News from Spain: Father Santiago Oriol leaves the Legionaries of Christ and his sister Malen leaves Regnum Christi

http://www.life-after-rc.com/2010/10/update-from-spain.html#comments

http://exlegionariescom.blogspot.com/2010/10/prominent-spanish-legionary-leaves-fr.html

Yahoo News on the Legion: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101027/ap_on_re_eu/eu_vatican_legionaries_of_christ_3

Pope’s Legion delegate warns of “shipwreck”

By NICOLE WINFIELD,  Associated Press Nicole Winfield, Associated Press – Wed Oct 27

VATICAN CITY – The papal official running the disgraced Legionaries of Christ has warned that the conservative order faces “certain shipwreck” unless its superiors and members work together to change course following revelations that their founder led a double life.

Archbishop Velasio De Paolis also said in a letter to the Legion that it will take three years or more to reform the order, dashing the hopes of Legion superiors who had wanted a quick-fix turnaround. At the same time, though, he made clear that the Legion was still viable as an order and suggested that, once reformed, it could have a role in the pope’s new efforts to revitalize Christianity where it’s on the wane.

Pope Benedict XVI named De Paolis to take charge of the Legion after an eight-month Vatican investigation determined it needed to be thoroughly “purified” to purge it of the influence of its late founder, the Rev. Marciel Maciel.

Maciel founded the Legion in 1941 in Mexico and it became one of the wealthiest and fastest growing orders in the Catholic Church. Pope John Paul II admired the Legion for its orthodoxy and ability to attract priests and money from wealthy patrons despite long-standing allegations that Maciel was a pedophile and drug addict.

The Legion revealed in February 2009 that Maciel had fathered a child; it later admitted that decades-old accusations that he had sexually abused seminarians were true and that he had fathered at least two other children.

The revelations have thrown the Legion into chaos, in part because its members had revered Maciel as a living saint, and prompted questions about what the current leadership knew about his misdeeds and when.

Over the past year, several prominent Legion priests have left the order to become diocesan priests and dozens of consecrated members of the Legion’s lay branch, Regnum Christi, have quit. Several have spoken about the deception and spiritual manipulation they say they endured in a cult-like movement that until recently had the unquestioning blessing of Rome.

De Paolis wrote a letter to current Legion priests and consecrated members last week, telling them that the process of reform was under way now that his team of canon lawyers and experts was in place.

He hinted at a power play with the current Legion leadership, detailing what they are supposed to be doing to help the Legion renew itself rather than digging in and resisting change.

“If we are united and respectful of each other as we move forward the journey will be swift and sure, but it will be certain shipwreck to let ourselves get caught up in the desire to win out and impose our own ideas,” he warned.

Veteran Vatican watcher Sandro Magister has written that the Legion’s vicar general Luis Garza Medina declined De Paolis’ request to give up some of his duties last month. Benedict recently announced De Paolis would be made a cardinal next month, giving him that much more authority.

At the same time, De Paolis noted that the superiors had an “extremely important” job to implement the necessary changes despite lingering distrust among the rank and file about what they may or may not have known about Maciel.

“I ardently invite you to set aside all suspicion and distrust, and work concretely and positively for the good of the Legion, without lingering still on the past or feeding divisions,” he wrote, suggesting that for now the question of who knew what and when remain unanswered.

Jim Fair, the Legion’s communications director, said Wednesday that any Legionary would resign his position if asked to by De Paolis. Fair also stressed the positive elements of the letter, noting “its clear statements of the future of the Legion.”

For the first time, De Paolis hinted at how the Legion would deal with Maciel’s victims, saying a commission would likely be formed to “approach those who in some way put forward claims against the Legion.”

Already, one of Maciel’s Mexican-born sons has filed a lawsuit against the Legion alleging his father sexually abused him; he had previously asked the Legion for $26 million to keep quiet. In Rhode Island, the family of a wealthy widow who gave millions to the Legion in life and in death is contesting her will, alleging she never would have given her fortune away had she known the truth about Maciel.

Another commission is expected to look into the Legion’s financial matters; some reports estimate the Legion’s assets at euro25 billion although the Legion has said those figures are wildly inaccurate.

