In other words, one had best proceed with some humility, and I do. Rightly regarded as one of the finest stylists in the English language—McEwan’s prose is as perfectly calibrated as a Swiss watch, or a time bomb―his Booker Prize win in 1998, though for one of his fluffier little books, Amsterdam, was nonetheless not entirely misplaced. Sentence for sentence, it simply doesn’t get much better.

One of the most stunning chapters I have ever read in any novel occurs early in Atonement (2001) in a section describing a woman’s flowering migraine. It is the 1920’s, the scene is an English country house, and the woman is a prosperous upper-class wife and mother:

Not long after lunch, once she was assured that her sister’s children and Briony had eaten sensibly and would keep their promise to stay away from the pool for at least two hours, Emily Tallis had withdrawn from the white glare of the afternoon’s heat to a cool and darkened bedroom. She was not in pain, not yet, but she was retreating before its threat. There were illuminated points in her vision, little pinpricks, as though the worn fabric of the visible world was being held up against a far brighter light. She felt in the top right corner of her brain a heaviness, the inert body weight of some curled and sleeping animal; but when she touched her head and pressed, the presence disappeared from the coordinates of actual space. Now it was in the top right corner of her mind, and in her imagination she could stand on tiptoe and raise her right hand to it. It was important, however, not to provoke it; once this lazy creature moved from the peripheries to the center, then the knifing pains would obliterate all thought, and there would be no chance of dining with Leon and the family tonight.”

By the time I finished reading this chapter, I had to make for the bathroom and a bottle of aspirin.

Passages of horror encroaching on the quotidian are usually the best things about an Ian McEwan novel. The man is a poet of the Age of Anxiety; of violence erupting in the midst of the everyday; of all the things that can suddenly and dreadfully Go Wrong: the opening helium balloon scene in Enduring Love; the discovery of the drunken ex-husband in the wardrobe in The Innocent; the protagonist’s wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time-with-the-wrong-guy fender-bender in Saturday. In the hands of a master of the language, such scenes inspire more terror than any splatter movie. When I learned that one of his early novels opened with a child being abducted away from her father at a local grocery store, I knew at once that that was one work in McEwan’s oeuvre that this already anxious mother would never, ever pick up.

But great episodes do not a great novel make, and after reading, with a writer’s appreciation, six of his eight novels, I confess myself disappointed with the collected works of Ian McEwan. More, mine is that greatest of all disappointments in artistic terms, the disappointment of unfulfilled (great) expectations. This guy is so good, so fine a wordsmith―at crafting a sentence, a paragraph, a scene―that one ought to feel confident that he will be reckoned among the few authors of our time who will outlast our time.

And yet, set side-by-side with the Greats of previous eras―Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Melville, James, Dostoevsky, and so many others―McEwan, in my view, comes up perplexingly short. In place of a fully-realized narrative structure complete with foundation, floor, supporting walls, and a roof, fretted with golden fire, what we get in his books are brilliantly executed but strangely strung-together episodes, many of which end up having nothing to do with anything else in the novel; or which one feels should have led to a wholly different novel. That brilliant pre-migraine scene in Atonement, for instance, serves no purpose in the rest of the story. In fact, neither does Emily Tallis, the migraine-sufferer herself. Instead, Emily drops off the page as the book goes on to tell the story of Emily’s daughter, Briony, a teenager (and budding writer), whose immature misreading of a romantic incident ruins the lives of two people close to her. It was as if the author got a terrific idea for a passage about an approaching migraine, and having no place else to put it at the moment, stuck it in the middle of the manuscript that happened to be on his desktop.

Worse, in that particular novel, after getting his readers to care about the star-crossed lovers whose lives are so adversely affected by the imaginative teenager, McEwan flips the reader a literary bird with a too-clever-by-half “meta-narrative strategy” that is so cynical, so artsy-fartsy trick-ending gimmicky—a poster child for the “Unreliable Narrator” school of postmodern lit fic—that my eldest son, when he read it, threw the book against the wall. Publishers Weekly adored it, of course, calling it a “coup de theatre.” Chacun a son goût.

Texts and Subtexts

My second disappointment with the fiction of Ian McEwan has to do with the man’s acute but narrow, even blinkered, vision. On the face of it, McEwan has made his well-deserved reputation with a lack of overt political or social agenda. And thank God for that, one might well exclaim, after all the exercises in narrative agitprop readers of fiction have had to endure for the last several decades, from potboilers like The Da Vinci Code to fêted literary works like Written on the Body. (The latter, if you haven’t heard of it, is Jeanette Winterson’s sly contrivance, crafted in such a clever way that the reader, in spite of the protagonist’s love affairs with both men and women, cannot for the life of him―or her―determine by the end of the book whether the protagonist is a him or a her. And if you think there isn’t an agenda in that, then you have surely been sleeping, Van Winkle-like, through the better part of the Sexual Revolution.)

But before one succumbs to some Pollyannaish notion that McEwan displays that laudatory disposition towards fair play and reticence such as only the British seem able to produce, caveat lector: The author’s seeming lack of overt system, of agenda, masks one of the most ferocious and all-pervasive systems in intellectual history: that psycho-matrix of rationalism, scientism, materialism, positivism, and relativism that nary an educated creature of the twenty-first century West can think beyond without the most strenuous of mental labors, and a robust measure of Grace.

By God, it’s in the very (hepa-filtered) air we breathe, and the (carbon-filtered) water we drink. I think, therefore I am (I think). And if what I think is true is at odds with what you think is true, we’ll either a) do a controlled experiment, the results of which will be brought into question by next year’s controlled experiment, or, b) take a poll to settle the matter in true democratic fashion, or c) agree to disagree by agreeing that nothing is true, nor does any of it matter a good goddamn, either way.

McEwan, it would do well to remember, is a self-proclaimed atheist. When PBS was doing its series on post-9/11 faith, it chose McEwan to represent those without any. And like many of his creed (so to speak), or of any creed, McEwan occasionally exhibits a phenomenal ignorance of people who do not share his.

I’ve yet to see anything in McEwan’s fiction to make me suspect that he understands the difference between religion and superstition, belief and ideology, faith and fanaticism; between the numinous and the irrational; between what physician-novelist (and believer) Walker Percy described as “the scientific method” (which Percy loved as much as any son of the Enlightenment), and what Percy decried as “scientism.”

Indeed, McEwan associates himself so vigorously with the Voltairean myth of the inherent enmity between Faith and Reason―a position continually rejected by the Church, at least―that he has turned his back on a significant portion of the heritage of that very western civilization that produced the scientific method in the first place; the part that, while hardly excluding science or reason (and born as much from Aquinas as Kant or Locke), also acknowledges Mystery; of other ways of knowing besides mathematical certainty. In other words, Tradition (what Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead”) and Faith.

In the hands of McEwan, scientism is both a gift and a curse; for if he can write better than anyone when the subject is amenable to a biological, neurological, Darwinian, or even a Freudian explanation, description or diagnosis, he succumbs to a peculiar failure of imagination when the thoughts or actions of a character invite the employment of the non-ratiocinative faculties.

Consider this neo-Darwinist passage from Enduring Love:

We lived in a mist of half-shared, unreliable perception, and our sense data came warped by a prism of desire and belief, which tilted our memories too. We saw and remembered in our own favor, and we persuaded ourselves along the way. Pitiless objectivity, especially about ourselves, was always a doomed social strategy. We’re descended from the indignant, passionate tellers of half-truths, who, in order to convince others, simultaneously convinced themselves. Over generations success had winnowed us out, and with success came our defect, carved deep in the genes like ruts in a cart track: when it didn’t suit us, we couldn’t agree on what was in front of us. Believing is seeing. That’s why there are divorces, border disputes, and wars, and why this statue of the Virgin Mary weeps blood and that one of Ganesh drinks milk. And that was why metaphysics and science were such courageous enterprises, such startling inventions, bigger than the wheel, bigger than agriculture, human artifacts set right against the grain of human nature. Disinterested truth. But it couldn’t save us from ourselves, the ruts were too deep. There could be no private redemption in objectivity. (Enduring Love, p. 196)

What happens when a novelist, even a brilliant one, brackets out a huge chunk of common human experience? McEwan is so much the atheist, the rationalist, the materialist, that the fictional world he creates in his novels is curiously two-dimensional and lacking in variety. One simply can’t imagine him, for instance, writing a historical novel set anytime before the modern period, so rooted is his curious mix of Enlightenment naïveté and postmodern cynicism. Even Atonement, his one attempt at a sort of historical novel, failed in this regard. Set in the period before and during the Second World War, there’s not a single figure in this rather large cast of characters who, even in the thick of battle or faced with death, seems aware that the majority of people around them believe in something called God and the Afterlife. These characters, like the author himself, appear to be untroubled atheists even in their imaginary foxholes.

By profession, a McEwan protag is likely to be a technician, a science writer, a neurosurgeon. The latter (Henry Perowne in Saturday, McEwan’s latest) seems especially fitting, given McEwan passion for biological tropes. And though perhaps honest enough at times to admit that he talks rationalism better than he walks it, a McEwan protag will invariably try to explain away his own occasional lapses into “irrationality” with polysyllabic references to neurological, bio-chemical, and trauma-induced stimuli or “evolutionary strategies.” Not that McEwan would be the first writer with a penchant for protagonists who are mirror-images of himself—in this case, atheistic hyper-rationalists so committed to the familiar terrain of scientific materialism that anything outside it, were it to be mapped, would have to be stamped, “Here be Dragons.”

And there’s the rub. For show me a McEwan “non-rationalist,” and I will show you either a female love-interest or ornery family member―some artist or literary type that the male protagonist simply cannot understand―or, if male, a threatening, out-of-control alcoholic, psychotic, or criminal with a degenerative disease.

