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Chapter 1

My Story

“She had the feeling that somehow, in the very far-off places, perhaps even in far-off ages, there would be a meaning found to all sorrow and an answer too fair and wonderful to be as yet understood.”

— Hannah Hurnard, Hinds’ Feet on High Places

So, why did I start writing this book?

Let’s back up a ways.

I reached young adulthood in the mid-1980s. As a freshman at Marquette University in 1983, I had an experience—I called it a “conversion” at the time—that led me to a more lucid and deliberate commitment to my Catholic faith. These were still the years of considerable pastoral and liturgical upheaval following the Second Vatican Council. Now in college, I had emerged from that upheaval not only with my Catholic faith intact, but intensified by a newfound zeal. I had great hopes for the future of the Church and for my life in it. As time went on, it became clear that those hopes were anchored in a particular way in the person of Pope—now a saint—John Paul II, and in the Church’s renewal movements.

Indeed, the experience in the United States and elsewhere, from the late seventies into the eighties, was that the Church was precisely in a time of renewal, a reality seemingly captured in the multiplicity of renewal movements across the globe, from Renew International (born as a program for parish-based Catholic spiritual renewal in Newark, New Jersey, in 1976) to Catholic charismatic renewal and many more. “Renewal” was the spiritual buzzword of the 1980s.

This momentum took on an added dimension of urgency and excitement as a dominant theme began to emerge in the thought of Pope St. John Paul II: that we were actually protagonists in a great, new, noble, and holy endeavor, the “New Evangelization.” The pope used the phrase for the first time in a significant and public manner on March 9, 1983, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in his opening address to the general assembly of the Latin American Episcopal Conference (CELAM).

In that speech, John Paul directed the bishops’ attention to the upcoming fifth centennial of evangelization of the New World to be commemorated in 1992. That coming commemoration would attain to its full meaning, asserted the pontiff, only if the bishops, along with the clergy and lay faithful, were to embrace that anniversary with a renewed commitment, not to a project of re-evangelization, “but to a New Evangelization, new in its ardor, methods and expression.”

By 1986, I was fully committed to that project and convinced that—just as Jesus wanted me to be—I was on the road to becoming a real player in this effort: I had joined a new religious community, the Legionaries of Christ, whose entire ethos was seemingly to bring about in the Church a new day of faith, a new evangelization, with new and more effective methods, to provoke and spearhead a renewal of the Catholic priesthood, to forge new inroads in apostolic efficacy—in a word, the Legionaries were going to play a decisive role in ushering in an era of vitality, youth, energy, action, and “results” in the Church.

I was twenty-one. I had discerned a vocation to the priesthood. I wanted to fully abandon myself to Jesus Christ and his Church. And in my mind, I could not be better positioned to do just that, and to make a lasting contribution to this great project—the New Evangelization—than as a member of the Legionaries.

Those convictions about my religious community, and about my life within that community, began to be challenged eleven years later. In February 1997, nine former Legionaries of Christ went public with allegations of sexual abuse against the Legion’s founder, Marcial Maciel Degollado.

I was studying in Rome at the time, not yet ordained a priest. To most of us within the congregation, this news was a bombshell. Yet we were somewhat shielded from the impact since we were not allowed, under obedience, to read the story itself (which had been published in the Hartford Courant). We were forbidden to seek out information from anyone outside of the congregation and discouraged from speaking about the matter even with our own superiors. And we were certainly not to discuss it among ourselves.

I, along with a few others, had access at the time to the newly emerging internet, but our access was controlled by a gatekeeping mechanism that required users to obtain permission for every site they wanted to visit. Under obedience, our superiors required us to forgo reading such articles and information that might otherwise come into our hands—a limited possibility anyway since our mail was screened and newspapers were edited before being left in the reading rooms. Anything deemed inappropriate (on any matter, not just news of Maciel) was clipped out by the superior.

Like any and all negative things that were ever publicly expressed about the Legion and could get to our ears, this bombshell, too, was quickly diffused and channeled into a void of internal congregational silence.

We knew the drill. If you considered yourself a faithful member of the congregation, you would strive internally to set aside any curiosity on the matter. Besides, throughout our years of formation, we had absorbed the congregation’s narrative according to which, “enemies” of the Legion had time and time again plotted against Maciel, attempting to oppose “God’s plan” for the congregation. Time and time again, those attempts were thwarted by “divine providence.”