De Paolis acknowledged the toll the scandal has taken, noting that some priests have left for dioceses, ordinations are down and that other current Legion priests have “let themselves get caught in this whirlpool of public opinion and have desisted in their efforts to promote vocations.”

In its May denunciation of Maciel, the Vatican said the Legion needed to review how authority was exercised in the order to ensure it respected the consciences of its members amid charges that superiors had unchecked ability to manipulate underlings. The Vatican also said the order’s essential spirit — what makes it unique from other orders — had to be redefined.

Despite such fundamental problems, De Paolis noted the Legion had been approved by the church, that the pope had expressed his confidence in it as a religious order by naming him to carry forward, and that the Legion could be a vital new force in Benedict’s effort to revive the faith in an increasingly secular Europe.

Such facts give hope for a positive outcome of the reform process, De Paolis said.

“The shock caused by the founder’s actions had tremendous impact, on a scale capable of destroying the congregation itself, as many in fact predicted,” he wrote. “Yet it not only survives, but is almost intact in its vitality.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101027/ap_on_re_eu/eu_vatican_legionaries_of_christ_3

Disappearing Middle Eastern Christians by David P. Goldman in First Things

Disappearing Middle Eastern Christians, Disappointing Bishops

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/10/disappearing-middle-eastern-christians-disappointing-bishops

Oct 25, 2010

David P. Goldman

“Catholic Church: Christ nullified God’s promises to the Jews,” reads the headline on the Israel Today website. That is not quite true: At the just-concluded Synod of Middle East Bishops, a cleric from the tiny group of Melkite Greeks, Archbishop Cyril Salim Bustros, made such a statement on behalf of the Melkites, not the Catholic Church.

The head of the same church, the Syrian-based Patriarch Gregorios III Laham, also attacked priestly celibacy before the Synod. He wasn’t speaking for Rome, either. Clerical marriage hasn’t helped the Melkites; they claim just 1.3 million members worldwide, fewer than the Korean Methodist Church or the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Papua New Guinea. Their actual numbers are much smaller.

The concerns of Greek Christians will fade before long, for in two or three generations there will be no Greek Christians in the Middle East, nor indeed Christians of any sort in the Middle East. Nor, for that matter, will there be many Greeks; with a fertility rate of only 1.37 children per female, one of the world’s lowest, Greece by mid-century will have a population two-thirds of which exceeds the age of sixty, and very little population at all by the end of the century. In a hundred years, modern Greek will be a dying language.

Israeli Jews, by contrast, have the highest fertility of any first-world population, and not only because of the fecund ultra-Orthodox; fertility among secular Israelis is far above replacement. By 2100, eighteen centuries after Constantine founded the Greek empire, more people will speak Hebrew than Greek.

Jews might well ignore the sepulchral voice of a dying ethnic church, except for one fact: The Melkite cleric in question, Archbishop Cyril Salim Bustros, headed the commission that drafted the Synod’s final statement. Speaking personally and not for the Synod he said, “The theme of the promised land cannot be used as a basis to justify the return of the Jews to Israel and the expatriation of the Palestinians. . . . For Christians one can no longer talk of the land promised to the Jewish people,” because the “promise” was “abolished by the presence of Christ . . . there is no longer a favored people, a chosen people; all men and women of every country have become the chosen people.”

Middle Eastern Christians are hostage to a hostile Muslim majority, and to Iran in particular. Lebanese Maronites, the largest surviving community, were a majority by design when France established the present Lebanese state after World War I as a Catholic enclave. Infertility and immigration have reduced Maronite numbers to perhaps 30 percent, although political sensitivities have forbid census-taking for a generation. If Iran’s proxy army, the Hezbollah, wished to, it could slaughter the Christians on any given morning. That is why the most prominent Lebanese Christian leader, Michel Aoun, is allied to Hezbollah, against the Saudi- and American-backed Sunni opposition.

It is hardly news that Middle Eastern Christians (except for the growing community of Hebrew-speaking Christians) hate Israel. They blame the Israeli-Arab conflict for the deterioration of their position. Arab Christians, moreover, played a prominent role in Arab nationalist movements; they are Arabs first, that is, and Christians second.