Using words like surgical instruments, McEwan is wholly in his comfort zone when sketching these “Others”―detailing the dismal prognosis of an old woman slipping into Alzheimer’s, or limning the tell-tale features of Huntington’s disease in a clever but violent street thug, or describing, as from some Olympian professional distance, like a clinician eyeballing a virus under a microscope, the case history of a stalker suffering from erotomania.

Hound of Heaven or Feral Dog?

The problematic notion of a war between reason and science, on the one hand, and emotion, intuition and faith, on the other is so chronic a theme in McEwan’s fiction as to approach the obsessive; but only two of his books deal with religion directly: Black Dogs (1992) and Enduring Love (1997). The difference in vision and emotional impact between the two consecutive novels deserves a closer look.

The earlier book, Black Dogs, gives us an indecisive, between-two-worldviews narrator writing about his mother-in-law, June―a gruff-but-endearing mystic of New Age-ish persuasion. June is married to (but separated from) Bernard, a rationalist, atheist and (for many years) committed communist. For the narrator, this bickering pair sit as it were one on each shoulder, arguing their for- and against- religion cases like angels and devils in old Tom and Jerry toons.

The novel’s (and narrator’s) focus, however, is on June, and hers is a story of conversion—of a life-changing experience of the Numinous during an otherwise terrifying encounter with two wild black mastiffs in the French countryside. While the scene amply displays McEwan’s capacious gift for instilling horror and terror―Stephen King, I understand, is a fan―his description of June’s subsequent encounter with “a circle of light” is vague, vapid, abstract. I came away feeling that the subject held little interest for the author in any event, but thought McEwan deserved brownie points, at least, for his tolerant, even affectionate characterization of June. If the narrator (and author) couldn’t understand this woman, I thought, at least he could imagine understanding her, and that was nearly enough.

With the 1997 publication of his next novel, however, McEwan appears to have finally taken sides, and with a vengeance. Recently made into a so-so film starring Daniel Craig, Enduring Love details the shocking personal aftereffects of a random accident, in which several strangers are thrown together trying to save a young boy about to be carried away in a runaway helium balloon. The upshot: the protagonist, an (of course) atheistic/rationalist science writer, finds himself the prey of a different sort of feral hound: a “Jesus freak.” A Jesus freak, moreover, as the Christian reader soon discovers with a yadda-yadda sigh of weariness, whose increasingly violent obsession with the protagonist is wrapped up homoerotically with a desire to show the protag the light of God’s love.

Well, as Walker Percy once so charmingly put the case, “just because Jimmy Swaggart believes in God doesn’t mean that God does not exist.”

Not that McEwan is such a crude intellectual combatant that he fails to endow his hyper-rationalist hero with some borderline manias of his own—indeed, there were times when the protagonist, Joe Rose began to remind me of Chesterton’s famous dictum that a madman is not someone who has lost his reason, but someone who has lost everything except his reason. Still, there’s no question that vis-à-vis McEwan’s beloved “war” between Faith and Reason, his narrative voice took a sudden, shrill-shrieking and partisan turn in this novel. No longer the each-to-his-own tightrope-walker of 1992’s Black Dogs, the protagonist of 1998’s Enduring Love is not only committed, he’s condescending, cocky, and angry. The contrast is so sharp when one reads the two novels, as I did, back-to-back, that one can’t help wonder…what the hell happened?

While it would be perilous to hang so pronounced a shift on one little hook, a quick perusal of McEwan’s available biography brings forth the fascinating factoid that in the 1990s, during the time the author was writing Enduring Love, he was also engaged in a rancorous and occasionally bizarre divorce and custody battle, the details of which were splashed like acid all over the British tabloid press, reputedly the meanest in the world. The ex-wife in question, it falls out, was a self-styled clairvoyant, meditation-teacher and faith-healer.

In which case, my sympathies. Confirmed believers have lost their faiths over less.

The Problem of Empathy

What McEwan lacks most of all, in my view, is that imaginative empathy, indispensable for a really first rate novelist, that enables one to think inside the skin of people wholly different from oneself. This is especially discouraging since, in a sorrowing post-9/11 meditation entitled “Only Love and Then Oblivion,” McEwan had the wisdom to write:

It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality….the hijackers used fanatical certainty, misplaced religious faith, and dehumanising hatred to purge themselves of the human instinct for empathy. Among their crimes was a failure of the imagination.

This is beautiful stuff; no Christian personalist could put it better. How unfortunate, then that among McEwan’s failures as a novelist, particularly a novelist with a fixation on the dodgy “Faith vs. Reason” dichotomy, is his seeming inability to “imagine what it is like to be someone” who is a believer—a believer, that is, who is not irrational, and certainly not dangerous, delusional, or obsessive. As it happens, in the real world, millions of us/them going about the streets every day, minding our/their own business; yet such as we/they never make it onto McEwan’s pages, nor those of many of his fellow literary lights, without being dressed in fool’s motley. Many of us/them have even contributed, and continue to contribute, to the history of that Science-with-a-capital-S that McEwan so clearly worships, from Newton and Copernicus to Fr. Mendel and the Curies.

It might be pertinent to mention in this context that like many male authors of the so-called “Great White Narcissist school” of fiction, McEwan not only peoples his books with intellectuals of the secular persuasion, there are also few people of color, working class or uneducated people in his work—the latter show up in Saturday only in criminal form, which is to say, as another example of “the Other.” When Zadie Smith, the young novelist of White Teeth fame, tried to call McEwan on this in a recent interview [Believer, August 2005], McEwan ducked the question with an appeal to the need to “frame” his stories—an image, I felt, that was uncannily apt, given the word’s secondary legal connotations involving the misapplication of guilt by way of false evidence.

Failure of Vison, or Failure of Nerve?

What Zadie Smith also described in her Believer interview as “the burst of the irrational into the rational,” usually in a terrifying form, is the central leitmotif in the work of McEwan; but after meeting Joe Rose, the protagonist of Enduring Love, I began to recognize another, different, more subtle, and in some ways even more chronic form of anxiety in McEwan’s fiction: a fear not only of the more bestial forms of non-rationality, but also of the everyday and human: particularly mental illness and age-related loss of mental acuity. (At least two of McEwan’s novels, for instance, have included characters stricken by dementia or Alzheimer’s.)

And then there’s the fear of being just plain wrong. A McEwan protagonist may try to explain away emotions like fear as the result of “neural activity in the amygdala, sunk deep in the old mammalian part of our brains,” but he also spends an awful lot of his word count reassuring himself of the correctness of his analysis, whatever the ostensible subject. Could the author, I began to wonder as I moved from book to book, be less certain of his own self-described “hard won” rationalism and atheism than he would like to think? Christians, of course, have it on best authority that the Dark Night of the Soul is a stage of development awaiting every believer who stays the course; but rationalists are not supposed to be troubled by such Clouds of Unknowing.

Which brings me to my final problem with the fiction of the immensely gifted Ian McEwan: it is a different sort of “failure of imagination” and it is on full display in McEwan’s latest novel, Saturday.

Acclaimed by some as the first great “post-9/11” novel, Saturday delivers another brilliantly McEwanesque opening sequence: a London neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne, wakes up too early on his day off with a vague sense of unease. Getting out of bed, Perowne ponders the lazy, pleasant Saturday to come as he gazes out the bedroom window of his posh London townhouse, only to see a passenger jet wheeling slowly across the sky, on fire from what may or not be, in this post-9/11 world, a terrorist incident.

If there is any truth to the traditional storytelling wisdom that there is an unspoken “contract” between author and reader, obliging authors to “pay off” incidents that are “set up”—and I guess I’m enough of a literary traditionalist to think that without some really good narrative reason, there is―then it may be understood why I felt put out, stiffed even, when the book failed in fact to be a “post-9/11 novel,” as many critics declared and as the opening led me to believe.

See, this isn’t a book about a wealthy and complacent Londoner (a sort of upscale Everyman) coming to terms with the post-9/11threat of global terrorism; it’s a series of conversations and episodes, highlighting the so-called “law of unintended consequences,” that eventually unfolds along domestic-thriller lines. That one of these conversations includes a father-daughter exchange about the War on Terrorism as it was building up against Iraq in February 2003 doesn’t signify that the opening setup is paid off in any meaningful way, or that the author affords his readers any insights on the mess. In the end, the only setup that is paid off in this novel involves a more “everyday” form of urban anxiety, an incident of road rage leading to a home invasion such as might have just as easily occurred in 1993 as 2003.

I suspect that this failure to answer his own first-scene questions might have something to do with McEwan’s lack of a firm metaphysical foundation for his ethical and political beliefs, whatever they may be. Consider: without such a foundation, how can anyone, even with the utmost benevolence, deal with thorny questions like the effect of Global Terrorism on the individual, and the individual’s responsibility in dealing with it? Or whether the 1938 Neville Chamberlain appeasement metaphor is applicable to Saddam’s Iraq? Or whether Bush and Blair were morally justified in responding to the events of 9/11 with “Shock and Awe” against a government that, whatever its evils, appears to have had nothing to do with 9/11?

On the face of it offering little beyond a “whatever will work best” pragmatism, McEwan’s Saturday quickly downshifted to a more domesticable set of narrative questions―from Scope to Microscope, as it were: When confronted on the street with three bullies, should the rationalist/pragmatist protagonist run, fight, or use his superior but rather abstract powers of ratiocination to humiliate the leader in front of his two thug-underlings? And if he does, what might be the unintended consequences?

And if he does, I began to ask myself as I read the book, after such a crack opening, will the reader give a damn?

I didn’t. Since every scenario in a McEwan novel unravels in terms of chance accidents and biochemical or evolutionary determinism, perhaps it was for the best that the author decided not to waste breath and brain cells on the huge question of how the west should respond to global terrorism. That’s a subject for this generation’s Dostoevsky or Tolstoy…would that we had one.

