'Difficult, not impossible' for Legionaires to recover

Editor’s note: the news Feb. 4 that the founder of Legionaries of Christ, Fr. Marcial Maciel, had lived a double life, having a mistress and fathering a child, has come as a devastating blow to members of his order and all others who held him in high esteem.

What will the impact be on his religious order? What can members and supporters expect in the years ahead? Is the damage irreparable? NCR Senior Correspondent John Allen asked the religious leader and spiritual writer Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate Father Ronald Rolheiser to assess the situation. Rolheiser is president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. He received his doctorate at the University of Louvain and is a member of the Catholic Theological Society of America.

What’s the nature of the relationship members of a religious order have with their founder, especially after the founder is gone?

I think it varies order by order, and also individual to individual. In general, there’s a distinction I find valuable, even though sometimes it’s subtle and unconscious, which is the distinction between the founder and his or her personality, and the charism of the order. When you join a religious order, particularly when the founder is already dead and you don’t know the person, it’s often really the charism of the order that attracts you.

For example, I know that many Oblates were not at all drawn by our founder’s personality [St. Eugene de Mazenod], but by our charism and mission. One Oblate once told me, “If I had met the founder a century ago in France, I probably would have fled by two continents and taken my chances with Jesus!” It was the same with me. It took me years to process who he was. The man had a very fiery temperament, and sometimes he would unload on people. When I studied his life early on I tended to think, “This probably isn’t a guy I would like, or who would like me.” It took his canonization for me to look again, and to come to understand that he was a complex person, a truly zealous person, and admirable in many ways – even if he’s not necessarily the guy you would want beside you at a barbeque.

The average person who joins the Dominicans, or the Oblates, or the Jesuits, may think they’re relating to the founder, but in reality it’s usually more to the community, the work the order does, and its charism.

Can an order survive without being able to venerate its founder?

I think it makes it difficult, but not impossible. With time, you become aware that so many other people who joined the order, many of whom are sincerely great men or women. Their generosity, their faith, gives substance to the order. Obviously there would be certain disillusionment if we were to learn something about this about our founder, but it wouldn’t be fatal. We know so many other Oblates who lived and died for our charism and for the faith – just in the last ten years, we’ve had martyrs – so we know these are the real goods. Of course, it’s more difficult for a younger order that doesn’t have the 700-year tradition of, say, the Franciscans, but it’s the same principle.

What a number of great founders or re-founders did, like Francis or John of the Cross, is that they self-marginalized before they died. They wanted to make the point that it’s not about them, it’s about Jesus. If the order is founded on a valid charism, this will be what stays, despite the faults of the founders.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Open letter to Legionaries by Dr. Germain Grisez, theology professor at Mount Saint Mary's University in Emmitsburg, MD: ..." identify those complicit in Father Maciel’s wrongdoing and its concealment until now, and work closely with faithful, professed members in carrying out an orderly termination of the existing Institute, election of a small group to serve as founders of its replacement, and the preparation of an entirely new and reformed body of particular law for the new institute."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

All founders have had their faults. It’s only a question of which ones in any given case. If it were a Legionary, I think this would be a huge source of pain for me, but it wouldn’t necessarily be a vocational crisis. What’s happened doesn’t invalidate their charism, their good work, or for that matter even this man’s generosity.

Is there a sense in which being able to be critical of the founder is actually a sign of maturity?

In my opinion, yes. With all forms of maturity, part of the picture is that we stop demonizing and stop ‘angelizing,’ and can look realistically at people. In human terms, my dad’s been dead now for 30 years, and I’ve had to come to terms with who he really was. He was a great man, but the danger is that I idealize him. I have to be able to look at him and say, ‘There are areas where he wasn’t a saint.’

I think this is particularly important for religious orders. You know, Jesus himself shows us many examples of shrinking from unqualified adulation. Uncritical adulation is just as bad as unqualified criticism. Neither is real, and neither does a favor to the person or to the order. Whether it’s the Dominicans, the Oblates, the Carmelites, or whoever, we all need to able to look at our founders and admit their faults.

It seems that there’s often an arc to the development of groups in the church, whether it’s religious congregations, lay movements, or anything else. They tend to be born in a fit of enthusiasm, which can sometimes breed a certain cult of personality around the founder. Over time, a more balanced appraisal sets in. Does that seem right to you?

Yes, it does. In God’s plan, there has to be some disillusionment precisely so that reality comes through. It’s like falling in love. It’s extraordinarily powerful, but then five years later you realize who you’re actually married to – you see that person for the first time.

I have a priest friend who teaches at a seminary, who tells me that sometimes younger seminarians say to him that they’re becoming priests because of John Paul II. His response is, “That’s not a good reason. He was a great man, but your focus has to be on Christ and the mission.” It’s always dangerous to hook your star to a human person. As I said, within the Oblates some of us struggle with the founder, and that’s actually a very healthy thing. I know that I wasn’t joining in any kind of unrealistic fervor, but because I liked the order, what they do, and what he founded.

Though the particulars of the Maciel case are obviously unique, is there a sense in which the challenge they face now isn’t all that different from the challenge any order will face sooner or later?

The proportions are clearly different, but every order has to come to terms with the fact that the founder was a human being, not God.

When an order makes a discovery about its founder that is damaging, what advice would you give about moving forward?

I would say, accept it in grace. Focus on your charism, on Christ, on the direction the founder set. You shouldn’t be focused on the personality of the founder to begin with. As amazing as Mother Teresa was, I would hope that her nuns are more hung up on Jesus than on her, and I think they are. There’s a certain kind of health involved in getting derailed from the person of the founder.

I would say that this is an opportunity to focus on what we’re all about, which is not this man, but our mission and truth and Christ and the faith. Those are the things that will sustain you over the long range. It’s a chance to purify the charism independently of personalities. St. Paul has this expression, in which he thanks a certain group for listening when he preached, taking what he said as “the word of God and not ours.” In other words, they were listening not because of Paul, but because of Christ.

Human disillusionment is always an opportunity to re-purify the faith, to focus on what does not ultimately disillusion, which is God.

On a human level, a discovery like this might invite recriminations within the order along the lines of who knew what and when. Any advice on how to handle that?

In some of these situations, I don’t think it’s all that healthy to get into who knew what when. If we want to live this charism, then we have to move on. Of course, there are people who will have to officially look into this, almost like an autopsy or a review of a plane crash. It’s important to establish what went wrong, so it doesn’t happen again. The survivors, however, have to get on with their lives. As a member of the order, I would say the important thing is to build positively, don’t let negativity kill us.