I'm confused.
I thought Maciel was gay?
I don't get it. It turns out he was a drug abusing sex addict?
He used the Church to grab any thrill or high he could latch onto?
The Legion confirms something is askew, without specifics and is trying to encourage letting bygones be bygones:
“We’ve learned some things about our founder’s life that are surprising and difficult to understand,” Fair told CNA on Tuesday.
“We can confirm that there are aspects of his life that weren’t appropriate for a Catholic priest....
“Obviously he had human feelings but it remains true that through him we received our charism, which has been approved by the Church.
“Our commitment remains and we‘re going to go forward and love Christ and serve the Church,” he remarked.
Asked to verify the specific allegations, Fair replied:
“Fr. Maciel died over a year ago and obviously whatever has happened is between him and God and God’s judgment and mercy, so we’re going to let him take care of that.”
Not sure this is a winning strategy.
There are many innocent & good priests and lay people in the Legion who have to go on doing the work of the Church. Yet, there is something profoundly disturbing about the ongoing culture of silence and secrecy.
Steve Skojec who was involved in the Legion at the time dozens of seminarians accused Maciel of inappropriate sexual activities, reacts here.
This man who the Legion describes as having “the spirit of obedience to the Church that has always characterized him” had “had a mistress, fathered at least one child, and lived a double life”, after he had already been accused by “more than 20 but less than 100″ of his own priests and seminarians of sexual abuse, and had been described in terms depicting a disordered addict by his own trusted LC priests as early as the 1950s. I vaguely recall being told when I was with the Legion that Fr. Maciel made it clear that he had “…never said no to Christ.” Wish I could find that quote. Whether or not it was what he wrote, they certainly acted like it was true.
The link in Steve posts describing observations of Maciel's habits includes spiritual neglect, trading his Breviary for Reader's Digest, avoiding the Blessed Sacrament, lack of discipline, disclosures of confidential information - including information obtained in the Confessional, habitual lying and exaggerations, splurging on exclusive hotels and restaurants, drug abuse, sexual addiction & abuse.
The documented conduct of Maciel, these most recent revelations of mistresses and children don't leave a lot of room to believe the Vatican was unaware or had doubts about the validity of the allegations.
The Legion is between a rock and a hard place, the innocent of any wrongoing are faithfully serving the Church -- leading people from temptation and into salvation. Many observers passed the information along.
When you start getting information from many sources telling you one of your children is smoking crack, at some point, you are going to go into his room and start looking for a crack pipe. For the Vatican to not follow through on the myriad of complaints - -when the conduct was so egregious, well, it is subpar.
Steve continues:
I am angry because I allowed myself to be sucked into this group, like so many of the good people I met there. They turned my love of God into an asset for their own purposes, and when they were done with me they stabbed me in the back. The damage this did to my faith persists even today. I made an act of the will to completely trust God through this charism, and I was betrayed. I was made to believe that the rest of the Church wasn’t good enough, and when I left, I found no solace in a faith devoid of my elite purpose, my sense of mission, my fellowship with those who were chosen.
Through the prayers of many, I retained my belief, and I strengthened my Catholicism with education and an appreciation of tradition. But I have been cynical since those years, harboring a secret anger even I was no longer aware of. I trusted no one. I refused to seek spiritual direction again after it had been used against me. I saw God as antagonistic, temperamental, unreliable - helping sometimes and hurting others as it pleased Him. I avoided committing myself to any subgroup of the Church. I was wary of any but the most common devotions. I became even more risk-averse than I had been by nature, and spent years feeling residual vocational anxiety and hurt.
It’s taken a lot for me to get to where I am now, and I find that the vestiges of these things are all still here. I never got closure, never received an apology, never got a response to my request for answers. And when I tried to warn people of the dangers inherent in this group, they often ignored me, or at least refused to believe me.
There's something Steve said that's haunting, because it's so true:
"They turned my love of God into an asset for their own purposes, and when they were done with me they stabbed me in the back."
Orthodox Catholics are so easy to exploit. While we are focused on our zeal to serve God, our trust is hijacked. The stabbings from the people in all the various orthodox camps are more shocking than the abuse itself.
The culture of coverup and secrecy goes well beyond the Legion or the Vatican - it permeates every aspect of our culture. No matter how many people you contact to warn - abusers and predators are protected, sheltered and allowed to victimize and consume.
****UPDATE
A great discussion about the new Maciel revelations and how they affect the Legion is going on at the Long Dropping of the Other Shoe.
Part Two of the discussion here.
As someone recently and correctly put it, with all the disturbing allegations, with DNA in their hands, the Legion was forced to abandon their meme that Maciel was the next Padre Pio. Beyond that, they want to leave us with a "cliffhanger"about the scores of allegations.
Is that acceptable?
To me, this begs the question: Institutionally, how bad does conduct have to be before somebody on the inside with authority will stand up and say "this is wrong"?
Are all the allegations true? What did the cover up entail? Who saw what and who told whom to keep mum about it?
Answering these questions can vindicate the institution from the scourge of being labeled a cult.
Otherwise, I fear the good work and mission of many solid and faithful priests in the Legion will be kept under the bushel. They have a credibility problem on their hands.
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