And according to that narrative, enemies of the congregation had lowered themselves to make untoward accusations about the founder as early as the 1950s. We heard that he had been accused of an addiction to painkillers, that he had engaged in questionable relationships with a young woman or two in Mexico, but each of these had its explanation: each was an attack, a lie aimed at discrediting Maciel and stopping the progress of the Legion. That narrative—of Maciel, the saintly founder, continually bearing the cross of defamation and inexplicable hatred, his lot in life as founder of this new work of God—was the very backbone of our self-understanding as a congregation.

So, in February 1997, by default, most Legionaries grappled to fit these new accusations into that narrative. I tried as well, and worked hard at it. Yet from that moment on, I struggled with periods of doubt about the congregation. I kept those doubts to myself for years, and my subconscious worked hard to bury them. But my faith in the congregation began to erode ever so slowly until its utter collapse twelve years later.

Meanwhile, the Legion published a statement vigorously denying the allegations and calling into question the motivations and moral integrity of the accusers. For my part, I did in fact seek as much information from the superiors as they were willing to give me about the whole situation, and particularly about the accusers.

My own interactions with Maciel had been limited in comparison with those of other Legionaries, never longer than an hour or two at a time, mostly while I was studying in Rome and later as a Legionary priest in New York. These were always in the company of at least a few others. Based on these experiences, and with my interior life nourished by reading spiritual letters we believed he had written, I thought I knew this man.² And I loved him as a spiritual father. We would refer to him as “Nuestro Padre,” our father founder—an expression which, when in print, would always be written with a capital N and a capital P.

From 1997 onward and into the first years of my priesthood, and bolstered by my own psychological defense mechanisms, I worked hard at sustaining—both for myself and others—the grand narrative of our heroic founder and the divinely assisted establishment of the congregation. But so did the vast majority of Legionaries, including most of the superiors. In so doing, we were unwittingly keeping ourselves immersed in a kind of parallel universe: we were all protagonists in this great, providential work of God—our congregation. We were called “to build up the Legion” (“hacer Legión”). Such was the Kool-Aid we drank, and it was readily available.

Seven long years would pass before the Holy See would reopen its investigation of Maciel in 2004³ and determine, within the course of a months-long investigation, that the primary accusations against Maciel were credible, principally, that he had, in fact, engaged in sexual misconduct, including the sexual abuse of several of the Legion’s first seminarians, and committed the canonical crime of giving sacramental absolution to at least one of the victims he abused.⁴ A communiqué from the Vatican Press Office on May 19, 2006, read in part:

After having submitted the results of the investigation to an attentive study, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under the guide of its new Prefect, His Eminence Cardinal William Levada, decided—taking account of the advanced age of the Reverend Maciel and his delicate health—to renounce any canonical process and to invite the Father to a reserved life of prayer and penance, renouncing every public ministry. The Holy Father [Pope Benedict XVI] has approved these decisions.

After Maciel’s death in 2008, there came more revelations: Maciel had, in fact, been addicted to painkillers for years and had enlisted a close circle of trusted Legionaries to obtain a steady supply of drugs for him. In addition to sexually abusing young seminarians, he had fathered at least three children: a daughter (by one woman) and two sons (by another woman). The latter two have alleged that Maciel sexually abused them as children.

Maciel was, in actuality, a colossally enigmatic individual—a sociopathic sexual omnivore who presented to a broader public the credible persona of a religious leader and reformer, friend of popes, and darling of much of the Roman curia, who secretively used the Catholic religious order he founded to feed his lusts.

Subsequently, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, ordered an “apostolic visitation” of the Legionaries in 2009—a close scrutiny of all Legionary houses of formation and apostolate conducted by a team of bishops appointed by the pope. Following that visitation, early in July 2010, Cardinal Velasio de Paolis was named papal delegate to the Legionaries of Christ to shepherd the congregation through a “process of profound re-evaluation” as mandated in a communiqué from the Holy See to the Legionaries in early May of that same year.

Maciel had roused the suspicions of at least two major superiors as early as 2004. For its part, the Holy See, in May 2006 had already disciplined Maciel, consigning him to “a life of prayer and penance,” the outcome of its own independent investigation of Maciel, completed in late 2005, which had already deemed credible the principal accusations made against him. Father Álvaro Corcuera (then general director of the Legionaries, who succumbed to a brain tumor in 2014) had been summoned to a meeting at the Vatican in March 2006 and was informed of this outcome.

From that moment on, every member of the congregation had a fundamental right to know the truth regarding their revered founder. Moreover, the very good of the Church demanded an immediate and transparent communication of these facts.

We know today that by the end of 2006, Corcuera had been presented with further, independent evidence that Maciel had fathered at least one child.⁵ Yet it was not until late 2008 that Corcuera finally opted for a slow and overly cautious rollout of a watered-down and minimalized version of the founder’s sordid life. But it was to be shared first only with the congregation’s superiors; rank-and-file members of the congregation would be informed at some undetermined point in the future. It was a plan that would prove catastrophic.

