True Docility

"There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to uproot the plant." (Ecclesiastes 3:1-2)

The false understanding of docility that Maciel promoted through the Legion was a sham that deadened consciences.  The path to the true faith that Maciel buried starts with the rediscovery of the real meaning of conscience and docility and the real nature of the Church.

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What Maciel cultivated through the Legion:

Fanatical Denial:

The first Apostolic visitor concluded in 1957 that the Legion "offers hope insofar as it can be freed from fanaticism. Which seems doubtful". This fanaticism was amply demonstrated in 2006 when the Vatican exiled Maciel to a life of penance. The Legion characterized Maciel as an innocent man ""following the example of Jesus Christ" and the decision as “a new cross...that will obtain many graces for the Legion of Christ and the Regnum Christi Movement”.

The 2010 communique observes the Legion was formed by a man "devoid of scruple and of genuine religious sentiment" and identifies the crippling of the Legion with the "relationships created by Fr. Maciel... to gain the trust, confidence and silence of those around him" 

For more on the history of denial read this fanaticism summary.

Impaired Conscience:

As Fr. Berg observed the Legion "occasions unholy and unhealthy restrictions on personal conscience...a simplistic, and humanly and theologically impoverished notion of God's will ... that breeds personal immaturity".

The 2010 communique observes "the behaviour of Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado has had serious consequences for the life and structure of the Legion" and highlights the urgent need to "review the exercise of authority, which must be linked to truth, in order to respect conscience".

For more on the toxic consequences of Macielism read this toxic legacy summary.

Using People:

John Paul 2 wrote: "Nobody can use a person as a means towards an end, no human being, nor yet God the Creator... Anyone who treats a person as the means to an end does violence to the very essence of the other"

The 2010 communique zeroes in on the central error in Legion thought by contrasting the reality of the Legion to the  "'militia Christi' which characterises the apostolic and missionary activity of the Church  which is not the same as efficiency at any cost."

For more on the pervasive utilitarianism read this utilitarianism summary.

[updated 10/15/2015 and bumped to top of blog. All links on this blog to external web sites are active of that date. Duc in Altum.]

Goodbye, Agent Smith

"You willingly carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in truth, because there is no truth in him. "
(John 8:21)

If you only take away one thing from this blog, whether you are staying, leaving, just out, or long gone...return every corner of your only property - your heart - to its original owner. Challenge every groove and rut and obstacle that keeps you on Fr. Maciel's spiritual hamster wheel.

If you missed it last year this excellent essay by Mark Shea on real fruits deserves to be read in full:

"Once again, Father Maciel is instructive here: a man of massive organizational charisms who used those gifts to create an organization whose purpose, in the final analysis, was to supply him with means to pursue his proclivities and guard him from being discovered. 

He designed the robot so well that it went lumbering on defending him even after he was dead — because organizational systems, like computers, don’t do what we want them to do. They do what they are designed to do. 

Father Maciel perverted his charism to fool people into trusting him and then organized those people into a phalanx of defenders. He understood the Number One Rule of the Con Man is that a con man does not fool people. He gets people to fool themselves."

Duc in Altum

"Put out into the Deep" (Luke 5:4)



Sometimes when you run aground you need to question your perspective and start seeing things as they truly are. The foolish cling to the past. The wise find new horizons. Seeing what needs to change is largely a matter of  perspective and focus.

John Paul 2 reminds us that "Nobody can use a person as a means towards an end, no human being, nor yet God the Creator" and that even "Christ's command to love is based on the personalistic norm".

Benedict 16 reminds those formed by the Legion that Maciel twisted their understanding of the Church's mission into "efficiency at all costs".

The more you have been integrated into Maciel's system of efficiency at any cost, the further you are from the true understanding of militia Christi that the Legion's charism must be refounded on.

The time has arrived to put out into the deep and leave behind the shallowness of Maciel's system.

Anyone looking to turn away from coercive activism would do well to turn to Dietrich Von Hildebrand  "one of the great ethicists of the twentieth century" (JP2) and "most prominent among the figures of our time" (B16). Especially to his great spiritual work Transformation in Christ written at the peak of his struggle against efficiency at the cost of human freedom:

"They apply the categories of mechanism to the province of organic life and even to the realm of spiritual personality and culture..."

