POPE FRANCIS AND CHURCH LEADERS, PLEASE WAKE UP!
Pope Francis with a group of Legionaries
August 3, 2015
I have just attended the Survivor Network of those Abused by Priests annual conference in Alexandria, VA and have been discussing Maciel, the Legion of Christ and Regnum Christi with a good and knowledgeable friend. This brought to the surface the following convictions:
MANIFESTO
- After thirty years ministering to Legion of Christ/Regnum Christi survivors, I clearly see once again the path of destruction left by Marcial Maciel/Legion/Regnum in the lives they have sailed through. Because it is not just sexual abuse; it is abuse of all kinds: physical neglect, psychological illnesses, confused consciences, depression and suicide, loss of faith in the Church, Christ and God, financial abuse of members, families and vulnerable adults; as well as exile, calumny, ostracism, lawsuits and threats for those who will not submit.
- The Popes and the Vatican, after their investigation of Maciel and the Legion, chose to save the Legion of Christ religious order. Pope Francis rubber-stamped his predecessors’ conclusions.
- Telling us: Maciel bad; Legion good, and asking us to believe that God used the flawed Maciel to create His Work, the Legion of Christ Catholic Religious Order and the Regnum Christi lay movement.
- The Vatican did this by ignoring and/or twisting centuries of Christian Faith and Tradition which link a religious order’s validity and authenticity to the charism, holiness and inspiration of the founder.
- We are asked to believe that God performed a new miracle, that the rotten tree has produced healthy fruit.
- Or is it just that the business created by entrepreneur Maciel, the Legion of Christ Inc., continues to mass-produce priests, astutely recruit well-meaning Catholics, and bring in millions of dollars into the Church, an institution reeling from accusations of corruption and abuse which is losing the allegiance of thinking and discriminating members?
- What if Marcial Maciel, the verbally, emotionally, physically and sexually abused little Mexican boy, who never sought or received help for his own damaged and warped psyche, became a sexual predator and manipulative exploiter with airs of grandeur, creating the myth that he was chosen by God to save the Catholic Church, Christianity and the world by founding a new and better religious order?
- Maciel totally lacked self-awareness and restraint, simply acting out his sexual, controlling and ambitious appetite:. Maciel, the psychopath, the Traumatizing Narcissist, who deluded himself into thinking he was creating a religious order and not a sect to satisfy his own desires, using and abusing others in the process?
- What if the Father of Deceit, and not the Holy Spirit, took possession of that damaged psyche, to create a cleverly crafted diabolical sect within the Catholic Church, endowed with the same spirit that possessed Maciel: lies, deceit, smoke-screens, spiritual pyrotechnics, control, and self-aggrandizement that would continue to wound, damage and deceive generous, idealistic and naïve people in their sexuality, self-respect, maturity, discernment, human dignity, and in their very souls?
- What if Maciel was able to fool Church authorities and con them into approving his fraudulent order?
- What if Church authorities have never wanted to acknowledge they were conned by Maciel and refuse to correct their mistake?
- I throw down the gauntlet and challenge blind Catholic Church leaders, dazzled by glittering images, to see the deceptive “cult in their midst”!
J. Paul Lennon, LC 1961-84, Licensed Professional Counselor.
Totally agree; the lc/rc group is trying to wash their image redirecting it to the RC Movement
Thanks Paul!
I am a Catholic lay woman and a physician. I am sorry that the order created by Maciel has not been closed and disbanded by the pope. From my perspective, everyone has a vocation in life whether married or single. Former Legionaires can be considered by other orders, if they still wish to live that kind of consecrated life. It does not speak well for credibility for the Church to continue the Legionaires, in my view.
Speaking of redirecting LC to RC and their influence inside the church, why should Archb. Cupich tolerate this http://www.rcchicago.com/
It’s amazing how well he conned everyone with his “holy” facade. How many joined the Legion based heavily on that lie and have to re-learn how to be actually normal? Sad.
The person in the legion that I know, who does not say she is so openly, Thinks the holy ghost speaks through her or pretends to. If this is something she pretends, then the conceit would be that as the Legion know the right interpretation of Gods word,in a christian sense, then when they say they are the Holy Ghost people will listen more seriously to what they are sure would be his word. Then the problem with them saying that the Holy Ghost speaks through them is that they have no doubts about the Legions interpretation of what is right being indeed what is right and what God wants his followers to believe.