In reality, for nearly three years Corcuera kept the vast majority of Legionaries and members of Regnum Christi—the Legion’s lay apostolic movement—in the dark until the Legionary leadership was finally forced to publicly admit Maciel’s guilt in late January 2009 as leaked details about his mistress and child were about to hit the press.

Nor did Corcuera desist during those same years from continuing to foster the cult of personality that had enveloped Maciel for decades. In his homily at Maciel’s funeral Mass, Corcuera several times used expressions indicating his apparent conviction that Maciel was already enjoying his eternal reward in heaven: “Now he is receiving God’s eternal embrace, something he always longed for,” explained Corcuera. He then went on to paint a hagiographical account of the founder’s final breath just as several priests were beginning to concelebrate Mass at his bedside: “We celebrated that Mass,” affirmed Corcuera, “when he was already in heaven.”

Yet, anyone who knew Corcuera would know very well that he did none of this out of malice. In reality, Álvaro Corcuera remains a tragic figure in the history of the Legionaries. A lifelong and childlike devotee of Maciel, Corcuera was handpicked by the founder to succeed him as general director of the congregation—bereft as Corcuera was of some of the most basic and essential qualities of governance. I can only think that his impossibly poor judgments were largely the fruit of his own interior bewilderment, confusion, and utter loss of good sense as the facts about Maciel came to light and the congregation began to implode.

In 2014, a newly elected director general of the Legionaries apologized for “hesitations and errors of judgment when setting out to inform the members of the congregation and others … which have increased the suffering and confusion of many.” Yet those determinations were more than the result of inept leadership or unspeakably poor judgment on the part of Corcuera; they resulted from the deliberate intent on the part of some individuals within the Legionary leadership to keep rank-and-file members of the congregation in the dark. As well, it defies belief to think Corcuera was not guided by certain members of the Roman Curia, themselves the product of a mindset which, in a case such as Maciel’s, held that “prudence” required silence, secrecy, and subterfuge in order to “avoid further scandal.”⁶ Further, it remains simply implausible that Maciel’s closest collaborators for decades could not have known anything about his egregious behavior, or at least have serious suspicions about him, well prior to 2006.⁷

In the end, the Legionaries released an official statement to the press on February 3, 2009, that read in part:

We have learned some things about our founder’s life that are surprising and difficult for us to understand. We can confirm that there are some aspects of his life that were not appropriate for a Catholic priest.

What ensued in the coming days was a public-relations fiasco and a pastoral nightmare. In the final days of January, Legionary superiors had scrambled to break the news to priest members of the congregation. Thousands of stunned and bewildered Legionary supporters only became aware of the revelations from news accounts on February 3.

Their questions and demands for explanations were met, more often than not, by subterfuge aimed at minimizing the gravity of the crisis. For their part, Legionaries and members of Regnum Christi were expected to follow the Legion’s customary ways of not externalizing negativity, not criticizing the superiors and directors, nor expressing negative emotions to anyone but their spiritual directors.

In late January 2009 my own religious superior finally sat me down to confirm that the allegations were true.

I immediately went numb—there’s no other way to explain what I felt.

Shortly after the Holy See’s actions against Maciel in May 2006, I had ceased trying to account for it all as some kind of unique “cross” that God had permitted Maciel to bear. For three years, I struggled mightily to believe in my congregation, and to validate it in the eyes of the Church. Now, in the course of one conversation with my religious superior over a late supper at a local diner, my entire world was upended. The accusations were essentially true. In one moment of pristine and devastating clarity, I realized that for the better part of twenty-three years I had been caught up in a lie, in a massive deception of unprecedented proportions in the Church.

Within days a raw, emotional pain was setting in hard, pain like I had never felt before. At age forty-four, my life was turned upside down. Questions raced through my head: How could we have been so duped? How could the facts of Maciel’s depravities been concealed from us for so long? What was God doing? How could God let this happen to us? How could he let it happen—to me?

Before going any further, I am compelled to say a few things about the current situation of the Legionaries, and of so many persons who have been hurt in the wake of the whole Maciel affair, and about those who remain both in the Legion and in Regnum Christi.

My intention here, in sharing my story, is not to denigrate the Legionaries or Regnum Christi members who, as a religious family, continue their journey of discernment of God’s will now, nearly a decade into the aftermath of the crisis that occasioned my own discernment and decision to part ways.