The ambitions of Arab Christians grew after the Turks killed or expelled close to four million Greek and Armenian Orthodox Christians between 1915 and 1923; these groups once comprised a fifth of the population of Anatolian Turkey and dominated the Christian presence in the Middle East, as I wrote last year in an essay entitled “The Closing of the Christian Womb in the Middle East.”

It seems incongruous that the leader of a tiny ethnic group that lectures Rome on the merits of priestly marriage would draft the final statement of a Vatican Synod on the Middle East. The trouble is that among the twelve million Christians left in the Middle East, it is hard to find a leader who does not reflect the rage and desperation of a community on its way to extinction.

Pope Benedict XVI, like his predecessor John Paul II, has said that the Election of Israel cannot be changed; his October 25 homily at the close of the Synod would have been a good time to reiterate this position. The pope did not take the opportunity to do so. The late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, founder of First Things, wisely argued that the Election of Israel should be incorporated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church; it remains a papal opinion rather than a Magisterial ruling, and may be repudiated by a different pope in the future.

The Church’s anguish at the catastrophic decline of Christianity in the region of its birth and first expansion is palpable. The problem, as I explained in the “Christian womb” essay, is that Middle Eastern Christians won’t have children and won’t stand their ground. Nothing that Israel might possibly do will change this; the best Israel can do, as I wrote in a recent “On the Square” article, “Israeli Christians: Uncomfortable Minority, Mutual Opportunity,” is to foster the only expanding Middle Eastern Christian community, namely Hebrew-speaking Israeli Christians.

In August 2009, a senior official at the Vatican’s Secretariat of State received me in a small conference room on the third floor of the Secretariat building, near the papal apartments. “The Holy Father,” he explained, “feels a strong pastoral responsibility toward Christian communities in the Middle East.” Benedict XVI, he added, hopes that Christians in the Middle East will provide the “leaven” for a cultural revival among some of the world’s most backward societies. Given Jewish experience, I replied, the Church would do better to get its people out while there still was time.

As we talked, we passed through the gallery that Raphael had decorated in the “grotesque” style adapted from Nero’s palace, then just excavated, and stood on the terrace overlooking St. Peter’s Basilica. The subject changed; my host mentioned that new documents showed the deep concern of Pope Pius XII over the murder of European Jews, and hoped that I, as a Jewish journalist, would write about them.

I demurred. Pius XII was a good man, not a bad one, in my view then and now; under the terrible circumstances of the Second World War, he did what he could to save Jews while avoiding an open confrontation with the Nazi regime. An open denunciation of the Nazis probably would have led to his martyrdom and a Nazi-driven schism. He had every reason to expect the Nazi regime to last for a long time and wanted the Church to continue ministering to the spiritual needs of Catholics.

Evidently he failed to appreciate the full horror of Nazi intentions until the storm was upon him, but that was true of most of the East European rabbinate as well. When the secular Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky toured Poland in the late 1930s begging Jews to get out while they still could, he found little support from religious leaders.

Walter Cardinal Kasper, who heads the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, put it very well last May when he said that the Catholic Church had weakened itself by “cutting itself off from its Jewish roots for centuries . . . a weakness that became evident in the altogether too feeble resistance against the persecution of the Jews.”

At the time, I wrote that Jews should accept this statement “in full satisfaction of their grievance against the wartime Vatican.” The “Jewish roots” of the Church, as Franz Rosenzweig argued, are the Jews themselves; without the living Jewish people, Jewish Scripture would be reduced to another Gnosis in short order. And to separate the Jewish people from the Promised Land is an absurdity. For two thousand years we prayed thrice daily for God to gather our exiles from the four corners of the world and return us to Zion.

Pius XII might have taken the heroic step of excommunicating Hitler, or ordering priests to refuse communion to German soldiers and their auxiliaries engaged in the murder of non-combatants. Instead, he chose to work behind the scenes to save lives. Ultimately, Pius XII chose not to sacrifice the Church’s ongoing care for its flock in a desperate gamble of this kind.