(An aside: From the sounds of it, filmmaker Paul Greengrass may have come far closer to the mark, despite McEwan’s dismissal of movies as an inherently “superficial” medium, with his United 93. We may also hope that Updike’s new novel, The Terrorist, proves not only a departure from Updike’s standard adultery-in-New England fare, but a little more ambitious on the subject of terrorism and the West.)

The “Vision” Thing

More than one critic has noted a certain hesitance, even duality in McEwan. “McEwan is a Freudian with an Orwellian sense of decency,” wrote Alice Truax on Slate.com. “Rationality is [for McEwan]…not an instinct but an achievement, a sandcastle no sooner built than washed away by the tides of the mind,” wrote Adam Mars-Jones of The Observer. According to critic John Lanchester, “Ian McEwan has left-wing convictions and a right-wing imagination; the things he feels he ought to think, and the images which well up when he sits down to write, are at war.”

McEwan even admits, from time to time, that things may be a bit more complicated than his overt scientism would allow, but he doesn’t seem to know what to do with these more-things-in-heaven-and-earth, Horatio, moments. “There are certain mistakes,” he notes in one of Joe Rose’s numerous scientific digressions in Enduring Love, this one about the ingenious rescue of the faulty Hubble telescope, “that no quantity of astronauts can right.”

There are hints in several of his novels that McEwan is aware of the limits of scientific knowledge and that, as he put it in a recent interview, “the innerlife…is not driven by surface rationality but by a spectrum of hints, certainties that have no base.” It is interesting to note then that even though his novels have become increasingly complacent of late in their rationalistic tenor—the days of the narrator being caught between the poles of Sense and Sensibility appear to be over—in Saturday, it is the “Sensibility” characters that effectively save the day. Indeed, it could even be argued that it is the Sensible Perowne, with his fiendishly acute and hyper-rational self-awareness, that got them all into the mess in the first place.

It was in the context of this Hamletesque duality, this “thinking too precisely on the event,” that it occurred to me that McEwan’s reluctance to take on a large-scale subject, despite his large-scale literary gifts, might have more to do with a lack of philosophical confidence and vision than any possible literary shortcomings. Both Atonement and the opening scenes of Saturday prove that McEwan has the literary capacity to tackle a large canvas, but perhaps not the largeness of mind to wrap his skills around it. Nor, perhaps, the courage to risk his distinguished literary reputation on a venture into the dragon-ridden realms of “moral fiction”―the late John Gardner might approve, were he really to give it a go, but whether The New York Review of Books would is less certain.

To be or not to be

In 1949, Laurence Olivier filmed a screen version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that became instantly famous for Olivier’s voice-over prologue announcing that Hamlet was a play “about a man who could not make up his mind.” Perhaps “infamous” would be the better word, for Olivier’s little “frame” has echoed through the decades as incredibly simplistic in reference to Shakespeare’s fiendishly complex play; but I found myself reminded of it constantly as I made my way through McEwan’s oeuvre. The chiseled narrative voice of this writer, I felt, with the possible exception of his furious Enduring Love, was generally so cagey and hyper-cautious, so laden with the subtle sophistries of a man unwilling to take responsibility for the implications of his own alleged beliefs, that I began to long for an unexpected political or ideological outburst, even at the risk of agitprop. After all, you can’t be proven wrong if you don’t make a statement, and one of the hallmarks of the scientific method is falsifiability.

McEwan’s opting for the path of least resistance in Saturday felt less like an average citizen’s quandary about his competence to make an informed decision on one of the most complex “personal-is-political” issues of our day, than the indecision of a man so lacking a moral foundation on which to hang a Just War argument, for or against, that simple paralysis ensued; a sophisticated literary rendition of “I don’t know, so do let’s talk about something else.”

Or, as a football-fan friend of mine would have it, McEwan, one of the most gifted players on the field of fiction, just when he had the ball in hand, an open lane to the end zone, and his career-best chance to have a go at this century’s War and Peace, the mother of all literary touchdowns, he punted.

On Becoming a Classic

Even with a wordsmith as supremely gifted as McEwan, it would not surprise me if his fiction, as it stands, did not survive the test of time—that mysterious process that renders one work a “classic” and another no more than a footnote in some future grad student’s doctoral dissertation on “Postmodern meta-narrative” or “Communities of Anxiety in early twenty-first century English literature,” or “The Great White Narcissist school of fiction from Mailer to McEwan.” For when it comes to the process by which our present chaos might be organized into some harmony, at least intellectual harmony, McEwan, unlike many of the “Greats” before him, seems to have nothing to offer the reader beyond technical prowess and a predilection for the outdated intellectual fashions of the Enlightenment, dressed up in postmodern robes.

This is a highly personal view, of course; but for me, wasting a talent like this on what one critic called “over-extended short stories” written in the acid-ink of chronic Voltairean dyspepsia, is like taking out an enemy trench with a nuclear warhead. No question it gets the job done, if you’re into that sort of thing, but leaves many a reader with a profound sense of disappointment at the crater-sized might-have-beens. Grouchy meaning-junkie that I am, I am tempted to paraphrase the writer-protagonist of Atonement that, when it comes to Ian McEwan, “it was not the backbone of a story that [he] lacked. It was backbone.”

[Originally published in Second Spring Journal (http://www.secondspring.co.uk) and used by permission of the author.]

Murphy: The new ecclesial movements that have developed in the last fifty years have been a great gift to the Church, particularly, I think, for lay people seeking a greater sense of community with other Catholics with whom they share a spiritual sensibility or sense of personal vocation. But the downside, because these are indeed “new” movements, has been a certain “Wild West” atmosphere; enthusiasm, immaturity, charismatic leadership, and a belief that the group (or leader) has received a special grace from God have also occasioned problematic practices, disciplines, devotions, and attitudes surprisingly resistant, at times, to legitimate ecclesial oversight. What do you think has enabled this within the context of canon law?

Vere: This is something the Church has witnessed throughout her history. New movements have always arisen in response to different situations facing the Church. As new needs arise, so too do new movements. For example, St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic were contemporaries responding to the lukewarmness that had set into Medieval Catholic society.

The 20th Century saw an onslaught of secularism and atheism within society. The Church was not immune from the effects of what was happening in society. This is seen, for example, by the number of pro-abortion Catholic politicians as well as Catholics who practice contraception. Thus several new movements arose to present clear, orthodox Catholic teaching in a world that would prefer to ignore God.

Canon law has historically been more reactive than proactive in some aspects of its response. Canonists cannot predict what new charism or canonical structures the Holy Spirit will introduce to the Church. As one of my professors once joked, the Holy Spirit keeps canon lawyers in business. Whenever we finally have everything sorted into nice neat categories, He comes along and introduces something new. For example, the Franciscans and Dominicans broke the previous practice of incardinating — that is, tying their members — to a specific monastery. It was through these two orders that the idea of incardination to a religious order, rather than a geographical location, was introduced.

Likewise, Opus Dei introduced the structure of personal prelature. In Canada, the Companions of the Cross form seminarians in parishes, rather than in the seminary. All of these structures were innovative ideas at the time, based upon the charism of the movement through which the Holy Spirit inspired a structure previously unforseen by canon law.

On the other hand, not all new ideas are healthy. Some are quite dangerous to the spiritual welfare of the individual, and must be rooted out. Canon law affords the competent Church authorities the power to discern what is from God and worth keeping, and what is problematical and poses a danger to the faithful.

Murphy: What canon law is presently in place relevant to the new ecclesial movements, and do you think they are sufficient for the problems at hand?

Vere: Canon laws have different levels of approval, so that a new movement’s charism is continuously tested, and re-examined in light of the Church and her needs. For example, a movement will generally start as a private association of the faithful, which means the membership retains hold of the group’s possession should the group fail. From there it may receive approval as a public association of the faithful, where its possessions become the property of the Church in case the Church needs to intervene. Once a certain stability and membership is reached, if the group wishes for a deeper relationship between members, it may become an institute of consecrated life (religious order, secular institute, or society of apostolic life) of diocesan rite. And once another stability and level of membership is attained, it can then become an institute of consecrated life of pontifical rite. In Surprised by Canon Law II, my co-author and I devote an entire chapter to explaining the processes and various differences between these different types of structure within the Church. Suffice to say, at each level the Church is investigating and re-evaluating the movement’s charism.

Having said that, there are some warning signs that a movement is either not from God, or seriously troubled. These warning signs are not law in the strict sense of legislation, but more common sense based upon the Church’s historical experience with new movements. With the help of one of my former professors who specializes in canon law as it applies to religious life, I’ve assembled the warning signs into an essay published here.

Murphy: Was anything lacking in canon law, or lacking in the implementation of canon law, that would allow (for example) a group as large and lauded as the LC/RC to reach such a crisis point? In your view, are there any additions to canon law regarding ecclesial movement which you think might be appropriate?

Vere: I don’t think there was something lack in the law so much as lacking in the application of the law. The allegations against Fr. Maciel and criticism of certain aspects of LC/RC go back decades. However, everyone was looking at some of the discrepancies in the testimony of Fr. Maciel’s initial accusers. This happens when someone is victim to abuse, psychologists have told me. Victims of abuse apparently think with a different part of their brain, so their experience does not always come out in the correct chronology, or certain details get fragmented and confused. Not being a psychologist I don’t understand the details. Nor do I have access to the details of Rome’s first investigation. However, it is too easy in these situations to simply dismiss the accusation as false, which may be what happened. Today, especially after the recent sexual misconduct crisis to hit the Church, I think we have a better understanding of the victim’s psychology.

Also, people were looking at the good fruits of the LC/RC — lots of vocations to the priesthood, schools, tens of thousands of orthodox Catholic laity — and saying how could any of this negative stuff be true? Unfortunately, abusers aren’t concerned with orthodoxy or heterodoxy. They’re concerned with gaining, protecting and concealing access to victims. They will play whatever role helps them to gain and maintain this access. And an abuser will groom both his victims and other adults around him to prevent his abuse from coming to light.