"Facility is their watchword; and their complacent pride impels them to treat all things in a cavalier fashion..."

"They imagine themselves able to solve every problem and to arrange everything according to some simple prescription..."

"They denature the object of their attentions and with a kind of glib dexterity doctor it, as it were, until the problem appears to be solved or, rather, enchanted away...

"They do not treat things adequately but merely tamper with them, though often with a show of success..."

False Pieties

"Empty and false are the hopes of the senseless, and fools are borne aloft by dreams. Like a man who catches at shadows or chases the wind, is the one who believes in dreams...Can the unclean produce the clean? can the liar ever speak the truth?" (Sirach 34:1-4)

A shameless liar "devoid of scruple and of genuine religious sentiment" robbed so many of a true understanding of vocation and discernment and substituted false thought stopping pieties.

False Piety #1: God brings good out of evil

Deirdre Mundy:

"God took the loaves and fishes and multiplied them into a feast. He turned water into wine. He did not take rotting food and transform it into a feast or mud and turn it into wine... God does not turn evil to good ... He's bringing good out of conscious decisions to be brave, or honest, or self-sacrificing".

False Piety #2: God draws straight with crooked lines

Deirdre Mundy:

"Sin is not a crooked line. It can't be made straight. It's not a detour, it's a roadblock. The only way to get a 'straight line' after sin is to repent and start over. God could not bring good out of Maciel's evil, because Maciel did not repent. He started sinning at the founding, and he kept piling sacrilege upon sacrilege up until the moment of his death".

False Piety #3: It's been so good for our young people

Deirdre Mundy:

"He promised them a chance to do big things, when other adults just wanted their help with donut day... He gave them rallies. He gave them VOCATIONS. He made them feel special and needed...But he gave them nothing in exchange. He took their time, their money, their enthusiasm, and used them feed his own sinful desires. He was like a great gaping mouth, swallowing the good and repaying it with evil. He took their enthusiasm and turned it to his own ends with faulty theology and thought stopping phrases".

False Piety #4: The evil done by one man does not detract from all the good being done by so many.

JP2, To The Youth of the World:

"the evil implanted by [the evil one] from the beginning may receive its development from man himself, from systems and from relationships... so as also to become ever more a 'structural' sin, ever less identifiable as 'personal' sin. In other words, so that man may feel in a certain sense 'freed' from sin, but at the same time be ever more deeply immersed in it."

False Piety #5: I would leave if God gave me leave to do so, but He has not.

No. It was the deceiver who schemed for you to feel this way.

Envoy II Letter 80, p. 186:

"Consider that much of your perseverance rests on your identification with your vocation to Regnum Christi. If Regnum Christi becomes an intimate part of what you are, if it is no longer something stuck on but becomes your very flesh and bone, you will never be able to turn your back on it without a thought, because you would feel a terrible wrenching, as if part of your body was torn away

Prayer and Air

"Why could we not drive it out? He said to them, 'This kind can only come out through prayer.'" (Mark 9:28-29)

In the life after RC combox Deirdre Mundy applies G.K. Chesterton's thoughts on morbid logic to waking folks up from Maciel's spell.

G.K. Chesterton:

"There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable MARK of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way...".

"He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea: he is sharpened to one painful point. He is without healthy hesitation and healthy complexity..."

"Theology rebukes certain thoughts by calling them blasphemous. Science rebukes certain thoughts by calling them morbid..."

"If you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument..."

Deirdre Mundy:

"if someone is really integrated in Maciel's spirituality, you CANNOT reason with them... Their #1 axiom is that God created LC/RC, and that the health and safety of the Church is tied to LC/RC. #2 is that all attacks on LC/RC come from the devil..."

"Until someone starts questioning the axioms, until he starts to wonder how Maciel COULD build something good and if the Church REALLY needs LC/RC, logic can't work. Remember, insanity is a closed system-- crazy people are often PERFECTLY logical --it's just that their assumptions are wrong..."

"That's why the praying is necessary-- once there's a little crack so that God's love and their guardian angels' warnings can get through, THEN logic starts to work..."