With hindsight, one might speculate that things would have turned out better for the Church if he had done so. Christianity is fading in all of Europe except Poland, and Poland’s startling rate of population decline does not bode well for the future. If the wartime Vatican had taken a moral stand against Nazism, the outcome might or might not have been different; the Church might have emerged from the war with the moral authority to stand against the secular tide that has swamped it. But there was no way for Pius XII to have known this in 1943.

That was 1943. In 2010, the Church should have learned better. I thought it had. When then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s interview book The Salt of the Earth appeared in 1996, I read it with wonder: the future pope wrote, “Perhaps we must take leave of the concept of a popular church.” He added that the Church might shrink to small, seemingly insignificant cells, which nonetheless work for the good:

We might have to part with the notion of a popular Church. It is possible that we are on the verge of a new era in the history of the Church, under circumstances very different from those we have faced in the past, when Christianity will resemble the mustard seed [Matthew 13:31-32], that is, will continue only in the form of small and seemingly insignificant groups, which yet will oppose evil with all their strength and bring Good into this world.

This statement provoked scandalized comment in the German media; I first learned of the book from a news article in Germany’s leading newsweekly, Der Spiegel, which considered this headline news.

A prince of the Church with the courage to abandon the shell of the institution and fight on principle, I thought, would have done better than Pius XII. Here is a German who learned the lesson that one should fight on issues of faith and trust the outcome to God. I hailed his election as Pope in my then-pseudonymous “Spengler” columns so enthusiastically that many readers mistook me for a Catholic.

When as Pope Benedict XVI he addressed irrationality in Islam at his September 2006 Regensburg address, and personally received the convert Magdi Allam into the Church in 2008, I saw in these actions hope for a rebirth of the decaying West. And I was gratified that other Jewish journalists, for example Azure magazine editor Assaf Sagiv, came to view Benedict as a friend and ally of the Jewish people.

And I still believe that Benedict XVI is our friend. It is hard to avoid the impression that he has tired after swimming so far against the tide. What remains of Middle Eastern Christian leadership is beholden to Iran. The Vatican foreign service comes from the same social strata as the bureaucrats of the European Commission, and shares their hostility to the inconvenient Jewish state. Among Western European political leaders, Israel’s best friend is the Lutheran pastor’s child Angela Merkel.

And that is why the Synod of Bishops on the Middle East is such a disappointment, including the Holy Father’s bland homily at the end of the Synod on October 25. The Jewish people face the prospect of a new Holocaust at the hands of Iran, which President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens as brazenly as ever did Hitler. If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, millions of Jews may burn, again. Iran’s proxies have ringed Israel with missiles on its northern and southern borders, the recompense Israel received for ending its occupation of Gaza and southern Lebanon.

And now the Middle Eastern bishops’ Synod demands that Israel end its “occupation” of the West Bank, which as a practical matter means that Iranian proxies would install missiles on hilltops a dozen miles from Tel Aviv.

Just as in World War II, Catholic communities are hostage to an evil power that proposes to wipe out the Jewish people. Just as in World War II, the first concern of the Church is to maintain its ministry under adverse conditions. Just as in World War II, some elements of the Church make common cause with this evil power to buy temporary security for their own communities.

The anguish of the Church, its unwillingness to let go a foothold in the Holy Land, and its pastoral concern for its beleaguered flock, all are understandable. Jews should temper their disappointment with understanding. But the facts on the ground are what they are. The Christians of the Middle East long since failed of their own infertility, and would decline even if they did not face persecution from Muslims. Giving a big voice to a little man like Archbishop Bustros will do nothing to help them. But silence in the face of evil increases the likelihood of war.

David P. Goldman is a senior editor at First Things  and the “Spengler” columnist for the Asia Times. His previous “On the Square” articles can be found here.

RESOURCES:

David Goldman’s The Closing of the Christian Womb.
His Israeli Christians: Uncomforable Minority, Mutual Opportunity.
His Cardinal Kasper: Church Was “Too Feeble” to Resist the Persecution of the Jews
His reflection on then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s election as pope, Ratzinger’s Mustard Seed.
His Jihad, the Lord’s Supper, and Eternal Life.
His report on Magdi Allam’s reception into the Catholic Church, The Mustard Seed in Global Strategy.
His Azure on Coming to Terms with Christianity”.
Benedict XVI’s Homily at the end of the Middle East Synod.