Murphy: As you know, immense pressure (by way of promises, vows, admonitions to secretiveness vis-a-vis “outsiders who don’t understand our vocation” has been put on group members to “put up and shut up.” Those who do find the occasion or courage to pose objections, even about uncanonical practices, have been shunned or vilified. I have talked to a number of people from different groups who felt themselves completely isolated, with no one to turn to. What recourse does a faithful Catholic, troubled by doings in their own organization, have within the Church?

Vere: First of all, pray. Second, you can always approach the Church hierarchy with your concerns. For most people, this would be diocesan authorities — including the bishop, vicar general, episcopal vicar or judicial vicar. You can also approach your parish priest if this is happening on a local level. This is why these rights exist in canon law. If an apostolate or movement is truly Catholic, it should never fear recourse to the Church hierarchy.

Third, laity need to instruct themselves on their rights within the Church, so that when something like this happens they know where to turn and how to vindicate their rights. This is one of the reasons my co-author and I wrote Surprised by Canon Law, volumes one and two, to help laity better understand their rights within the Church.

Murphy: How much formation do diocesan priests receive about the issues surrounding new ecclesial movements? Do you think it is sufficient?

Vere: I don’t know if seminaries keep records of this or where one would obtain them, so I cannot answer the question with any certitude. However, I imagine it would depend on where the diocesan priest received his formation, as well when he received his formation. Certainly, in a post-Vatican II Church that has seen an increase in the number of new movements, it would make sense for seminary formation to provide future priests with training on this subject.

Murphy: Some groups which have developed uncanonical practices, such as unregulated vows and the imposition of confessors and spiritual directors who are also the penitent’s superior in the exterior forum, have notwithstanding received all sorts of hierarchical support, from the ad hoc mentoring of specific bishops and cardinals, to official recognition as Associations of Christ’s Faithful or Pontifical Institutes. Indeed, the leadership in those organizations will often point to that very support as a sort of “Good Housekeeping Seal” when members complain that their situation is irregular or abusive. It’s possible that the hierarchy does not always know the gory details, since the questionable practices are likely not written down in the group’s institutes, and some leaders are very canny about keeping visiting hierarchy away from any but the most “loyal” members; but that’s hard to believe with a group which has endured as much long, drawn-out controvers as LC/RC. What do you think is going on with this, and how is it to be remedied so as to prevent this kind of organizational meltdown?

Vere: One of my former canon law professors, who had dealt with a lot of these types of crisis to hit the Church, use to say: “The Church can usually avoid trouble when she follows her own rules. It’s when she fails to follow her own rules that she finds herself in trouble with the secular authorities and the laity.” This demonstrates why it is important to always be open and honest in one’s dealings with competent Church authorities. No founder or superior within a movement is above the law that binds all Catholics, or the obligation to submit to competent ecclesiastical authority.

Murphy: The admission of Fr. Maciel’s “double life” was made public by the LC almost four weeks ago, and yet we have heard nothing, or next to nothing, from the Vatican about it. Why, do you think, and what may we expect?

Vere: I don’t know Rome’s game plan, other than what has been reported in some Catholic media — namely, that Rome does not have any immediate plans to intervene directly. However, if the situation worsens or the LC/RC request it, I imagine Rome would intervene and take charge of the situation. However, Rome will often take a “wait and see” approach. It will wait to see whether the LC/RC can resolve the controversy internally, and make the necessary reforms on its own. If this fails, or if bishops join the chorus of those calling for a serious reform of the movement, then I would not be surprised if Rome steps in.

Murphy: A priest friend of mine, who was also a scholar of Church history, once commented that it had taken four hundred years for the great renewal launched by the Council of Trent to settle out, as it were, and become fully developed in the Church. Could we be looking at something like that here, with the Second Vatican Council and the new ecclesial movements? If so, given our current age of instant communications and the internet, and the Church’s historical tendency to “grind slowly, but exceedingly fine,” as the saying goes, what are the implications for the full integration of the new ecclesial movements, or at least preventing the kinds of scandals we’ve seen the last few years?

Vere: The average of age of any new religious order or institute of consecrated life that takes root is 400 years. So the time-frame of 400 years is certainly not without some significance. As the Church moves forward, certain lay movements will take root and carry out the mandate of the Second Vatican Council. Others will wither on the vine. What are the full implications for the Church? In the short term, these movements have helped reinvigorate the faith of the Catholic faithful in a culture that is increasingly hostile to Christ’s message. In the longer term, I’m not sure. History will have to play itself out, just as it did during previous epochs of the Church.

With regards to the LC/RC, who knows where this will end up? Certainly the Church will still be with us in the future— this is Christ’s promise to His apostles: “I am with you always.” But there is no guarantee that any individual movement or institute of consecrated life will survive along with the Church. Having said that, I think the LC/RC can survive this if they turn their focus to Christ and undertake a fundamental reform of the movement.

Murphy: As a final question, you’re not alone in calling for a reform or reconstitution of the LC/RC movement. What would you recommend?

Vere: With every passing day, this controversy has become more and more complicated. I sometimes think this is the way of the devil; he complicates the simple message of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Thus I recommend — and please keep in mind I am only one lay canonist located in the far reaches of the Church’s geography — a return to simplicity for the LC/RC.

To begin, the focus of the LC/RC response should be on Fr. Maciel’s victims. Not only is this the right thing to do, given that the victims have been doubly-victimized — first through their abuse at the hands of Fr. Maciel, and secondly by being branded publicly as liars by good people (acting in good faith) when the victims came forward with the truth. Thus there is an obligation in justice to acknowledge what was done to them and make restitution.

The victims are the primary concern of most people watching this from the outside. The victims are the ones with whom most people identify and sympathize. Thus any response from the LC/RC that does not put Fr. Maciel’s victims first will not be well-received by orthodox Catholics outside the LC/RC (and even many within the movement) as well as the world at large.

The second thing the LC/RC movement must do is apologize to the victims. The apology should be short, plainspoken, identify clearly the wrong done to them, and apologize for it. People become suspicious when apologies are overly complicated or couched in attempts to defend, justify or explain away what was done wrong. Admit the wrong. Apologize for the wrong. Don’t offer excuses.

The third thing, of course, is to offer prayer and restitution for the victims. And fourth, the movement needs to undertake a thorough reform, overseen by an outside party appointed by the Holy See, to purge itself of the practices that allowed this to happen. This reform should be open and transparent. In order to restore trust among Catholic faithful, the RC/LC need to tell us what they are doing to reform the movement and prevent similar occurrences in the future, and they need to follow through.

In the end, this is an extremely painful moment for the LC/RC. However, it is also a great opportunity for the movement to show a Christ-like example. A sincere apology to victims and a commitment to reform the movement will allow the LC/RC to move forward at the service of Christ and the Church.

God calls us as concerned friends of the LC/RC to play a very delicate role. Like an alcoholic in the gutter who recognizes he needs help, we cannot kick them while they are down. As Christians we don’t laugh at the drunk in the gutter, we try and help him. Thus we must offer our RC/LC brothers and sisters the support they need during this difficult time.

But we must also hold them accountable to a Christian standard and not allow them to fall back into the old patterns of behavior that allowed this scandal to happen. In other words, after rescuing the drunk from the gutter you don’t drop him off at the nearest bar or allow him to blame others for his alcoholism. You pray for him and you help him seek the treatment he needs.

This is true charity for souls. This is what Christ is calling us to do.

Conscience in Canon Law

As a convert who came into the Church at the age of nineteen in large part because of the writings of Cardinal John Henry Newman, it was with pleasure that I noted that the section on conscience in the Catholic Catechism (part 3, article 6) opens with a quote by Newman from his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk , written on the occasion of the Vatican I definition of papal infallibility. (In the Letter, Newman defended English Catholics, as only he could, against the familiar charge that they couldn’t in good conscience be good Catholics and loyal citizens of England at the same time.) Here’s the quote:

Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment… man has in his heart a law inscribed by God… His conscience is man’s most secret core and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths.

The Catechism proceeds to describe, among other things, the necessity of judging according to one’s conscience and the necessity to form one’s conscience by means of the Word of God and the teachings of the Church. But there are two principles worth repeating in the context of this discussion:

1782 . Man has the right to act in conscience and in freedom so as personally to make moral decisions. "He must not be forced to act contrary to his conscience. Nor must he be prevented from acting according to his conscience, especially in religious matters." [Dignitatis Humanae , Pope John Paul II]

1789. Some rules apply in every case:

* One may never do evil so that good may result from it.

* The Golden Rule: "Whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them."

* Charity always proceeds by way of respect for one’s neighbor and his conscience: "Thus sinning against your brethren and wounding their conscience… you sin against Christ." Therefore "it is right not to… do anything that makes your brother stumble."

In my novel, I relate a conversation between the protagonist and Lionel Krato [cf. part one of this series] about the nature of conscience, how it is properly formed, and its connection to Beauty. Here’s a relevant paragraph:

… It was the aesthetic element, he [Lionel] went on to explain, which had been neglected in these last utilitarian centuries, but was understood by the ancient philosophers and the Fathers of the Church. To them and to Lionel, Truth, Goodness and Beauty were one, a seamless garment, and where there was no appreciation for beauty there was liable to be little for truth or goodness either. Lionel then quoted Newman to the effect that Truth had two attributes: Power and Beauty. Real power, he added; power to attract, not to pressure or force. Force he said, quoting Simone Weil, turned persons into things, and was one of the sure signs of the diabolic. Or, to use the language of the police, Lionel said, forced entry is the sure sign of crime.