"I think we'll make more progress with acts of love than acts of logic at this point. Help out when people need dinners. Be a good neighbor. Let the people stuck in RC know that we love them for who they ARE, not for what groups they belong to. That way, when they do start feeling the urge to leave, they'll know that they'll still have people who care about them..."

Harvesting Rot

"The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away." (Matthew 13:24-25)

life after RC:

while we cannot ditch the world (God will in His own sweet time) we can jettison those things which are so entwined with depravity that they detract from the human condition, rather than enhance it. That's what a healthy society does.

Yes, the enemy will always sow weeds into hearts, families, and societies. Good will always have to struggle against evil. And always with great love for persons and their free response.

But when the enemy sows weeds among the wheat and STAYS to manage the fields and groom the wheat to enable the weeds, good cannot imagine that the harvest of that particular field is far off.

The truth is out about Maciel, his teachings, his methods, his rules, and norms. And the wheat, that grew up enabling weeds, is now calling on the Servant of the Servants of God to replace the managers and the rotten foundation that they built on.

Sacrificing the Intellect

"False messiahs and false prophets will arise, and they will perform signs and wonders so great as to deceive, if that were possible, even the elect". (Matthew 24:24)
A blogger has perfectly captured the end result when everything is seen as a positive ‘case study’ where Christ is found in every feature of the Legion:

Shalimar (full article):

What I discovered was a mixture of reactions, which is to be expected of any group of people, considering different personalities and pain thresholds. But I did encounter one reaction more common than my own… that ‘tranquil peace’, the ‘joy’, the gratefulness that Fr. Maciel was also a sinner like the rest of us… the ‘let’s move on’ attitude, especially from our suffering priest leaders...

It was the belief in an ideal that sacrificed the intellect; that asked us to continue down a road when we had been lied to by the founder of our group and his cohorts… grave lies and deception, and that we were supposed to believe that our remaining associated with the founder and his movement would bear good fruit, and we were supposed to gloss over it, move on, and simply focus on Christ...

I have heard some compare Fr. Maciel to King David who committed grave sins, or St. Peter who denied Christ. But I don’t think those comparisons are accurate. Both of these Saints repented publicly, in Scripture, for all to see, and amended their life. I compare Fr. Maciel to Judas...

There is no way to make Judas look good, or gloss over his sin. We should never start a group imitating Judas or claiming him as our leader, or associating with anything even related to him... God did not inspire Judas’ sin, anymore than I believe God inspired Fr. Maciel to found an order. But God has, and will, bring good out of this man’s grave sins...

The elephant has been exposed, and elephants are elephants, no matter how attractive we want to make them. To deny the elephant is to sacrifice our God-given intellect, and that is a sign that we may have fallen under the influence of someone or something with power over our mind, however minor, and that is a dangerous place to go, because Jesus doesn’t ask us give up our intellect.

(Click photo to visit the elephant @ Exlcblog)

Kingdoms

"Then the devil took him up to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their magnificence... At this, Jesus said to him, "Get away, Satan! It is written: 'The Lord, your God, shall you worship and him alone shall you serve.'" (Matthew 4:8-10)

It took years for the Legion to admit that the CDF was morally certain about Maciel. In the meantime they pretended the Pope had subjected Maciel to a dry martyrdom that would rain new graces on the Legion and the Church.

How did they get so many people to suspend critical thinking for those years? The way Maciel taught them to. Keep them busy in pursuit of a grand cause and wrapped up in their own subjective experiences.

John Zmirak:

What is more, from all I have witnessed, [Maciel] used in his lay movements a modern technique mostly employed in political groups. I learned of it from a book by Douglas Hyde, Dedication and Leadership, in which the author (a former Communist converted to the Church) sorts out the methods of Leninists, searching for those that are morally neutral and highly effective, which could serve the Church. (I read this book at a right-wing activist camp, so I know that others are using it, too.) The key to making people commit themselves to a movement, the Communists learned and Hyde revealed, was to keep them busy. To make them work harder and longer than they'd ever thought possible -- even at tasks that don't really need to be done. A person's devotion to a cause, Hyde coolly explained, is proportionate not to what he gets from it but what he puts into it. So don't make things too easy. Make people feel useful, and keep them digging up holes so others can fill them up. (It's telling, perhaps, that Hyde rejoined the Commies and died outside the Church.)

