Maciel's Multiple Sins Could Not Overshadow his God Given Grace (Charism)

This would appear to be one of the conclusions to draw from Cardinal designate Velasio de Paolis' 2nd Letter to the Legionaries of Christ (October 20th, 2010)

See sister link with Essay

Our Commander who art in Panties

just off the news

A top ranked military guilty of murders, sexual assault and fetishes

The importance of mental health can never be stressed enough

People are still trying to figure out Fr Marcial Maciel's psychiatric diagnosis [Narcissists never go to therapists, much less anti social personality disorder people]

Fr. Flanagan of Boys Town had warned about Danger of Irish Clergy Abuse

Boys Town founder Fr. Flanagan warned Irish Church about abuse in 1940s


By

JOHN FAY,

IrishCentral.com Staff Writer

Published Tuesday, October 5, 2010, 2:15 PM

Updated Tuesday, October 5, 2010, 2:31 PM

As the Vatican prepares to send bishops to Ireland it is worth recalling what the last American priest who investigated a church scandal in Ireland found.

Father Edward Flanagan, founder of “Boys Town” made famous by the Spencer Tracy movie, was a lone voice in condemning Ireland’s industrial schools back in the 1940s –and he was viciously castigated by church and government for doing so.

Fr. Flanagan, from Co. Roscommon, left Ireland in 1904 and was ordained a priest eight years later. In 1917 he was living and working in Omaha, Nebraska, when he hit upon the idea of a "boys town," which offered education and a home for the poor and wayward boys of Omaha.

However, demand for the service was so great that he soon had to find bigger premises. Boys Town, built on a farm 10 miles from Omaha, was the result.

The center was open to all. There were no fences to stop the boys from leaving. Fr. Flanagan said he was “not building a prison." "This is a home," he said. "You do not wall in members of your own family.”

Boys Town eventually became so well-known - and so well-respected - that Hollywood and the U.S. President came calling. Spencer Tracey and Mickey Rooney starred in the 1938 movie "Boys Town," and it made a national hero out of Fr. Flanagan. He was internationally renowned as “the world’s most foremost expert on boys’ training and youth care.”

When World War II ended in 1945, President Harry S. Truman asked Fr. Flanagan to tour Asia and Europe, to see what could be done for the homeless and neglected children in those regions.
Fr. Flanagan decided to return to the land of his birth in 1946 to visit his family, and also to visit the “so-called training schools" run by the Christian Brothers to see if they were "a success or failure.”
The success of the film "Boys Town," meant Fr. Flanagan was treated like a celebrity on his arrival. His visit was noted by the The Irish Independent, which said that Fr. Flanagan had succeeded “against overwhelming odds,” spurred on by the “simple slogan that 'There is no such thing as a bad boy.'”

But Fr. Flanagan was unhappy with what he found in Ireland. He was dismayed at the state of Ireland's reform schools and blasted them as “a scandal, un-Christlike, and wrong.” And he said the Christian Brothers, founded by Edmund Rice, had lost its way.

Speaking to a large audience at a public lecture in Cork’s Savoy Cinema he said, "You are the people who permit your children and the children of your communities to go into these institutions of punishment. You can do something about it." He called Ireland’s penal institutions "a disgrace to the nation," and later said "I do not believe that a child can be reformed by lock and key and bars, or that fear can ever develop a child’s character."

However, his words fell on stony ground. He wasn't simply ignored. He was taken to pieces by the Irish establishment. The then-Minister for Justice Gerald Boland said in the Dáil that he was “not disposed to take any notice of what Monsignor Flanagan said while he was in this country, because his statements were so exaggerated that I did not think people would attach any importance to them.”
Fr. Flanagan was a devout Catholic, a man who Catholics and non-Catholics world-wide had deemed a hero. He was the Mother Theresa of his day.

Despite that, the Irish Church and the Irish authorities felt comfortable ignoring Fr. Flanagan, ignoring the fact that he was considered to be an expert in the matter of providing for the education and upbringing of boys who were otherwise considered to be “lost causes.”

When he arrived back in America Fr. Flanagan said: "What you need over there is to have someone shake you loose from your smugness and satisfaction and set an example by punishing those who are guilty of cruelty, ignorance and neglect of their duties in high places . . . I wonder what God's judgment will be with reference to those who hold the deposit of faith and who fail in their God-given stewardship of little children."

Again, his efforts fell on stony ground.

What was it about the Irish Church and the Irish authorities that made them so insular that they felt comfortable dismissing someone of Fr. Flanagan's stature? Despite the fact that Fr. Flanagan was a popular hero to many Irish people, his words had no sway with those in authority, whether in the government or the Church.

And, once those who endorsed the industrial school model survived Fr. Flanagan's broadsides, they must have known that no one would challenge them again. They were right, for 50 years anyway.

Not since the penal times has the Catholic Church been so threatened in Ireland. Only this time the damage is all self-inflicted and not imposed by an outside force. Unless strong Catholic characters arise from the wreckage we have now, the Church in Ireland is doomed.

Find this article at:

http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Boys-Town-founder-Fr-Flanagan-warned-Irish-Church-about-abuse-in-1940s-104356519.html?showAll=y

Vatican Probes Disgraced Order's Cultish Lay Group

MSNBC created that headline!





Only about 900 are consecrated — nearly all women, but also a handful of men. They give up possessions and ties to their former lives much in the way nuns or priests do. They adhere to Vatican-approved statutes that require them to "voluntarily renounce the use of their capacity for decision-making" — pledging unswerving obedience to their superiors.

"I feel like I was brainwashed," said J., an American who joined the movement shortly after graduation from a Catholic university in the late 1990s and asked that only her middle initial be used. Like most of the women who spoke to the AP, she did not want to be identified for fear of retaliation from the Legion.