Beyond the sex-abuse charges against Fr. Maciel (some of which have been admitted by the LC to be true, though their nature and extent is as yet unclear), there is the issue of potential cover-ups. And connected to the issue of potential cover-ups, there is the fact that many ex-Legionaries and Regnum Christi members have spoken publicly about LC/RC practices which, given the nature of conscience and the statutes set up in the Code of Canon Law to protect its exercise among Christians, are disturbing: namely, practices which impose uncanonical restrictions on members’ exercise of conscience, spiritual direction, and the Sacrament of Reconciliation; practices imposed ostensibly to maintain charity and unity, but which also serve, conveniently, to silence legitimate questions or challenges; practices which are intended to prevent outsiders from finding out what goes on within the organization; practices that intend to maintain a public persona, whatever the "inside" reality, of piety, holiness, success, and the production of "good fruit."

Such practices were doubtless what prompted the recent comments of Baltimore Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien, “[I]t’s clear that from the first moment a person joins the Legion, efforts seem to be made to program each one and to gain full control of his behavior, of all information he receives, of his thinking and emotions…. This is not about orthodoxy,” he said, as reported by his archdiocesan organ, The Catholic Review . “It is about respect for human dignity for each of its members.”

Among the alleged practices: taking vows not only to obey Fr. Maciel, but also never even to criticize him; restricting (even prohibiting) members’ visits to non-LC/RC family and friends; shunning ex-members and attributing malicious or diabolic motives to critics and ex-members; discouraging or even forbidding members from seeking confession or spiritual direction from non-LC/RC priests; imposing spiritual directors and confessors on members, even with the spiritual director is also the member’s "boss" in some official capacity in the organization. (More on this, later.)

I could go on.

Some of this stuff, whenever true in any organization, is just plain vicious, un-Christian and manipulative; when it occurs in a Catholic association it also transgresses clear norms of Canon Law. For example, regarding 1) the rights of every Christian, lay or religious, in the exercise of their conscience, and 2) the proper way to manage ecclesial associations. For specific norms, check out the following canons:

* 212, 219-221, 223

* 305

* 325

The problem is, judging from personal experience and speaking with others from a variety of ecclesial movements (some well known, some not; some with canonical status, some not), these are not uncommon practices. If so, this latest scandal will not be the last connected to a new ecclesial movement.

False Conscience and its Bitter Fruit

As I suggested in the previous section, even beyond the immediate victims of an abusive Group or Founder, consideration must be given to the predicament of that far larger group of good people who find themselves "second-hand" victims of an organization afflicted with cultish attributes — those ordinary priests, consecrated and laity who do the bulk of the "praying, paying, and obeying", as the old saying goes, in a new ecclesial movement. What breaks the heart is that these second-hand victims are invariably among the most idealistic in the Church, the most generous in spirit and fervent in faith. Indeed, it is their very virtues of idealism, generosity and fervor, coupled as they often are with youth, inexperience, and spiritual and/or psychological immaturity, that render so many of these good Catholics vulnerable to groups promising an inside line on God’s will and the Church’s blessings.

A priest-friend once commented that it can take the Church centuries to integrate and "normalize" the kind of revolution/renewal in the liturgy, canon law, and religious life one saw after the Council of Trent. He predicted a similar time-frame for the Church to fully implement Vatican II and integrate the new ecclesial movements. (This prediction was made almost a quarter of a century ago, before our “new age” of instant communications.)

Either way, centuries are a very long time and unfortunately we, who are still in these frontier "Wild West" decades of the new ecclesial movements, are too often forced to learn the hard way that good intentions, fervor, and ostensible orthodoxy are not enough to protect us from serious abuses; that sometimes even the apparent blessing of the Church — that "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" granting some form of canonical status to a new movement — is not enough. Bishops, as we in America have had reason to learn in the last few decades, sometimes fall down on their job of protecting the faithful from wolves in shepherds’ clothing; nor even is papal support, as other commentators on the Maciel scandal have pointed out, among those "faith and morals" decisions which fall under the assurance of infallibility. As the history of the Church proves, when the laity rely solely on their immediate leadership to discern spirits and the signs of the times — when they truly do nothing but "pray, pay, and obey" — they are likely as not to be led astray.

I wrote in my previous post about the methods some groups use to control their members; but many who have never suffered this kind of experience still wonder how it is possible that so many good, intelligent people take so long (if ever) to recognize the manipulations and deceptions.

The flip answer is often, "brainwashing!" While that’s no doubt off the mark in most cases, there is one way at least in which the notion of "brainwashing" may be instructive: that is, in the propensity of imbalanced groups for "forming" their members in a manner which will sooner or later inevitably place them in a situation of "false conscience": where obedience to the group’s methods or leaders conflicts with fundamental principles of charity and the teachings of the Church. In this excruciating moral "double-bind," a member will either resist, thereby suffering feelings of guilt and confusion, as well as the displeasure of the Group; or else will submit his will and do what is asked of him, even though he knows, in his heart of hearts, that what he has been asked to do is wrong. Whichever decision the person makes, his human and divinely bestowed dignity suffers tremendously, and that suffering can be acute.

In his classic Apologia pro vita sua , Cardinal Newman, relating the story of his conversion from childhood Evangelicalism to youthful Anglicanism and finally to Catholicism, describes his own struggles with a case of "false conscience" derived from absorbing contradictory theological notions at an early age:

Now I come to two other works, which produced a deep impression on me in the same autumn of 1816, when I was fifteen years old, each contrary to each, and planting in me the seeds of an intellectual inconsistency which disabled me for a long course of years. I read Joseph Milner’s Church History , and was nothing short of enamoured of the long extracts from St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, and the other Fathers which I found there. I read them as being the religion of the primitive Christians: but simultaneously with Milner I read Newton on the Prophecies, and in consequence became most firmly convinced that the Pope was the Antichrist predicted by Daniel, St. Paul, and St. John. My imagination was stained by the effects of this doctrine up to the year 1843; it had been obliterated from my reason and judgment at an earlier date; but the thought remained upon me as a sort of false conscience. Hence came that conflict of mind, which so many have felt besides myself; — leading some men to make a compromise between two ideas, so inconsistent with each other, — driving others to beat out the one idea or the other from their minds, — and ending in my own case, after many years of intellectual unrest, in the gradual decay and extinction of one of them…

In new ecclesial movements exhibiting cult-like attributes, the double-bind situation of "false conscience" arises when a Group undertakes to form its members to accept, unconditionally and simultaneously, two potentially contradictory "absolutes" that go something like this:

1. The Church is the Body of Christ and the means by which Christ gives us the ("ordinary") grace of salvation. It is our duty as Christians to obey the teachings of the Church in all matters of faith and morals.

2. The group (or the Founder, by way of his charism) is our group’s special ("extraordinary") means of grace. By God’s will, it/he is the means given to us to fulfill our Christian vocation. Therefore it is our duty as members of the group to work tirelessly for the Group/Leader; to trust that it/he has received special graces of discernment which we cannot share or even understand; to obey our Founder and Group superiors in all matters, even when we think they are wrong.

Now, number 1, of course, is the teaching of the Church herself; the sine qua non of Catholic ecclesiology and the basis for our moral system and the proper formation of conscience. But number 2 is an exaggeration of the Church’s understanding of the special ("extradordinary") charisms an individual may receive from God by means of a community or form of spirituality. For those who believe they have a call, the practice of a certain spirituality within a specific community may indeed be their particular way of living out the universal Christian charism; but it is not sine qua non (required for salvation), and can never (should never attempt to) contradict or usurp the ordinary means of Grace, or the Church’s universally established teachings on faith and morals.

To most of us, the notion that a Founder’s charism might give him (or his group) "special" permission in "special" circumstances (because of "all the good it does") to keep a mistress, or abuse young men, or misuse funds, or cook the books, or lie (even to the Vatican and members of the Curia) to maintain appearances, or hide crimes and malfeasance from legitimate authority, or vilify critics and ex-members, or insist that members receive spiritual direction only from "loyal" priests, or demand the kind of absolute obedience, reverence and freedom from criticism that not even the Pope could or should enjoy, is complete (and malignant) nonsense. Unfortunately, the more the group resembles a cult, whatever its originally Catholic mission, and whatever its canonical status (which is never "once and for all", incapable of being withdrawn) the more the importance of the Group or Founder’s "charism" is exaggerated; even to the pointing of trumping, as it were, the Church’s teaching on its own nature.

The Group/Founder with an exaggerated, even Narcissistic, sense of its/his own grace and mission will accomplish this dangerous control of otherwise good Christian consciences by means of the methods mentioned in an earlier section. They/he will also do it by imposing the constant repetition of slogans and prayers referencing the Group’s or Founder’s charism; by ceaselessly assuring members that the approbation the Group/Founder has received from the hierarchy is sufficent cause for trust that everything the Group/Founder does or demands is "of the Holy Spirit"; by constantly referencing the "good fruits" achieved by the Group in terms of conversions, growth in membership, or support (especially financial) from famous or important Catholics. Every community meditation is on the glories of the Group/Founder, and how members should serve and be grateful to it/him; every homily is about the Group/Founder and the graces received from it/him.

Given the power of human concupiscence, with its temptations to lust, greed, pride, anger, or the desire for power, if this sort of overheated and imbalanced "spiritual formation" goes unchecked by legitimate ecclesial authority, disaster and scandal in some form is inevitable. It is also likely to overshadow, to say the least, all the "good fruits" for which members have offered up countless prayers and sacrifices. The whole Church suffers.

The False Conscience in a Concrete Situation

As I have been proposing in this series, these types of uncanonical practices are, alas, hardly exclusive to the Legionaries or Regnum Christi. They flourish in other movements as well and carry the same potential for serious abuse. Even when the abuse does not reach the extreme of covering sexual crimes, the damage done to individual Christians — to their faith, conscience, and trust in the goodness of God — can be severe. The fact that the patterns of abuse can go on for years, without ecclesial intervention (whether because of ignorance, or indecision, or turning a blind eye because “so much good is being done”), extends the damage to the whole Church.

