hallucinations of a distant psychotic episode.

Every word, every gesture, every commentary, every scrap of paper scribbled on by ‘the Boss’ was a treasure, an unforgettable connection between the inspired, saintly Founder and his intrepid, although still imperfect, co-founders.

For a long time the most piercing motivation the superiors could give us to live with greater fidelity the infinite rules and regulations of the order was: “Think of how Nuestro Padre suffers with even the slightest infidelity of his co-founders!”

He was our ideal... the true “legionario tipo” that we all so ardently aspired to imitate.

I cringe to think of it now.

Those same green books that I so dutifully worked my way through, volume after volume, taking time to memorize favorite passages and copy special phrases into my own spiritual journal... now make me physically nauseous when I try to read their pages.

A letter from the early 80’s encouraging a LC priest to be ‘authentic’, to open himself entirely to the Legion through his superiors, to never wear ‘masks’ and always be transparent...

This from the master mask maker himself!

Line after line on the subject of chastity, on maintaining priestly dignity and decency when dealing with women, on offering the sacrifice of ourselves with a pure heart to Christ...

When did he think this stuff up? While he was lying in bed, enjoying a post-coital cigarette next to some young concubine, dreaming of the army of holy priests he would someday offer the Church?

Or how about those fabulous letters warning us of the dangers of ‘particular friendships’, those devilish ‘maría–remedios' waiting to seduce us at every turn, importuning us to have confidence only in our superiors (i.e. report everything you see, no matter how innocuous, to Big Brother)...

Yet behind it all he camouflaged his own turbid proclivities and allowed his unrestrained deviance to ruin so many young lives!

How sick does it get, man?

All those heavy one-liners of Nuestro Padre that were constantly repeated as a litany of motivation to eager and gullible ‘co-founders’ now sound hopelessly vapid and cynical:

“fiel hasta morir en la raya” Yeah, right. Just like NP.

“de una sola pieza, al pié del cañón” Spare me the irony.

“amor et dolor vita mea” You put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig.

“el Legionario se es o se despide” Finally, some candid advice...

“nunca he dicho ‘no’ a mi Señor Jesucristo” If that’s the case, who has?

“soy por la Legión que Dios me quiere” Syntax is no longer the main problem with this one...

“mi vida por Cristo” Whatever.


All of this is not just the venting of a guy who, like many others, was deceived and betrayed about the core truth of his vocation.

It is vitally important as a point to be considered by the visitation.


The spirituality of the LC, such as it is, is embedded in the writings of the Founder. His thoughts and his words are conserved in endless books, pamphlets, recordings and videos. In the LC we have often prided ourselves on how completely EVERY aspect of our lives has been defined and detailed by the Founder.

The double life of Fr. Maciel as inspired spiritual guide/fraud and sexual predator has totally negated his credibility. Nothing he has said or written to the LCs or the RC members can be believed or taken seriously. Who he was taints all he wrote. There is no separating the teachings from the life of the teacher when it comes to the all-consuming, conscience-binding religious vocation.

The writings – all of them, from the Constitutions to the Salterio – are as fraudulent as the life that produced them.

From now on, there will be an 800 pound gorilla in the room every time his letters are read during meals in spiritual exercises, every time the Constitutions are read and commented on in community, every time the wishes and words of the Founder are half-heartedly tossed around as motivations.

In essence, the visitation has to expunge every last vestige of the Founder from the Legion’s spirituality.

But would a ‘Legion’ devoid of Fr. Maciel’s thought and teaching still be the Legion of Christ?

Therein lies the challenge: to remake a religious congregation into something totally removed from its Founder, while at the same time salvaging the vocations, apostolates, houses of formation and charitable works associated with it.

Peace.

The Exorcist Has Been Prolific

Fr. Karras has returned to blogging. I will direct you to him here, and offer only some excerpts. But both of his commentaries, gift of tongues and liar, liar, are good reads.

The pending canonical visitation may be a Pentecost of sorts for the LC. A promising wind is blowing and I can only pray that it will shake the whole house to the foundations. Hopefully the cowering disciples will shake off their fear and indifference and give into the mighty impulse of truth and transparency.

The PTB will smile bravely and offer the usual platitudes about what a blessing the Vatican intervention is and how willingly the institution will collaborate...But it is up to the rank and file to seize this opportunity, this open forum that the Spirit has initiated, and speak from the heart. The legitimacy of the continued existence of our religious family is on the line. The future of our congregation and its works of apostolate, the credibility of our vocation as LCs depend on what we do now.

Do not wait to be called. Demand to be heard.

___________________

Recently the Superior General wrote us a long, sentimental letter about his trip to the Holy Land as part of the entourage of Pope Benedict on his historic visit. Instead of waxing poetic on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, perhaps a straight forward, no-spin letter about something that actually matters to the members of the congregation might be in order.

I suggest a letter about the tremendous historical event we are about to experience: the visitation.

What is a visitation? Why is the LC being submitted to this extraordinary canonical process now? What precise finality does the visitation seek? How can we prepare for it? How can we all participate in it? Who can we write to? Who can we speak to?

_________________

Certainly the shredders on Via Aurelia have been churning fast and furious since the ball of twine began to unravel, making new revelations more unlikely.

_________________

The visitation is about us, the LC and its inner workings... everything from silly norms of urbanity to finances, from the competence of its superiors to the freedom of conscience of its members...If this is the moment of truth, it is also the moment of grace.

_________________

A Legionary priest, working in a women’s center of RC in South America, recently responded to the anguished questions of the Movement’s members about the fraudulent life of Fr. Maciel by saying, in short, that “as a man he had his shortcomings, we should not be judgmental and we should look to the good that has come from the Legion in its works”.

His ‘shortcomings’?

That’s like saying that Caligula had his ‘quirks’... or that Amy Winehouse has her occasional ‘bad hair day’.

If we are to believe that Fr. Maciel was somehow a ‘flawed saint’ or simply ‘an imperfect instrument of God’, how do we defend the fact that he perpetuated the lie of his double life and drew so many ingenuous, enthusiastic followers into a spider’s web of wanton deception that lasted till his death?

___________________

He chose to lie and he slaved tirelessly to inflate an image of sanctity, of inspiration, of leadership and of relevance for the Church throughout his entire despicable career. He diligently hid his secret life from the acting LC superiors over the years so that the realistic appearance of the illusion he was spinning would be flawless.

It is the lie that kills me.

I know he was a sexual predator. I know he was morally corrupt. I know he duped, popes, bishops, authorities both civil and ecclesiastic.

But the lie that he seduced me with and with which he held me compliantly captive for thirty years smolders in my gut, invades my dreams and sullies my experience as a priest.

His was a masterful and heartless betrayal of that which was noblest in us.
We are all damned fools and the sorry, hapless remnant of a vicious fairy tale.
He has made cynics of us all.

Fr. Changobeer Karras is not a Legionary of Christ, at least not anymore

He says on his blog:
"I told my niece that I would visit her once a month. In that regard, at least, I have proven to be a very serious piece of uncle."

This kind of family visit is simply against the norms of the Legion of Christ.
We all know that.
And it would be a weird special permission,
unless the girl is loaded.

What an excellent day for an exorcism, indeed.