— Hannah Hurnard, Hinds’ Feet on High Places
So, why did I start writing this book?
Let’s back up a ways.
I reached young adulthood in the mid-1980s. As a freshman at Marquette University in 1983, I had an experience—I called it a “conversion” at the time—that led me to a more lucid and deliberate commitment to my Catholic faith. These were still the years of considerable pastoral and liturgical upheaval following the Second Vatican Council. Now in college, I had emerged from that upheaval not only with my Catholic faith intact, but intensified by a newfound zeal. I had great hopes for the future of the Church and for my life in it. As time went on, it became clear that those hopes were anchored in a particular way in the person of Pope—now a saint—John Paul II, and in the Church’s renewal movements.
Indeed, the experience in the United States and elsewhere, from the late seventies into the eighties, was that the Church was precisely in a time of renewal, a reality seemingly captured in the multiplicity of renewal movements across the globe, from Renew International (born as a program for parish-based Catholic spiritual renewal in Newark, New Jersey, in 1976) to Catholic charismatic renewal and many more. “Renewal” was the spiritual buzzword of the 1980s.
This momentum took on an added dimension of urgency and excitement as a dominant theme began to emerge in the thought of Pope St. John Paul II: that we were actually protagonists in a great, new, noble, and holy endeavor, the “New Evangelization.” The pope used the phrase for the first time in a significant and public manner on March 9, 1983, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in his opening address to the general assembly of the Latin American Episcopal Conference (CELAM).
In that speech, John Paul directed the bishops’ attention to the upcoming fifth centennial of evangelization of the New World to be commemorated in 1992. That coming commemoration would attain to its full meaning, asserted the pontiff, only if the bishops, along with the clergy and lay faithful, were to embrace that anniversary with a renewed commitment, not to a project of re-evangelization, “but to a New Evangelization, new in its ardor, methods and expression.”
By 1986, I was fully committed to that project and convinced that—just as Jesus wanted me to be—I was on the road to becoming a real player in this effort: I had joined a new religious community, the Legionaries of Christ, whose entire ethos was seemingly to bring about in the Church a new day of faith, a new evangelization, with new and more effective methods, to provoke and spearhead a renewal of the Catholic priesthood, to forge new inroads in apostolic efficacy—in a word, the Legionaries were going to play a decisive role in ushering in an era of vitality, youth, energy, action, and “results” in the Church.
I was twenty-one. I had discerned a vocation to the priesthood. I wanted to fully abandon myself to Jesus Christ and his Church. And in my mind, I could not be better positioned to do just that, and to make a lasting contribution to this great project—the New Evangelization—than as a member of the Legionaries.
Those convictions about my religious community, and about my life within that community, began to be challenged eleven years later. In February 1997, nine former Legionaries of Christ went public with allegations of sexual abuse against the Legion’s founder, Marcial Maciel Degollado.
I was studying in Rome at the time, not yet ordained a priest. To most of us within the congregation, this news was a bombshell. Yet we were somewhat shielded from the impact since we were not allowed, under obedience, to read the story itself (which had been published in the Hartford Courant). We were forbidden to seek out information from anyone outside of the congregation and discouraged from speaking about the matter even with our own superiors. And we were certainly not to discuss it among ourselves.
I, along with a few others, had access at the time to the newly emerging internet, but our access was controlled by a gatekeeping mechanism that required users to obtain permission for every site they wanted to visit. Under obedience, our superiors required us to forgo reading such articles and information that might otherwise come into our hands—a limited possibility anyway since our mail was screened and newspapers were edited before being left in the reading rooms. Anything deemed inappropriate (on any matter, not just news of Maciel) was clipped out by the superior.
Like any and all negative things that were ever publicly expressed about the Legion and could get to our ears, this bombshell, too, was quickly diffused and channeled into a void of internal congregational silence.
We knew the drill. If you considered yourself a faithful member of the congregation, you would strive internally to set aside any curiosity on the matter. Besides, throughout our years of formation, we had absorbed the congregation’s narrative according to which, “enemies” of the Legion had time and time again plotted against Maciel, attempting to oppose “God’s plan” for the congregation. Time and time again, those attempts were thwarted by “divine providence.”
And according to that narrative, enemies of the congregation had lowered themselves to make untoward accusations about the founder as early as the 1950s. We heard that he had been accused of an addiction to painkillers, that he had engaged in questionable relationships with a young woman or two in Mexico, but each of these had its explanation: each was an attack, a lie aimed at discrediting Maciel and stopping the progress of the Legion. That narrative—of Maciel, the saintly founder, continually bearing the cross of defamation and inexplicable hatred, his lot in life as founder of this new work of God—was the very backbone of our self-understanding as a congregation.
So, in February 1997, by default, most Legionaries grappled to fit these new accusations into that narrative. I tried as well, and worked hard at it. Yet from that moment on, I struggled with periods of doubt about the congregation. I kept those doubts to myself for years, and my subconscious worked hard to bury them. But my faith in the congregation began to erode ever so slowly until its utter collapse twelve years later.
Meanwhile, the Legion published a statement vigorously denying the allegations and calling into question the motivations and moral integrity of the accusers. For my part, I did in fact seek as much information from the superiors as they were willing to give me about the whole situation, and particularly about the accusers.
My own interactions with Maciel had been limited in comparison with those of other Legionaries, never longer than an hour or two at a time, mostly while I was studying in Rome and later as a Legionary priest in New York. These were always in the company of at least a few others. Based on these experiences, and with my interior life nourished by reading spiritual letters we believed he had written, I thought I knew this man.2 And I loved him as a spiritual father. We would refer to him as “Nuestro Padre,” our father founder—an expression which, when in print, would always be written with a capital N and a capital P.
From 1997 onward and into the first years of my priesthood, and bolstered by my own psychological defense mechanisms, I worked hard at sustaining—both for myself and others—the grand narrative of our heroic founder and the divinely assisted establishment of the congregation. But so did the vast majority of Legionaries, including most of the superiors. In so doing, we were unwittingly keeping ourselves immersed in a kind of parallel universe: we were all protagonists in this great, providential work of God—our congregation. We were called “to build up the Legion” (“hacer Legión”). Such was the Kool-Aid we drank, and it was readily available.
Seven long years would pass before the Holy See would reopen its investigation of Maciel in 20043 and determine, within