Leave your camel at the door

"'There is still one thing left for you: sell all that you have and distribute it to the poor, and you will have a treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.' But when he heard this he became quite sad, for he was very rich." (Luke 18:22-23)

Jason Berry via Damian Thompson:

"In 1997 [Ratzinger] gave a lecture on theology to Legionaries. When a Legionary handed him an envelope, saying it was for his charitable use, Ratzinger refused. 'He was tough as nails in a very cordial way,' a witness said"...

"In 2004, John Paul – ignoring the canon law charges against Maciel – honored him in a Vatican ceremony in which he entrusted the Legion with the administration of Jerusalem’s Notre Dame Center, an education and conference facility. The following week, Ratzinger took it on himself to authorize an investigation of Maciel"...

"The Italian newsweekly L’espresso estimates the Legion’s assets at 25 billion euros, with a $650 million annual budget, according to The Wall Street Journal"...

That's a $1 million budget for every 3 priests or seminarians. 3M, American Express, and Coca-Cola bring in roughly that revenue per employee.

If the Legion is serious about escaping from Maciel and all his works, the first thing to go must be the fund-raising network.

Shut down Maciel's perpetual motion machine of buying eyes and scooping up cash and children. And check that camel at the door and walk through the gate without Maciel's burdens.

Pontifex Pilate?

"Haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that plots wicked schemes, feet that run swiftly to evil, the false witness who utters lies, and he who sows discord among brothers". (Proverbs 6:16-19)

So how did the Legion miss the CDF's moral certitude? Sometimes the reason you don't hear is because you are way too busy lying:

Church is Sanhedrin, Pope is Pilate, Maciel is Jesus.
Rorate Caeli, May 20, 2006 (full article):

...While the Holy See's communiqué was clear in the distinction between the founder and the movements he founded ("Independently of the person of the Founder, the worthy apostolate of the Legionaries of Christ and of the Association 'Regnum Christi' is gratefully recognized"), the Legion of Christ institutionalized the personal misgivings of Maciel Degollado and rushed to issue its own response to the communiqué, a response which can only be described as galling and offensive.

Read carefully this passage: "Facing the accusations made against him, he [Father Marcial Maciel] declared his innocence and, following the example of Jesus Christ, decided not to defend himself in any way".

"By comparing Maciel Degollado to Christ under trial, the Official Response makes clear the indirect reference it wishes to make. Maciel is Christ; the competent Church authorities -- the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Holy Father himself -- are the Sanhedrin and Pontius Pilate (and Herod, the only one before whom Christ was actually completely silent)"...

"It is certainly fair to call this invitation a cross: even fair punishments are crosses we are to bear. Yet, here once again, the "Official Response" crosses the boundary of appropriateness: "he [Father Marcial Maciel] has accepted this communiqué with faith, complete serenity and tranquility of conscience, knowing that it is a new cross that God, the Father of Mercy, has allowed him to suffer and that will obtain many graces for the Legion of Christ and the Regnum Christi Movement". The troubling messianic aspects of this paragraph are evident"...

"What a misfortune that such a beautiful spirit had to be squandered by sectarian gall. This official response only deepened the links between the Founder and his movements, which the Holy See had been careful to separate -- and, instead of the spirit of a Saint Joan of Arc, was filled with the spirit of self-righteousness. There may have been pharisees in this succession of events -- but they were not in the Vatican".

Ultimate Toxic Cleanup

If your hand or foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. (Matthew 18:8)

In the this post we looked at the falsifications of Christian life that Maciel deliberately built into his system:

• A false Gospel of Efficiency
• A false Idol to Trust
• A false Love for the Church
• A false Obedience opposed to Truth

Now we turn to the ultimate question. How to clean-up these toxic brews deeply embedded into every facet of the Legion?

The worst possible response would be to assume a charism can be cobbled together by retaining parts of Maciel's mission, vision, teaching, and methodology. Rather than focusing on what can be saved, the Legion must be willing to lose all of the limbs Maciel provided them with.