If it is claimed that the Legion have charism, then the claim on the part of a legionaire that the Holy Ghost speaks through her, is one of the ways in which they believe they have miraculous charicteristics, charism.
There is a lot to be said about this aspect of charism and one of the things i would say is that for people to belive that the Holy Ghost speaks through them total turns peoples heads, they no longer have to use their good judgement just to chatter on.
The belief that the Holy Ghost speaks through them is i suppose, part of Marcials heritage and would, for me, be one of the reasons to think that the Legion has inherited an awful lot from his teaching and so much that is suspect that you cannot think that by simply putting Marcial to one side the legion will be all right.
That Legionair still believe the Holy Ghost speaks through them or that they know the right way so absolutely that they can say it is the Holy Ghosts voice that tells us what to do not their own, is one of the things that makes them impossible. They do not look at the evidence of psycologists say, that proves thats ome bit of very old fashioned thinking on behavior is wrong much as it is traditionally cahtolic, and this makes them totally irresponsible as people who look after others.
It is impossible to believe that it is theologically correct for the members of a group to believe that what they say comes from the Holy Ghost. I remember being taught that what the Pope himself says is only on special occasions to be taken as Gods word.
Of course the Holy Ghost is everywhere, so it could be said that what we all say comes from him.
My knowledge of the Legion comes from such a source that it can only be taken as true if what i say can be corroborated as part of ideas that people on this site have known, If it is the experience of other people who have been in the Legion or had contact with those who have.What i have heard seems to fit with what others write on this site.
If saying the holy ghost speaks through them is not what they believe but simply a way to convince potential reecruits that the Holy Ghost says what they think,is what he would say, when the recruits cant hear his voice, then it is part and parcel of the churches whole policy, and the church hads changed a lot since the sixties into a more old fashioned and manipulative self, whose policy is to veiw people as sheep and try to force them in a direction instead of giving them free will allowing them to choose and also argue or reason any point they teach. It seems to me that their attituññde now is to force people to behave for instance, to argue with no less than the Holy Ghost if they want to disagree, which is to say they make arguement too frightening for people to try to use their intelligence or good judgement. Making people scared to use their good judgements is manipulative.
Marcials pederasty is a problem in that it makes people on this site concentrate on pederasty, very naturally, and forget the Irish Scandals about the Magdalene Sisters, when much of the manipulation that girls talk of in Regnum Christi might have more to do with the attitudes of certain parts of the church, the most reactionary and conservative the cruelty of which are well described by those who suffered from the mental abuse of the Magdalene sisters.
It seems to me that the more modern countries have come face to face with South American Catholicism and Spanish Catholicism and, I have seen signs of it being Italian Catholicism too, of the old school, now when members of their families are carried off by the Legion. For me, contact with catholic sects has certainly made me more real about the most conservative part of the church.
It is possible to say that, that the people in less conservative countries should come to suffer from the most conservative side of the church is well deserved, they did nto help south americans or any other latins with the church in times when the church was liberal in England say. In all truth, I am very sorry that the things you can suffer from in Spain say have been carried into North America and into my own English family.
Spanish Catholicism of yesteryear, of Generals Franco’s time, when his right hand man, Carrero Blanco, believed in executing people because he feared that too much liberty would cause an apocalpyse, the most fascist spaniards of Franco’s time and earlier, were absolutely tremendously puritanical and squashing and castrating and they were so because they were defending their faith against Godless people like communists and anarquists.TRhe church was very very puritanical and squashed people as much as the legion does or nearly so, from the stories of peoples grandparents that i have heard told again and again. Until I met the catholics sects, their street recruiters, I thought all this a thing of the past but now it seems to be a thing of now and I am so glad of sites like these.
The people they squashed did not get help from places like England, from the Catholics of more liberal countries. My own England did not help them by trying to make the church be nice in all countries, they behaved as if what the church does in one country is no business of the church in more liberal countries. I myself had no idea that the church was as it has been and is again becoming in Spain. Some countries needed the liberal country catholic’s to be aware of the worst side of this religion and so help them with it. Now ,with catholic sects bringing puritanical Catholicism to all countries,the liberal countries will start to understand the sufferings of people in other places, the reasons for communist upraising in catholic countries.