Tuesday, June 5, 2012

From Marx to Maciel: What An Ex-Communist Can Teach Us About False Catholics

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by R.J. Stove

(Crisis Magazine) Four years after Marcial Maciel went to his judgment, his dark legacy continues to erupt in scandal leaving one to seriously question how anyone could remain in or be associated with the Legion of Christ (L.C.).  At a time when even the dimmest male Legionary might have thought it advisable to behave in the most irreproachable manner, we learn that Fr. Thomas Williams, L.C., through a statement on May 21 by the L.C.’s General Director, Fr. Alvaro Corcuera, that Williams had fathered a child. Fr. Corcuera admits that he had known about Williams’s philoprogenitiveness ever since 2005. He did not say why it has taken till now for him to make a public statement of condemnation on the matter. And no doubt the General Director half-expects that the same fantasists and dupes who gave Maciel a clean bill of moral health during the latter’s lifetime will oblige Williams likewise.

Two websites above all, ReGAIN and Life After R.C. (“R.C.” standing for the Legion’s lay outreach, “Regnum Christi”), have played an especially significant role in revealing the extent of mindless L.C. corruption: mindless because the Legion’s ruling body seems to have gone one better than even the Bourbons through its ability to learn nothing and forget everything. In authentic allegiance to Screwtape – who never neglected the need for encouraging believers to acquire, “the uneasy intensity and the defensive self-righteousness of a secret society or a clique” – the L.C. has clearly operated on the premise that it is the Church, and that any Catholicism outside the L.C.’s own ambit is not merely dubious but, worse still, boring.

Consult, for example, Maciel’s “Unique Methodology.” This, as discovered by a Missouri Catholic named Patrice Becker and reported by her in 2010 to Pete Vere (whose co-authored books include The Tyranny of Nice), is a methodology that owes a hair-raising amount to … the Latter-Day Saints:
“Having lived amongst Mormons for over nine years, I recommend every R.C. member to read Judy Robinson’s book Out of Mormonism to discover Fr. Maciel’s methodology is not unique at all. When I confronted the leaders of the R.C. Movement at our L.C. school in the suburbs of St. Louis, I was told at first, ‘How ridiculous, R.C. is completely Catholic, and what a ridiculous accusation! How could you possibly compare it to Mormonism?’ Then I explained I was not saying the theology was like the Mormons, just the methodology. They replicated the Mormon methodology to the tee. A R.C. woman’s lifestyle in the ‘movement’ was so identical to a L.D.S. member’s lifestyle in their movement, I challenged a R.C. leader to read Out of Mormonism, and then tell me what she thought. … She called me back three days after reading Out of Mormonism. ‘You’re right’….She was horrified by the exact replication.”
Patrice confronted the Priest at the school, who after initially denying any similarity to the Mormons  then,
“Shut the door, and explained to me that the Mormons are the fastest- growing church in Mexico, so Fr. Maciel mimicked the methodology to stop the hemorrhaging from the Catholic church to the Mormons, and said they were taking what was good from the Mormon methodology, and leaving the bad, like it says to do in the Bible.”
Still the official foot-dragging continues. From Spanish blogger José Martinez de Velasco, come the following acerbic questions – among others – prompted by the Apostolic Visitation (already two years in the past) of the Legion:.... (continued)

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