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/10/disappearing-middle-eastern-christians-disappointing-bishops

 

Legionaries. The Past That Doesn’t Want to Go Away, by Sandro Magister

Legionaries. The Past That Doesn’t Want to Go Away

The heirs and trustees of the disgraced founder Maciel are not agreeing to leave their positions of command. But papal delegate De Paolis is issuing an ultimatum: either they change, or it will be “disaster” for all. The complete text of his letter

by Sandro Magister

http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1345274?eng=y

ROME, October 25, 2010 – Now that he has been made a cardinal, Archbishop Velasio De Paolis will have even more authority in implementing the mandate he has received from Benedict XVI to salvage the Legionaries of Christ, brought to the brink of ruin by their founder, Marcial Maciel, and by the men of his inner circle.

But the difficulties that the pontifical delegate is encountering are significant. The superiors of the congregation, the most powerful of which is vicar general Luís Garza Medina (in the photo), are by no means giving up on the idea of remaining in their positions of command, now and always.

In mid-September, De Paolis asked Garza to give up the main offices that he holds, at least those of territorial director for Italy, supervisor of consecrated virgins of the movement Regnum Christi, general prefect of studies and head of the financial holding company Integer. But Garza said no. A chill has fallen between the two.

De Paolis has been in office since June 16, but has only been able to operate and decide fully since this October, when he was finally given the four “advisers” that the Vatican authorities had promised him four months earlier. One of them, Brian Farrel, is a Legionary with an important role in the Vatican curia, a proponent of a decisive shift in the direction of the congregation. Two others, the Jesuit Gianfranco Ghirlanda and Sacred Heart Fr. Agostino Montan, are highly experienced canon lawyers, even more in favor of decisive action for reform. The one most inclined to negotiate with the heads of the Legionaries appears to be the fourth, Mario Marchesi, previously a professor at their university.

Last October 19, De Paolis addressed to the Legionaries and members of Regnum Christi a long and well-constructed letter, reproduced in its entirety further below, which gives fairly clear indications of the process of “rebuilding” and “renewal” that the pontifical delegate intends to undertake. And of the obstacles that he is encountering.

De Paolis describes his project as “change in continuity,” with the accent on the first word. The changes – he writes – include “not a few things.” They concern freedom of conscience, the role of confessors and spiritual directors, the forms of control over everyday life, and more. But the point on which he is insisting most is “the problem of the exercise of authority within the Legion,” including the way in which the superiors relate with each other.

De Paolis dedicates numerous passages and one entire paragraph of the letter to the need for superiors to change the way in which they act. For the first time in an official Church document, he states in black and white the thesis according to which “the current superiors could not have been unaware of the offenses of the founder,” and so “by remaining silent about them, they would have been lying.” He does not endorse this thesis, but he also does not rule it out. In conjecturing that their knowledge of the outrages of the founder would have come about “late and gradually,” he does not say how or when. And in effect it is now common opinion, even among the Vatican authorities, that Garza and the other ultra-faithful of Maciel knew of and covered up his double life as early as the early 1990’s, long before his denunciation in 2006 and his death in 2008.

But in spite of this, it could be gathered from the letter from De Paolis that for now neither he nor the Vatican authorities intend to remove the superiors of the Legion by executive fiat. They are instead trying to get them to leave their positions of their own will, or at least immediately change their attitude, because – as stated in the letter – “if we get caught up in the desire to prevail, and to impose our own ideas on the others, disaster is certain.”

The fact remains that, so far, no trace of this desired conversion has been seen in the leaders. By closing ranks, they are withholding visibility and initiative from the healthy part of the Legion, those dozens, hundreds of priests and novices who yearn for a renewal of their religious life, but continue to suffer highly suffocating restrictions and pressures, on the individual and collective level.