I write with the awareness that my story—although uniquely my own in so many respects—is only one of many personal stories that could and should be told, of hundreds of laymen and women whose lives were negatively impacted by their experience with the Legionaries and with the Regnum Christi movement.

I think of the hundred or more former confreres of mine and brother priests in the Legionaries, who, like me, since 2009 discerned that they should continue to follow Christ on a new path. My story, compared with theirs, has no particular drama attached to it meriting special attention. While we have all suffered significantly in our own ways, I am aware of some who have suffered much more and for a longer time than I have.

Stories could also be told of hundreds of other lay Catholics whose experience was different, who are convinced their spiritual lives were definitively enriched by the Legion and Regnum Christi, consecrated men and women, lay members of Regnum Christi and hundreds of Legionary priests whose lives, like my own, were catapulted into the storm, but who discerned a very different path—a call to remain part of the process of renewal and reform which the Church would require of them, who also suffered grievously, but who continue today in their commitments.

Admittedly, in the first years that followed my departure, which coincided with the Legion’s mandatory process of internal reform, I published a few articles in Catholic periodicals that were highly critical of the Legion, of the role of the superiors during the time of crisis, and of the dysfunctional internal culture of the congregation.⁸ I also raised difficult questions about the existence and validity of a putative institutional religious charism, and I wondered whether it would not be best—for all those implicated and for the good of the Church—if the Holy See were to suppress the congregation, essentially to shut it down.

No doubt, some things I wrote might have offended some Legionaries and their supporters. I can imagine that my departure from the congregation instilled a sense of abandonment and hurt in some of my former comrades. All of this was ultimately inevitable. I stand by what I wrote at the time, knowing that my intention was not malicious. Much of what I wrote needed to be said. I was playing a role that few of us could uniquely play—offering candid and very public criticism of the Legionaries from someone with knowledge of the internal life of the congregation who could help sustain the external pressure that was necessary to rupture the web of deceptions in which so many of the members remained engulfed, and help them face certain realities in ways that might allow for a genuine reform of the congregation.

I am grateful today that over time I have been able to renew contact with some of my former confreres for whom I continue to feel great affection. By God’s grace, and notwithstanding the dysfunctionality in which we lived, I have no doubt that we truly were blessed to participate in and make a very real contribution to the New Evangelization. Jesus accepted and blessed our sacrifice and gift of self in the Legion. I pray for those who have continued in the congregation, not without continued concern for their well-being, and acutely aware that a full accounting for the sordid history of Maciel has never been given, nor adequately investigated.⁹

Finally, always present in my mind and heart while writing this book have been the victims of Maciel’s sexual abuse. I think especially of the courageous nine men who came forward publicly in 1997 after previous efforts over a period of decades to inform the Holy See had been of no avail. By their perseverance, they have done an incalculable and lasting good to the Church, inciting all those involved to heed the demands of justice, particularly the call to transparency and accountability. While much of the entire Maciel affair still remains to be accounted for, and the Legionaries must continue to uncover, correct, and be transparent with regard to any other unsavory elements of their history, these men were catalysts in a cathartic process of liberating minds and hearts from a web of darkness and deception in the Church.

I have been saddened and ashamed that I did not believe their stories sooner. I ask their forgiveness for the ways, as a Legionary, I contributed to denigrating their good names by perpetuating hearsay and gossip about their supposedly twisted intentions. And, to all, I ask forgiveness for the ways in which, in my ignorance, I myself contributed to propagating the cult of personality surrounding Maciel, and to perpetuating the web of deceptions in which we were all trapped.

I had a lot of emotions to deal with as the crisis unfolded in February 2009. I worked through moments of repugnance, horror, anger, and rage. I couldn’t get it out of my head that twenty-three years of my life—what seemed to me to have been the best years of my life!—had apparently been dedicated to a fiction. The sense of having been utterly betrayed was nearly overwhelming, and it fueled my rage.

Another emotion I grappled with was shame—shame at having been duped! Sure, I could say to myself as some people attempted to console me at the time: “Hey, don’t feel bad; you’re in good company. Maciel duped thousands of people—including Blessed Paul VI and St. John Paul II.” But that did little to temper my sense of shame, embarrassment, or the gut-wrenching sense of loss and sense of indignation at having been had, at having been manipulated—for over two decades of my life. I had been violated in my intellect and in my spirit. I had been sucked into an elaborate web, a labyrinth of deception. Once in, it was nearly impossible to see my way out, until finally the walls of the labyrinth began to crumble. Over time, I have recognized this as one of my deepest wounds: the sense of personal violation.

As the initial strong emotions eventually subsided, there loomed the fairly urgent task of discerning what God was directing me to do next in my life, since it was becoming overwhelmingly clear that remaining in the Legion was simply not an option.