The crux of the problem of the creation of “false conscience” in abusive movements is the attempt to impose a model of religious obedience that in any given situation trumps all other considerations, including the Church’s own standards for operating set down in canon law, obligations due legitimate authority “outside” the movement, whether ecclesial or secular, and even Church teachings and the plain meaning of the Gospel. In a manner reminiscent of war criminals excusing their behavior with the “I was just obeying orders”, abusive spiritual leaders will often misappropriate and exaggerate concepts of religious obedience for their own ends — e.g., by taking literally the Ignatian dictum that one should “be a corpse in the hands of his superiors.” In so doing, abusive organizations put their members in the absurd and spiritually damaging situation of being made to feel guilty for doing good or for refusing to do evil; for following one’s conscience, even when one’s conscience is in accord with the teachings of Christ and the Church . Like Cardinal Newman, who in spite of all his learning and wisdom was troubled by the deeply ingrained “false conscience” that the pope was the Antichrist — this, for years after he knew on every rational and theological level that it was nonsense — it may take years for the victim of an abusive organization to free himself emotionally and spiritually from the truly evil notion that one can do no evil as long as it is commanded by a superior and is intended for the furtherance of an organization which aims to “save souls”.

As a reminder that the Legionaries are far from being the only group accused of this kind of warped and warping formation, I’d like to share a friend’s story told me some years ago, which occurred in a different movement.

A well-educated cradle Catholic who had undergone an intense “reversion” experience, my young friend joined a Catholic lay organization with canonical status and an evangelistic mission. Eventually he took a paid position at the organization’s headquarters. This involved uprooting his young family to another state; but though initially excited to be given the privilege of earning a living, however modest, while working “for the Church”, the young man quickly discovered, however, that in this new ecclesial movement, twelve and fourteen hour work days, six and even seven days a week were the norm. The young man’s work was largely oriented towards recruitment and fundraising activities, and the long hours were intersperse with lengthy chapel prayers and retreats, led by the group’s Founder, whose primary purpose at the pulpit seemed to be to stir his followers to increasing levels of commitment and obedience to “the charism of the Founder”. At all times, what “was good for the organization” was equated with what was good for the Church.

Whatever the Founder’s “charism”, however, far from inducing a joyous or prayerful Christian atmosphere in the organization, the Founder’s temperament, even at the lectern, was so angry, negative and paranoid in tone that work became a living Purgatory — this, while the Founder waxed thoughtful, meditative, pious, and self-deprecating among visiting prelates or long-distance members on retreat. According to my young friend, the “cognitive dissonance” he experienced on a daily basis was acute.

Moreover, as the young man (and others who worked at the center) soon learned, the Founder’s strict Catholic faith did not prevent him from “playing hard ball”, as he liked to put it, both within the organization, in his treatment of underlings, and in business dealings with members or vendors in the local and wider Catholic community. This “hard ball” was excused by comments like, “even the saints had faults”, or “if you think this is tough, try the Legionaries or Opus Dei”, or by a constant name-dropping of all the ecclesial higher-ups who supported the organization’s mission, but who (of course) had no idea how things were run on the ground. (Visiting clergy and hierarchy were kept busy doing promotional video shoots and steered clear of potential contacts with lower-rung members who could not be trusted to be discreet.)

According to the young man, the Founder once claimed that “24 hours of a member’s day belong to the organization”. He made the message stick by putting families “under obedience” to send their children to certain schools, or to live in the neighborhood of his choice. The primary role of spouses and families, according to the Founder, was to “free up the member for his vocation”, primarily by not complaining when wife and children never saw their husband/father. Single or married, all members were admonished never to discuss group issues with “outsiders”, even their parish priests in the confessional.

Eventually, the Founder began choosing members’ “spiritual advisors” for them, and often this person, usually a layman, was also the member’s work supervisor. As may be imagined, our young man began to feel as if a noose were tightening around his neck, and that of his entire family, and began to question whether the organization was as much “of the Holy Spirit” as he had originally thought. When the young man discovered, much to his Founder’s chagrin, what was in the code of canon law about how ecclesial movements should be run, or how the volunteers under his supervision should be treated, he began to see the handwriting on the wall. In this troubled state of mind he prayed for guidance, for some “sign” as to what he should do, especially since he had learned to be afraid, given the Founder’s tendency to make public Judases out of anyone who crossed him, of what would happen if he tried to leave. In desperation, the young man began a nine-day novena to the Divine Mercy.

While this was taking place, the young man had been set to work on an advertising insert for the organization, to be placed in a widely circulated Catholic newspaper. Part of a very expensive media campaign, the group’s Founder was very excited about the fundraising possibilities from the insert, and was expecting a large return on the organization’s investment. But in the course of his work, the young man had been warned by the advertising specialist who was printing the insert, and who had much experience with Catholic media campaigns, that such inserts rarely produced enough even to cover expenses. The young man informed the leader of the advertiser’s warning, both in person and in a written memo, and the potential for failure was discussed in meetings with the Founder and several of the administrative staff; but the leader overruled all objections, so convinced was he that God was going to bless the group with a great fundraising success.

The media insert did indeed turn out to be a miserable failure in terms of fundraising, and the organization was suddenly faced with thousands of dollars of debt, some of it owed to the newspaper, some of it to the advertiser who had printed the piece. Rather than accept the consequences of his executive decision, however, the Founder tried to blame the failure on his staff’s lack of faith and negative attitude. Then he ordered my young friend to write a letter, in the young man’s name, not the Founder’s, stating that the advertiser — the very man who had warned them all of the likelihood of failure if fundraising was the objective — had given him “positive assurances” that the organization would at least get back its investment on the project. My young friend, who believed that the Founder was intending the proposed letter as a preliminary to refusing to pay what was owed, and possibly even to setting him up as a “fall guy” if things devolved into legal action, reminded the Founder that not only was what he was suggesting a lie, but that the advertiser was himself a good Catholic and conscientious business man with a young family to support, and shouldn’t be out thousands of dollars because of the organization’s actions.

Notwithstanding, the Founder insisted that the letter he was asking for was all “standard business practice” and that the young man should be able to write the letter in good conscience. (The Founder, by the way, had recently made himself the young man’s “spiritual adviser” as well as his boss.)

This confrontation took place on the last day of our young man’s novena to the Divine Mercy. As dreadful as it was, he was almost relieved to receive so clear a sign as to the nature of his situation, and whether something was terribly wrong in that organization, and he realized he needed to figure out how to get out of there as soon as possible. He refused to write the letter, of course, and told the Founder, who was not pleased, that if he felt that was the truth in his conscience, he would have to write the letter himself. (He never did, as far as my young friend knew, nor did he ever find out what went down with the advertising debt.)

I don’t want to make this episode sound like it was a simple matter of conscience for our young group member, because by his account, it was excruciating, a true dark night of the soul. He was only able to “do the numbers” finally about the organization because a situation had arisen with a (to him) crystal clear moral resolution, whatever his Founder’s insistence that it was an ordinary business matter, or that it was spiritual pride on his part to insist on his own discernment over that of the Founder of an organization that enjoyed so much ecclesial support. But by this time my young friend had already given several years of his (and his family’s) life to the organization, and the pressure subsequently put on him, before he could finally extricate himself, was intense. It included variations on shunning, the back-chatted circulation of calumnies, and even the suggestion on the part of a priest attached to the group that the young man needed an exorcism to dispel a spirit of rebellion. (This same priest, who reported directly to the Founder, had a disturbing tendency to ask my young friend, during their confessions/conferences, whether “we are still in the seal of the confessional”. On at least one occasion my friend heard the Founder repeat something to him that he had only told the priest, and in what he thought had been the context of confession.)

After that, the young man told me, he was in so much spiritual pain that the next time he went to Mass, when he remembered that his Founder (and the too-compliant priest) went to Communion every day, he could barely summon the will to go to Communion himself, and the Body of Christ tasted like ashes on his tongue.

(Some of my readers may recognize part of this from my novel: the young man’s story made such an impression on me that I ended up using it in a fictionalized form. I mean, who could make this stuff up? )

I’m not sure what religion this is, but anyone who thinks that it is in this manner that souls will be led to a salvific encounter with Christ are tragically mistaken. Moreover, movements such as these, however much they tout their spiritual success, tend to display a pattern of revolving-door memberships, a small cadre (”Gideon’s Army”) of no-matter-what devotés, and a trail behind them littered with spiritual and psychological casualties — ex-members who are too battered or frightened to raise the general alarm, and wouldn’t know how to do so even if they had the will for it. The problem is, too many of our young people and laity, even priests, are simply not well formed enough (outside the hothouse environment of the movement itself) to discern the difference between true religious obedience and the abnegation of one’s personal spiritual or moral duty when a “superior” comes between.

People — and Cultures — of the Lie

Ressler’s book is in many ways a study of the criminal socipathic mind, one feature of which is an almost complete lack of internally based moral norms; another feature is an almost intractable habit of deceit — this latter because the sociopath, while subject to no moral norms himself, is keenly aware that most other people are and would condemn him if they knew his secret actions; also because (to boot) he wants to be “special” and rather enjoys “putting one over” on the gullible others who restrict their own freedoms by adherence to a moral code he rejects.

Another book I came across in my research is M. Scott Peck’s classic People of the Lie. In it, Peck, a Christian psychotherapist, focuses more on the personality of “narcissists“—individuals who do have consciences, who know better, and yet who are similarly caught up in a web of deceit; self-deceit first and foremost. The problem for society, and for groups led by narcissists, is that the maintenance of this pattern of self-deceit requires the deceit of others — others who the narcissist loves to control and from whom he wishes to receive admiration, even adulation.