In any case, if the superiors of the Legion were counting on resolving everything everything in short order, a few months, and with minimal adjustments, De Paolis is shattering all of their illusions with this letter. The process of rebuilding – he writes – will take “the necessary time, which is expected to be two or three years, or even more.” and he cites God’s exhortation to the prophet Elijah: “Get up, eat, because the journey is too long for you.”

The pontifical delegate has announced the formation of three commissions: the first for a thorough revision of the constitutions; the second for the victims and requests for compensation; the third for problems of an economic nature, until now the unchallenged domain of Garza.

For the lay movement Regnum Christi – which will soon be examined by an apostolic visitor, Ricardo Blázquez, archbishop of Valladolid – there are plans for greater autonomy with respect to the Legion.

As for the specific charism of the Legionaries, the letter from De Paolis identifies this in the education of priests and laity, in the schools and universities, toward a Christian culture capable of reacting to the widespread culture “undermined by immanentism and relativism.”

It will be difficult, if not impossible, for the superiors of the Legion to overturn these guidelines. But not to impede them. And in the absence of rapid steps forward in the journey of renewal, other priests will leave, not “hotheads” as their superiors say, but some of the best, in addition to those who have already left and been incardinated into the diocesan clergy. The new vocations will disappear, and are already drying up more or less everywhere, for example in Italy, where only one novice entered this year.

Given this situation, if there is the intention to bring trust and courage to the healthy portion of the Legion of Christ, only one urgent signal of transformation can be given: the removal of those leaders, at least the highest ranking, all of whom owe their power to the man who both founded and capsized it. And they still continue to keep it in prison.

____________http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1345274?eng=y

ReGAIN on the Second Letter of Cardinal-elect Velasio De Paolis to the Legion

http://www.regainnetwork.org/article.php?a=47246134

Second Letter From the Delegate, October 20, 2010

Recently  appointed Cardinal- elect Velasio De Paolis has written a letter to the  Legionaries of Christ and the consecrated women of Regnum Christi that  has shocked and disappointed any critics or family members who were  anticipating major changes to be made by the Apostolic Delegate to the  Legion or to Regnum Christi in the near future.

The Delegate refers to “the good that the Legion has done and is  still doing”, points out that “the Legion has been approved by the  Church,” verifies that it is a “work of God,” points out that it is  difficult to be sure that the leaders of the Legion knew anything about  the founder’s misdeeds and concludes that “the (Legion) charism is  sufficiently clear and precise.”

The original letter was written in Italian and a translation of this letter has been posted on Regnum Christi’s website at:

http://www.regnumchristi.org/english/articulos/articulo.phtml?se=362&ca=966&te=707&id=31282

It would seem that the Church is enabling and encouraging the Legion  and Regnum Christi to continue business as usual.  The recruiting,  ordinations and consecrations are still happening.

The affirming tone of the letter was surprising to many and raises  questions about what the Vatican intends to do or to not do in the  reform process.  One thing is obvious.  The Vatican does not intend to  come in with a big stick and clean house.  The Legionary leaders are  going to have to fix things up themselves and not just sit by idly  waiting for the Church to impose changes.  Time will tell if they are  capable of achieving the necessary positive changes to create a more  healthy environment.

***

Links

Religious Groups Awareness Network (REGAIN)

Publisher: Religious Groups Awareness Network (REGAIN)
“REGAIN is a new and thriving not-for-profit (status pending) organization, stemming from the negative and abusive experiences caused by the Legionaries of Christ and their counterpart, Regnum Christi.

The Legionaries of Christ is a cult-like movement that continues to expand around the world under the guise of a legitimate religious order. Because of these experiences, REGAIN’S goal is to provide counseling and support to individuals and their families both during membership in the Legion and after leaving the order, while helping them to deal with the guilt and shame associated with abuse, understanding the experience and regaining a healthy balance for the rest of their life.

We provide workshops in various large cities regarding the nature and extent of the problems associated with the Legionaries, how to extricate someone from the order, surviving the after-effects, and moving forward. The majority of people who come out of the Legion and Regnum Christi have been violated in some way and many have a difficult time re-adjusting back into the secular world.
Our mission is accomplished through awareness, education, counseling, support, and resolution.”