Both Scenarios Involve the Police and Stopping It.

Since I've been in Mexico, I've - naturally enough - begun to think again about the Legionaries of Christ and Father Maciel quite a lot.  In fact, this past week, I've been becoming obsessed with it once more.  It's so lurid and entrancing, and like the story of the Mormons and Jos. Smith, it is a train wreck I just can't take my eyes from.  The Legion's story has had a direct and profound impact on me, since I was briefly though intensely involved with the Legion and Regnum Christi personally in the mid 90's.  I went to several Legion vocation retreats, and hung out with a girl who was in Regnum Christi, who taught at their school for consecrated women in Rhode Island (we didn't say that we were "dating" - it was the 90's after all.  It was more a very intense truncated friendship, romantic on her side, platonic on mine, where we spent weeks - chastely - together over a two to three year period.)  Due to all that, I seriously considered becoming involved in "the movement" myself, before it became very, very clear to me on those retreats that the Legion and I were not at all a good fit.  


When the news about Maciel ("Nuestro Padre") broke in 1997, it devastated me.  I knew in my gut that it was true, and I did - and in some ways still do - not understand why the curia did not react more strongly than it did.  I also had significant questions about the Legion itself, due to several things that had unsettled me when I spent time with  them.  


It was a slow burn acid of doubt that ate away at me.  The subsequent revelation of the wider scandals just compounded the effect and left me completely shattered.  That anguish over the scandals was intensified by other doubts that I had about the nature and theology of the Church, and led to me joining the Army (and so rejecting the idea of going to the seminary that I'd been entertaining) and then, later, converting to Orthodoxy.  


I've of course since reverted, and am now picking up all the shards of my innocence and trying to completely own my faith again in an active, mature way.  Still, the ongoing saga of the Legion is harrowing me even now.  I want - need - to see them canonically suppressed.  They have to be disbanded, and the members of the Legion and Regnum Christi need to find new ways within the Church.  Furthermore, the scandal in its wider sense is still a live wire for me.  There are too many questions about sex and indeed money and power within the Church that remain unanswered for me.  There needs to be an accounting, and people need to come clean.  On everything from usury to birth control people are fudging and bullshitting and not being sincere.  


I include myself in that assessment.  Being more honest about sex money and power has been one of my central struggles these last few years.  


I want to talk about all of that more, and soon, on this here blog.  Not because I am under the illusion that what I think matters to many people (even though I hope it matters a bit to my immediate audience of a couple dozen, who are mostly friends of mine) but because I need to finally articulate these things coherently for my own sake, so that I can name them, and think about them well, and so hopefully put them in their proper places and so then grow and become more integrated.  


This isn't funny, but it does sum it all up as far as I am concerned:

Brief money quote from the transcript of the preceding interview:


All right, by now you've probably heard about the situation unfolding at Penn State University, where longtime football assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was arrested last weekend for alleged sexual abuse of children.


It's terrible.  But it's also come out that those around Sandusky knew about his behavior for years, including an incident in 2002, where a 6'5" adult eyewitness walked in on Sandusky raping a child in a Penn State shower, and didn't do the two things most people would do in that situation:


(a) stop it and call the cops, or
(b) call the cops to come stop it.

Both scenarios involve the police and stopping it.  

Ecco.  Isn't that obvious?  Isn't that what "most people would do" damn the consequences to themselves (such as losing a job), anyone's reputation (creating a scandal), or any other extrinsic consideration when faced with something so evil?  

Apparently not, eh?  Because let's be clear here, sexual abuse is pretty common and when exposing it will compromise powerful interests, most of us seemingly become sluts to security and power, and maintaining the status quo. Because the scandals in the Church, that in the "Legion," both like that at Penn State, involved many people keeping silent and not exposing the truth, thereby allowing the violation of innocence to fluoresce..


It's almost as if having integrity means knowing you ultimately have nothing to lose but your soul. 




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