This required me to look back, carefully, prayerfully, and objectively over the steps that had presumably led me to the Legionaries more than two decades earlier. While in many ways I felt afloat in a sea of uncertainty, I cannot say I felt in the dark. On the contrary, with the admission of the truth on the part of the superiors, it was as if my life was suddenly inundated by light that allowed me to see myself, my relationship with Jesus, my reality with an objectivity I had frankly been largely deprived of since I entered the Legionaries.

As I looked back on my life, trying to discern the immediate future, what remained pristinely clear in my heart was that I was first called to the priesthood well before I supposedly discerned a vocation to religious consecration with the Legionaries. I had been ordained a priest in 2000—but had lived the first nearly ten years of priesthood in growing tensions with my superiors. I was becoming more and more aware of problems with the internal culture of our congregation. Aspects of community life became almost unbearable. We were not what we presented ourselves to be. The congregation—not Christ and his Church—was treated as the be-all and end-all. For years I lived in frequent need of shoring up my faith in the “work of God,” constantly seeking to validate, justify, and offer explanations for the Legion, for her apostolic works, her approach to formation and priesthood, her achievements—always against a headwind of sometimes withering criticism from outside the congregation.

So, my eventual discernment that Our Lord was moving me in the direction of diocesan priesthood cannot be simply attributed to the Maciel crisis; on the contrary, for years my roots in the Legion had been withering, and a movement toward separation was inevitable, especially as I was able to conclude over time that the “discernment process” that led me to enter and remain in the Legion was problematic and raised serious questions about its validity—a topic I will return to in chapter 8.

Ultimately, an excellent spiritual director, along with trusted and prudent friends outside of the congregation, including one American bishop, helped me through this period. I am forever indebted to that bishop for his patience, boundless kindness, prudence, and availability to me during the immediate days of the crisis. I was able to discern in short order that, regardless of the future of the Legionaries, they were about to embark on what appeared to be nothing less than a “re-foundation” of the congregation—and I was not called to be a part of that. I discerned that Our Lord was moving me in the direction of diocesan priesthood, a reality confirmed by my spiritual director, and by multiple other indications by which I understood Our Lord to be affirming my new direction.

I subsequently left the Legionaries in April 2009 and set out on the road toward my incardination in the Archdiocese of New York, where I had, in fact, lived and ministered during my first eleven years of priesthood. But even though my discernment process was concluding, the shockwave had now passed, and my immediate next steps were much clearer, my interior healing was only beginning. After a few months in my new life as a parish priest, I began telling myself I was “over it.” I soon discovered that was little more than a defense mechanism. The trauma was deep, and the healing would take a lot longer than I could have imagined. Nor did I expect the turmoil that was coming or just how severely my commitment to the Church would be challenged.

Notwithstanding the external appearances—I’m sure I seemed fine to everyone—by the summer of 2010 I was struggling internally as never before in my life. To be sure, I was seeing my spiritual director regularly, engaging in priestly ministry, preaching, celebrating the sacraments, praying, and feeling the support of some wonderful priest friends in the Archdiocese of New York. Yet, inside I felt as if I were slowly drowning.

Many aspects of day-to-day Church life—the bureaucracy and red tape, the hackneyed ways of parish ministry, the clericalism, gossip, cynicism, and negativity in the clergy—contributed to create in me a sense of loathing for almost anything Church-related. Sometimes, even at Mass, I felt as if I was just going through the motions. My homilies seemed hollow. And most difficult of all—I was assaulted at times by the hitherto unthinkable temptation to abandon priestly ministry altogether. When I looked inside sometimes, it seemed all I could find was aching, anger, emptiness, and an almost overpowering urge to flee, to be done with the whole thing, to go somewhere far away and start a new life.

There were moments when I was utterly numb, feeling at times as if I no longer loved the Church. In particular, I struggled profoundly with the sense that I had been hurt by the Church. I will never forget one morning in particular when, after celebrating Mass and after the Church had emptied out, I stood gazing at the beautiful stained-glass depiction of the Resurrection ablaze in the morning sunlight, and I asked myself: “Do I still believe that?”

In the summer of 2010, what was happening inside was that I was beginning to experience—to feel—the depths of my own wounds. Yet, that was actually the necessary first step toward healing. And that’s when I began writing—literally as therapy for myself—what would eventually become this book. So my story, thankfully, does not end here. I will share more about it in the following chapters, particularly about how I found healing in the aftermath of this traumatic experience, and how Jesus led me to discover in my wounds an oasis of grace, and a call to a new mission.