If any group in the Church in 50 years time traces its history back to this sorry mess, it must be be contemplative not conquering, humble not ambitious, and must serve the laity not enroll them into it's mission.

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Cassandra Jones:

José Barba, another Mexican seminarian and future accuser, remembers Maciel’s tearful farewell speech on October 10:

"'I have been attacked and am subjected to a great test by my enemies… The Legion is said to be a good work, but what is the chance that the Legion, the tree, the branches, and the fruits are good, but I, the trunk, am evil? What sense is there in that?"

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Vaclav Havel:

The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. … I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all - though naturally to differing extents - responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators.… We have to accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves.

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Changobeer:

The LC is wretchedly incapable of curing itself.

Is not full knowledge a requisite for full and free consent? Could anyone validly commit their lives to serve as priest and religious in an institution about which they really know quite little because the truth has been systematically obfuscated and discarded?

The retort that present generations are less affected by the scandalous life and legacy of Fr. Maciel and so should progress unfettered by useless hindrances like ‘truth’ and ‘full disclosure’ is disingenuous at best. Every new candidate to the LC should know up front that he is entering the only existing religious order in the Catholic Church whose Founder was a sexual predator and a pathological liar who lived a double life during the sixty whatever years of the foundation. The parents of every new recruit should be carefully informed that their son or daughter is about to put their life and conscience in the hands of an institution that has had to disown its Founder because of accusations of sexual abuse (“more than 20, less than 100”), toss out all the writings and teachings that sustain his warped spirituality and now awaits with uncertainty a judgment on its future existence. They should also know that the men presently running the organization that will exercise full and unmitigated authority over their son or daughter were hand-picked by Fr. Maciel and swore personal allegiance to him at the last General Chapter.

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.

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Deirdre Mundy:

I know you think that Regnum Christi helped you become the Catholic you are today. But it didn’t, really. You joined RC because you wanted to deepen your faith, because you were looking for a chance to learn and a chance to serve. You already had the desire...

You didn’t need Maciel and his warped methodology, but he needed YOU. He needed you to provide cover, so people would think he was a saint. After all, he attracted so many young Catholics on fire with love of the Lord! He needed you to provide money, to fund his luxurious double life. He needed you to provide labor, so he could build his empire.

Most of all, he needed you to provide your sons. He needed access to victims. He needed young minds that he could mold into copies of himself. He needed those boys. And he needed to convince you to give them over to his care...

You didn’t need him. But he needed your sweet, innocent sons.

Roadblocks and Detours

"Nothing gives me greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth". (3 John 1:4)

Deirdre Mundy reminds us that detours go around roadblocks and return to the straight path:

Rhetoric and Wisdom

According to his followers, Marcial Maciel wrote (or plagiarized) many beautiful things...But while words can lie, deeds don’t. Maciel lied. He stole. He raped and sodomized. He was not a wise man. He was not worthy of emulation. He cannot teach you how to follow Christ.

On Crooked Lines:

Sin is not a crooked line. It can't be made straight. It's not a detour, it's a roadblock. The only way to get a 'straight line' after sin is to repent and start over. God could not bring good out of Maciel's evil, because Maciel did not repent. He started sinning at the founding, and he kept piling sacrilege upon sacrilege up until the moment of his death. We can only pray that he was given the mercy of a deathbed conversion. But his congregation? His rules? His writings? His inspiring talks? They’re a rock slide blocking the road to holiness.

An evil man cannot create a good spirituality. A man seeking only his own will cannot teach others to seek God.

There is no crooked line here, unless, somehow, your own suffering as you leave this tainted soil helps to purify you for what lies ahead

UPDATE: Deirdre reminds us that the Legion also twists the expression "God draws good from evil":

God took the loaves and fishes and multiplied them into a feast. He turned water into wine. He did not take rotting food and transform it into a feast or mud and turn it into wine.