Here’s a quote from Peck:

The words “image,” “appearance,” and “outwardly” are crucial to understanding the morality of the evil. While they seem to lack any motivation to be good, they intensely desire to appear good. Their “goodness” is all on a level of pretense. It is, in effect, a lie. This is why they are the “people of the lie.”

Whether explained by the personality disorders of Sociopathy or Narcissism, or something else, the fact that Fr. Maciel was able to perpetrate a fraud of holiness on thousands of people who viewed him as their special mediator of grace and vocation, necessitates the consideration that his web of deceit spread further than just his own conscience. There must have been, as there always is when someone like this attains great fame and a reputation for holiness, a level of complicity or at least spiritual blindness on the part of at least some at the upper levels of leadership.

It goes a long way to explaining some of the most controversial aspects of the LC/RC “methodology”, discussed on such websites as ReGain network and Life After RC. Similar techniques of control, limiting dissent and maintaining a public persona of seamless unity are familiar to survivors of many a toxic organization. In particular one sees the vilification, impugning of motives, and shunning of people who are brave (or desperate) enough to suggest that there is something rotten or at least imbalanced at the heart of the formation they are receiving. These are all, of course, forms of scapegoating.

Another excerpt from Peck, who identifies scapegoating as one of the primary signs of evil:

A predominant characteristic, however, of the behavior of those I call evil is scapegoating. Because in their hearts they consider themselves above reproach, they must lash out at anyone who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to preserve their self-image of perfection…

Scapegoating works through a mechanism psychiatrists call projection. Since the evil, deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world’s fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad. They project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil, on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others…

Evil, then, is most often committed in order to scapegoat, and the people I label as evil are chronic scapegoaters. In The Road Less Traveled I defined evil “as the exercise of political power—that is, the imposition of one’s will upon others by overt or covert coercion—in order to avoid…spiritual growth.” In other words, the evil attack others instead of facing their own failures. Spiritual growth requires the acknowledgment of one’s need to grow. If we cannot make that acknowledgment, we have no option except to attempt to eradicate the evidence of our imperfection.

Strangely enough, evil people are often destructive because they are attempting to destroy evil. The problem is that they displace the locus of the evil. Instead of destroying others they should be destroying the sickness within themselves.

Next, a glance at some of the most commonly employed techniques of overt/covert “coercion” used to maintain the appearance of holiness on the part of leaders and groups.

Transparency

I’ll be writing later about the methods some Catholic groups (by all accounts, the LC/RC among them) use and sometimes abuse for maintaining control of its “public face” — methods which they share with cults. But first, I’d like to touch upon the related notion of “transparency,” one of the most frequently heard words of late in connection with the Maciel scandal and the LC/RC.

From the moment of its origin, and in some places still today, where believers are persecuted, Christianity has from time to time been an “underground” religion, requiring a high level of secrecy in its operations to survive. Too, times of great religious turmoil, such as the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, have encouraged the hierarchy, the Vatican, and sometimes the leadership of religious institutes to operate, justifiably or not, depending on circumstances, under the assumption that honesty, or at least transparency, would not be the best policy.

Unfortunately, the conviction that one is surrounded by enemies and potential Judases is not only a sign of potential paranoia and imbalance, it is also a standard reason given by over-controlling group leaders of every persuasion for demanding absolute obedience — in particular, obedience to the leader’s demand for absolute silence to “outsiders” about his modus operandi. This is, of course, also standard procedure for every group with temptations to cult-hood.

Or, as one Catholic group leader of my acquaintance used to say, whenever challenged on his obsessive habits of secrecy, both within and without his organization, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.” The “they” in question were as often as not visiting members of the clergy, religious, and hierarchy.

But just as Perfectae Caritatis calls on religious institutes to adjust their charisms to the needs of the times, if the Maciel scandal proves one thing, I should think it is that, in this age of blogs, e-mail and YouTube, the old habits of Circling the Wagons and spin-doctoring problematic practices simply do not work. Worse, they turn what might have been just a small organizational grass fire into a conflagration.

An example comes from an entirely different sphere of culture. Nearly the same day that the news of Fr. Maciel’s double life exploded in the blogosphere, actor Christian Bale, shooting an intense scene for the new Terminator movie, became enraged with what he viewed as unprofessional conduct on the part of the film’s young cinematographer. Bale, an actor I otherwise much admire for his on-screen intensity, proceeded to ream the poor fellow in a four-minute, F-bomb laden rant that, unluckily for all concerned, was picked up on the mikes. Before the day was over, the rant was all over the Internet. Within hours, an entrepreneurial music video geek had turned Bale’s rant into a sort of “rap video,” and by the evening of the second day the video had received six hundred thousand hits on YouTube.

My point being, though the Faith never changes, our understanding of it, and particularly our understanding of the best ways to live it and share it in a particular time, do change and develop. Like it or not, we are living in an age of instant communications and “viral marketing.” Surely if ever there was a time for the new movements to adopt a “methodology” of transparency, it is now.

“Public Face” vs. “Private Face”

Every religious group (or business, corporation, family, agency, team…you name it) develops a certain “public persona” over time, and I would be hard put to name any that didn’t want that public face to be a positive or even (in the case of religious groups) holy one. Ideally, in a Catholic group, that “face” should reflect the image of Christ himself.

But beneath the public persona, every group has a private face, too — the image formed from all the things which only members of that group see. (N.B.: How much a given member sees, particularly in highly structured, hierarchical groups, may depend on his/her place in the group.) The private face, too, should reflect the image of Christ, and when it does not — when members see a repeated pattern of “private face” words and deeds belying “public face” words and deeds, we are looking at a diseased community.

In a truly healthy and holy group, I would submit — once again the word “transparency” leaps to mind — there ought to be an overall consistency between the public and private faces of a group, particularly in terms of habitual approach, attitude, and methodology. This, even when certain things (say, for “reasons of national security,” or to protect the maturity level of a child) are occasionally better kept behind closed doors. I’m not talking about perfection here, which none of us will see in any group this side of the Beatific Vision, so much as a “habit of being”; but when there is a marked discrepancy between the public and private persona, there exists in the group an unacceptable level of dishonesty, of disrepect for human dignity, and of manipulation. As John Paul II taught us, this is the opposite of charity, of “love”; not “hate”, but use.

When the discrepancy is wholesale, we have a situation of outright hypocrisy, malfeasance, and abuse.

Sometimes the prettifying of a group’s “public face” may involve the tacit cooperation of friendly members of the hierarchy; at other times the hierarchy may not perceive the deception because vigorous pressure has been put on members to keep things mum, usually with the rationalization that “outsiders” (including priests and bishops and popes) “do not understand our vocation.” The hypocrisy, malfeasance, and abuse inherent in the present Maciel/LC situation are obvious on the personal level, of course, and may suggest the existence of some covering-up at high levels within and outside of the organization; but that is not my main concern. It is my belief, rather, that any future investigation of the LC/RC (or any other ecclesial movement, for that matter) must include the question of public/private face in broader organizational matters; for in groups troubled by scandals like this it would be the exceptional organization that didn’t exhibit analogous patterns of masking all the way through the ranks, and for any number of reasons — say, to prevent disclosures about,

* practices which do not conform to the Code of Canon Law

* practices which blur the line that by Canon Law should separate the exterior and interior forums; the line between group discipline and private conscience and the choice of personal spiritual direction

* practices which would upset family members, if they knew about them

* practices and attitudes which, in effect, set up “parallel churches” and divide Catholics from the local parish communities

* teachings or language which suggest heterodox theological positions

* teachings which confuse Church-sanctioned spiritual teachings with the private political or social beliefs of the Founder

* practices and code language masking inappropriate forms of recruitment and fundraising

* inappropriate expenditures

* inappropriate or heterodox devotions and practices, particularly relating to an excessive veneration of and loyalty to the Founder or the Organization

* the extraction of “vows” or “promises” from recruits, sometimes at a too-early age, which by Canon Law should be under the regulation of the local bishop or the Vatican, but are not.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

Here’s how I described, in my novel, the methods used to “mask” my fictional “Student Apostolate of North America.”

For the public view, Peter put his sweetest face forward as he made sure that no one nearby could prove an obstacle to his rule. His statements to the Archdiocese, to visiting prelates and Catholic journalists, remained moderate and submissive. He spoke in glowing terms of continuing his brother’s “important work.” He saved the meat of his new doctrine for the “inner circle.” Thus to outsiders and visitors Krato spoke in treacly terms of community, of faith, of charity. To the inner circle he spoke the language of combat and discipline, of leverage and pressure. He spoke the language of Power….

Unquestioning obedience quickly became the sole criterion for preferment at SANA. From the beginning Peter kept tabs on everyone by a stooge system worthy of a federal penitentiary or the Nixon White House. Having spent many years in English public schools and Canadian military academies, I am an old sweat at that particular game, and more than familiar with the techniques. For example, Peter sent everyone out “two by two,” whether to the grocery store, to class, or to the loo. Parents and guardians, such as they were, were surprised to find their sons coming home, on their increasingly infrequent visits, with at least one fellow SANA member invariably in tow. This measure was implemented primarily to prevent “imprudent disclosures” about the newly-reformed way of life at SANA House. The idea was that there would always be someone standing over your shoulder to hush you up if you spoke out of turn, or rat on you if you sneaked a smoke….

By the time I left, some members were making private “promises” of celibacy for increasingly extended periods of time, with a view to a possible permanent “Covenant.” Krato didn’t use the word “vow,” of course, because vows are governed by the Code of Canon Law and Archdiocesan oversight would interfere with his grace as Founder. Notwithstanding its non-canonical status, however, Peter managed to impose the concept of these promises with a feat of verbal gymnastics that I am unable to replicate, except to say that it communicated Krato’s belief that, if anything, such a promise would be “spiritually” if not “formally” even more binding on our souls than the vow of a cloistered religious.