"I really thought it was a mortal sin to break any one of the little rules that were laid out by the statutes or the directress," she said.

"Members are not allowed to question or think outside group-think," she said. "I know that members totally dismiss any discussion of the Legion and Regnum Christi as a cult — I did when I was still part of it — but it sure looks like one once you get out."

Restoring the Catholic Historical Imagination

Had to post this finely written piece by a good friend of mine, Rollin A. Lasseter, R.I.P., Catholic historian, educator, writer and poet.

http://www.catholicliberaleducation.org/newsletters/2010_september/news_newsletter_article_3.htm

Excerpted from a paper by Rollin A. Lasseter

“Restoring the Catholic Historical Imagination” -- my title for this paper -- is itself problematic. Why should anyone want to restore an imagination of history, that record of what J.R.R. Tolkien called “the long defeat”? At first glance, ancient history seems a recycled tale of building up and tearing down -- conquest, persecution, intrigue, and betrayal. Then, modern history -- often marked as beginning with the guillotine -- is defined by the death camps at Auschwitz, the darkness of Hiroshima, and the mass murder that is abortion and genocide. What is there in history, if anything, that we would want to pass along to our poor children? How do we, leading our children, get out of this cycle of death and domination? Is there a way out? Can we imagine any history with a happy ending? Or do we follow the pagan imagination, expecting loss, defeat, and death, and declare: “Call no man happy until he is dead.”

The problem for parents and teachers today is the current malformation of our own and our children’s imaginations. The imagination of our time is on a wide scale formed, or malformed, by some one else’s nightmare: movies, pornography, popular fiction, music, and ideology-driven TV. We see what we have been trained to see. We image what we have been taught to image. The modern imagination is an imagining of despair and increasingly, as a people, we cannot imagine a happy ending.

We have to be able to imagine Heaven, if we are to believe what Our Lord promised: “that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.” From the Old Testament we hear the promise of the Deuteronomist’s words, “And underneath are the everlasting arms.” From the Gospels come assurances spoken by Our Lord himself, “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world”; and “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”

The Catholic imagination has a great tradition of images to defeat the nightmares of despair. And the telling of history from a Catholic point of view is to see that human beings are, first and foremost, religious creatures who are given, what we call in our Catholic Schools Textbook Project textbooks, opportunities in time for choosing “grace-filled” change, providential evolution, if you will. One perception builds on another. One discovery makes way for another. Each inspiration leads to a purer understanding of mankind’s destiny: begun, continued and ended in God. Catholics are preeminently the people for whom history matters.
The Catholic imagination is not a closed, political view of a social utopia with a “preferential option for the poor,” -- though a free and just society is what we imagine as a Christian society. Nor is it defined by bitter polemics of Catholic isolation in America -- although a bit of Catholic triumphalism is not unbecoming. Nor is it that meager view represented by collections of overly pious saints-lives and sweet devotions -- though they may have grown out of the Catholic imagination.

The Catholic imagination is the good, the true and the beautiful -- vast and deep -- a world view that rests on two certainties: Man, as the Crown of Creation, and God, as the ever-present source of our life and hope -- the natural and the supernatural. A Catholic imagination sees all events of human life as participating in the Divine plan for Creation, the providential story being told by God.
They fail us not, the ever-suffering arms,

Nor careless, drop us from the trembling stage

Despite our petty sorceries and charm.

We rest enfold in comfort not in cage,

Still underneath, the Everlasting Arms.

(From the Hymn: The Everlasting Arms)

Therefore, I want to invite you to think about history and the teaching of history not as a clinical record of the facts of the past or as meaningless events in the sequence of ages, but as a lifting of a curtain on a great drama, an invitation to step--with imagination, thought and will--into the revelation of God in human history, to lift the curtain on the greatest drama in the cosmos: Salvation history. For it was not in myth or in “Once-upon- a-time in a galaxy far, far away,” it was not in some “Land before Time,” but instead at a moment in our own, our real human history, that God took flesh in the womb of His blessed mother, Mary. Lived. Spoke. Suffered, died, and rose from death for the salvation of all mankind. In this drama of salvation history, we see the hand of God in all ages -- His hand in the advances of human technology and science and in the everyday joys, sorrows, and miseries as well. In every moment of salvation history, God is present and does not abandon his special creation, made in His own image, “male and female created He them.”
To restore the Catholic historical imagination --so that students, and ourselves, can look at history as something other than nightmare and Death -- we need only to call attention to God’s intervention in the human story – God’s hand in events, in society, and in our own lives – to remind ourselves and our students of the interaction of providence with the story of human achievement, courage, and creativity. Human stories become true history when told as God-stories.

How is imagination formed? Through meeting with great souls and great visions. Not by philosophy or doctrine, for the young mind is not moved by doctrine, but by images, the images of divine reality. Images of virtue, images of faith, images of love, images of Hope. An imagination that cannot see hope is an imagination of death. It is not the imagination we want for our children. The imagination of hopelessness can be, must be, transformed.

Through the story and the romance of the past we can create an imaginative grasp of the world we have been given, so that our young people will know that “underneath, are the Everlasting Arms.” “And lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”

Our Father on Jack Keogh's Blog

this is me at San Simeon, not Jack

Thanks to Jack Keogh, who published only the second English language memoir of life in the Legion, Our Father got a bit of plugging when he blogged about "Another book about Fr. Marcial Maciel.".

Read my super interesting comments!

Irish Reporter interviews Lennon, Vaca, and Kineke

The blogger, author of Our Father Maciel who art in bed, with his parents in Rome, September 1969

"Legion of Crisis",
an article by Niall Stanage, US correspondent for The Sunday Business Post quotes former LC/RC members Lennon, Vaca,  and Gineke, mentioning the memoir "Our Father, who art in bed