Change Hurts

"Unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain who build." (Psalm 127:1)

Anon out of RC:

"My prayer is that the truth all come out and Maciel be renounced as founder, the true victims be taken care of by our love, prayers and restitution for their needs and we all surrender to the will of God as to what He chooses to do with each of us individually to continue to serve Him and His church in freedom and love. I don't know what that means for the LC/RC organization, but frankly it does not matter to me. It is not about the LC/RC. The first day the news of the scandal came out, I surrendered my opinion of what should happen to the Lord and have only tried to search for truth and to love. God will take care of the rest"

Indeed. You can't change until you are open to the truth and willing to change. Even then only God can "give you a new heart and place a new spirit within you, taking from your bodies your stony hearts" (Ezekial 36:26-27)

And if anyone says that real change won't hurt, they're lying.

C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader:

"But just as I was going to put my feet into the water I looked down and saw that they were all hard and rough and wrinkled and scaly just as they had been before. Oh, that's all right, said I, it only means I had another smaller suit on underneath the first one, and I'll have to get out of it too. So 1 scratched and tore again and this underskin peeled off beautifully and out I stepped and left it lying beside the other one and went down to the well for my bathe".

"Well, exactly the same thing happened again. And I thought to myself, oh dear, how ever many skins have I got to take off? For I was longing to bathe my leg. So I scratched away for the third time and got off a third skin, just like the two others, and stepped out of it. But as soon as I looked at myself in the water I knew it had been no good".

"Then the lion said - but I don't know if it spoke - 'You will have to let me undress you.' I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it".

"The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know - if you've ever picked the scab off a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away."

"Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off - just as I thought I'd done it myself the other three times, only they hadn't hurt - and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me - I didn't like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I'd no skin on - and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I'd turned into a boy again."

Taking Advantage of Youth

"And whosoever shall scandalize one of these little ones" (Mark 9:42)

Deirdre Mundy (full article):

"He promised them a chance to do big things, when other adults just wanted their help with donut day... He gave them rallies. He gave them VOCATIONS. He made them feel special and needed...

But he gave them nothing in exchange. He took their time, their money, their enthusiasm, and used them feed his own sinful desires. He was like a great gaping mouth, swallowing the good and repaying it with evil. He took their enthusiasm and turned it to his own ends with faulty theology and thought stopping phrases.

(Lost Vocation, Sure Damnation! It rhymes, so it MUST be true.)"

Protecting Children

Leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift. (Matthew 5:24)

The Vatican statement is a breath of fresh air:

"the correct starting point is recognition of what happened and concern for the victims and the consequences of the acts committed against them" (full article)

From start to finish it is an invitation for everyone in and out of the Church to use common sense in protecting the interests of children.

Whether in a prudish or in a hyper-sexualized society, the best place for kids is generally at home.

Alternate caregivers must always always act strictly in the interests of children and their families.

Alternate caregivers must not imagine that there is some magic in the air or lofty goal that excuses them from common sense and vigilance.

Alternate caregivers should let the benefits of their care speak for itself and never prey on parent's fears.

It is not a coincidence that the Legion's apostolic schools fail on every point. The Legion was groomed by a predator.

Maciel's Counterfeit

"You impose on people burdens hard to carry, but you yourselves do not lift one finger to touch them". (Luke 11:46)

The more the Legion binds its members the more they imagine that the Church is a command and control center in the image of the Legion.

"Rome hasn't TOLD us, so business as usual". "I'm waiting for Rome". "I'm not leaving, because I am obedient". "Whatever Rome want us to change we'll change it"

Or as one good soul misled by the Legion wrote:

"I would gladly leave RC and the Legion in disgust (because I don't want to be associated with sin and scandal anymore than anyone else) if God gave me leave to do so, but He has not. Just like He never gave me leave to abandon my husband or my children."

What could be more destructive than re-imaging the Church in the image of the Legion?

1) The Legion binds where the Church doesn't.

2) The Legion hides from its members the freedom that is fundamental to the life of the Church.

3) The Legion's obedience is like a blank check to a fictitious entity. Rome does not proscribe like the Legion does, so Maciel knew his imaginary check would never be cashed.

4) Maciel's survivors imagine they are bound to implement what never existed.

5) Those outside the Legion falsely conclude that this all proves that christian obedience is unhealthy.

This false notion of the Church Militant as a command and control center is the great scandal of the Legion.