To review methods and disciplines in other (real) groups, many of which are variations on a theme of manipulation known to cultish or abusive groups of every description, I recommend looking at the sites of ex-LC/RC folks, such as ReGAIN and Life-after-RC.

[CE Editor's Note: This series of articles is adapted from a series previously published on Debra Murphy's blog and is used by permission.]

This is old news. Depending on who you talked to, over the years, or which media outlet reported the accusations, the reaction in the larger Catholic community has ranged from triumphant I told you sos of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy variety on the Left, to equally inflammatory counter-charges on the Right about disgruntled fifth-columnists, possibly under the influence of Dark Forces, set upon discrediting the Legionaries and even the Church.

In other words, it hasn’t been pretty.

Let me state right off that I am not now, as the rubric goes, nor ever have been a member of, or been associated with, either the Legionaries of Christ or Regnum Christi, its lay affiliate. I have no special knowledge of the Maciel case, or the inner workings of those organizations, and my only contact at all with the LC/RC — for reasons of brevity the moniker I will use for these two organizations in the course of these articles — is a longtime long-distance friendship with a parish priest who spent several years with the LC back in the eighties. This gentleman’s reasons for leaving the LC were, if memory serves, complex; on one level it might be stated that it simply wasn’t a good temperamental or vocational fit; but there is no question he left with the conviction that, whatever its many valuable aspects, there was something (in his view) not right in the spiritual formation of the Legionaries and the manner of their devotion to its founder, Fr. Marcial Maciel.

Be that as it may, I repeat, I have no special interest or knowledge of this particular case. So why would I undertake to write on this subject at all?

An Encounter Between Fiction and Reality

In 2004 I published a novel , a spiritual thriller, one of whose leading themes was the deleterious and sometimes tragic consequences following affiliation with a fictional lay Catholic student group named SANA, the "Student Apostolate of North America." This group, which in the story had been founded by a Professor of Education (Lionel Krato) as a sort of Catholic fraternity ("Immaculata House") for university students in Milwaukee, had, upon Lionel’s untimely death, been transformed by his brother and nephew, Peter and Richard Krato, into the militant "SANA".

I haven’t the space or time to enumerate the many peculiarities of this imaginary group, explored at length in the novel, but suffice it to say that it interests me that some of the charges that have been laid at the door of the LC/RC would be familiar to any ex-member of SANA, and perhaps to current and ex-members of any number of real-world new ecclesial movements in the Church.

Here follows a brief excerpt from the novel, to give you a feel for what I’m talking about:

(N.B.: In the excerpt, the "Areopagus" refers to the weekly group meeting of the members of Immaculata House. What follows is the result of grad student Richard Krato’s researches into the history of the Knights Templar. The ellipsis in the middle leaves out a couple of paragraphs of "group argument" which would include a potential "spoiler.")

Together, Peter and Richard Krato poured over every available document, reliable or otherwise, relating to the Templars. The fruit of their devoted research was a self-styled Program for an American Crusade, which they presented before the assembled members of the House in the last meeting of the Areopagus before Lionel’s departure for Rome. As might be expected, however, in adapting the Templars’ spirituality to the situation at Immaculata House, Peter and Richard rigorously applied the aspects of the Templar Order that suited them, and vigorously ignored any cautionary elements to be drawn from the order’s controversial history. I enclose a copy of the information Peter and Richard passed out that evening, but I paraphrase their Program here in brief:

1. A two-week guided "formation retreat" (or "boot camp," as it came to be called) for all new recruits or "aspirants" at Immaculata House.

2. An elaborate business plan for organizational expansion by means of modern methods of management and fundraising. (What Peter described as "taking the best of American culture to serve the Church.") The goal was a "franchise" network of identically operated and centrally-controlled subsets spreading across the college and university campuses of the nation, hybridizing the unity of purpose of a military battalion with the financial sophistication and "product familiarity" of a fast-food chain.

3. Charismatic leadership supported by the absolute loyalty of a small but disciplined "Gideon’s Army" formed in military-style obedience.

4. The development of Spiritual Power through the Four Pillars of Spiritual Power Program, which included the practice of Prayer, Poverty, Persistence, and the counsels of Perfection.

Without prior consultation with Lionel, Richard and Peter unveiled their Program before the assembled Areopagus, their pale faces shining as if they had just descended from Sinai with the stone tablets of the Law. Peter was whipping out his flow charts when Lionel arrived, several minutes late and obviously distracted.

Talking without pause like a fringe-party orator in Hyde Park, Peter proceeded to announce to the assembly that God was calling Lionel Krato and the young men of Immaculata House to be the founding members of a well-organized and disciplined army of young apostles that would be to the third millennium what the Knights Templar had been to the Crusades. Moreover, because of America’s unique position of leadership in the world (so went Peter’s reasoning) the conversion of America’s youth would inevitably lead to the conversion of America itself; then the world at large. This in turn would bring about the eventual downfall of all godless regimes, finally ushering in the Reign of the Immaculate Heart. A domino-theory of the spirit, if you will.

[....]

Eager to lower the temperature of the heated interchange, Lionel finally pointed out, very quietly at first, that there were many vocations in the Church just as there were many styles and temperaments in the structure of the human personality. Nevertheless, the vocation of Immaculata House, Lionel maintained, was not at all consistent with Peter’s crusading vision. "No matter how noble the cause," he said, "When you mix fallen human nature with ideology and a militant organizational structure, alchemy will operate in reverse: gold will be transformed into lead. Genuine renewal occurs heart to heart, one person at a time."

Undaunted, Peter challenged his older brother to put the matter to a vote. Lionel, his broad face purpling, refused outright. Instead, rising to his feet, Lionel declared in a resonant voice supported by the full weight of his frame, "You’re all free to stay or go as your conscience dictates. If you go, then God be with you, you can try out your scheme someplace else. But I swear as I stand here that I will personally close Immaculata House before I see it turned into the headquarters of a militia!" With that, Lionel exited the room.

Every writer knows (and most readers suspect) that inspiration for such characters or groups is often sparked from some personal experience. Probably the most frequent question I’m asked by people who have read my book is, "What was your inspiration for SANA, and have you ever been a member of such a group?" My answer has invariably been that while I had not, it is true, created SANA entirely out of thin air, its wholly fictional particulars were based on a pattern I had discerned from a motley of sources: from my own experience, yes, many moons ago, with a dysfunctional organization; from personal observation of friends involved in a couple of Catholic groups exhibiting toxic organizational cultures; from a lifelong interest in the history of totalitarian regimes of both "left" and "right"; from research on cults and cults of personality, both religious and secular; from following the public controversies surrounding several new ecclesial communities, from the Catholic charismatic communities back in the eighties to Lumen Dei and Opus Dei; from the recent priestly sex-abuse scandals in the context of the Church hierarchy’s dealing with same.

It takes the better part of my novel (as it took some fourteen years of my writing life) to relate how Lionel’s prophecy of alchemical reverse — of gold being turned into lead — unfolds in the lives of those associated with SANA. Nor does it have much to do in its incarnational details with the unfolding Maciel scandal and the future of the LC/RC; I have no particular insights to offer on a subject I know so little about, first-hand; but what does interest me — what has interested me from my first acquaintance with the rumors about LC/RC and Fr. Maciel, now over twenty years ago — is how those accusations, mapping an alleged pattern of organizational secrecy and aggrandizement, of exaggerated forms of "Church Militant" language and formation, and of abuses of positions of trust and spiritual authority, dovetailed with my own experience, observation and research about groups exhibiting cult tendencies within the Catholic Church.

Does that mean the accusations are true? Absolutely not, so far as I know, though, interestingly, the second most common question I’ve been asked by readers of my novel is, "Did you model SANA after the Legionaries?"

My answer, again, is no. Indeed, the Legionaries were barely on my radar screen at the time I was writing the novel. Moreover, the last thing I would wish to do, by means of this discussion, is to contribute to the anguish now suffered by those thousands of good people, LC/RCers, who are at this moment shocked out of their minds by the unfolding events; but the fact that the question is asked at all has made me wonder if the Maciel case, and that it has hit the national as well as Catholic press and blogosphere in a big way, doesn’t indicate that it is time, perhaps long since time, for the Faithful, acknowledging that "mistakes have been made," to take a closer look at potentially disturbing or problematic elements in some new ecclesial movements; moreover to consider, prayerfully and thoughtfully, what may be done to prevent such scandals and personal damage in the future.

For as with the priestly sex abuse scandals in the American Church, these disasters impact the reputation and occasionally even the faith of Catholics everywhere, not just members of the group in question. And as with the priestly sex abuse scandals in the American Church, the simple fact that a number of clerics and lay leaders, from the founder of a major religious order down to the local parish priest, can get by with such hypocritical and destructive behavior for years or even decades, while their accusers are dismissed as disgruntled troublemakers, or pressured into silence, or even vilified, indicates to me that there may be more than personal sin involved here; that the Church’s system of organizational oversight may be inadequate; that we may have, willy-nilly, stumbled upon a "teaching moment" in the Church, whose implications for religious and lay organizations are wider-ranging than we may first assume.

How I Propose to Proceed

It will take these several articles to cover what I think are the significant issues raised by this scandal. Please keep in mind that the degree to which what I discuss coincides with the particulars of the Maciel/LC/RC situation will be for others to determine. The specifics of Fr. Maciel’s secret life hold little interest for me, nor am I in a position to render judgment on the accuracy of criticisms leveled against the RC/LC organizations as a whole, the circumstances of which I know very little. What interests me, once again, is the pattern and that it seems to be repeating itself over and over again in Catholic organizations these last couple of decades; and whether, finally, anything, reasonably and faithfully, might be done to prevent it from happening again.

To the end of exploring that question, I will present an interview with canonist Pete Vere in the fourth and final part. Stay tuned.

[CE Editor's Note: This series of articles is adapted from a series previously published on Debra Murphy's blog and is used by permission.]