Text: "Grisez's Response to a Critic and a Friend" {AmP Exclusive}

Dr. Germain Grisez, who has already posted an open letter and a follow-up on these pages, now responds to what he describes as "the nastiest critic and the only serious effort at counterargument that I’ve seen".

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Posted with permission of the author, February 12th, 2009.

Someone who remains Anonymous on this website says: “Whenever there is a crisis there is a tendency for everybody and his dog to weigh in as experts. Now we have the Peters, Weigel and Grisez among others ‘directing’ the church as to what it ‘should’ do.” Anonymous exhorts us: “Please don't forget that you are maligning many good and holy people, perhaps far holier than yourselves, when you attack an order that is full of extremely dedicated people, who have given their lives for Christ.”

I have not been trying to direct the Legion and the Church as to what they should do. Rather, I have offered advice and provided reasons to accept it, especially this reason: “Even after the death of an institute’s saintly founder, its members’ service and life continue as cooperation with him or her. Regardless of Father Maciel’s subjective moral responsibility—which only God knows—the evidence of his objective betrayal of his commitment makes it impossible for you and other good and faithful Legionaries any longer to carry on your service and life as cooperation with him.”

I addressed that reasoning to friends in the Legion and posted it in the hope that other good and faithful members of the Legion and of Regnum Christi would read it and urge their superiors and/or the Pope to do what is necessary to salvage their common good from the wreckage resulting from Maciel’s wrongful behavior. In offering my advice, I have neither attacked the Legion nor maligned its members.

Unlike Anonymous, whose response simply ignored my argument, one of my Legionary friends, in a private communication, responded to my argument. He points out that God often has done great good through sinful men, for example, he gave us the Psalms through David. But while true, that is beside the point. Jesus, not David, leads us when we do the Liturgy of the Hours. We do not belong to an institute that David founded. Moreover, David did not lead a double life.

My friend also recalls that some of the Franciscan friars who split off in the sixteenth century to found the Capuchin Franciscans eventually rejoined their original community, were expelled for rebelling against superiors, and/or left the Catholic Church. Yet the Capuchins survived and flourished. That’s true. But the men who led the Capuchins to success regarded Francis of Assisi, whose purity of heart is unquestionable, as their father founder. Their movement’s whole purpose was to regain a more perfect share in Francis’s charism—to be, as they saw it, more Franciscan than the Franciscan communities from which they split off.

Contrast that with Fr. Alvaro Corcuera’s testimony: “Through the charism he [Maciel] passed on to us, many people have received from God what has given meaning to our lives: love for Christ, the Blessed Virgin, the Church, the Pope and souls.” Most Catholics whom I have known, including my own parents and siblings, received all those things as the practice of the Catholic faith they received from their parents, first pastors, and other early teachers.

My view is that what Legionaries and Regnum Christi members received from Maciel was something different and more specific, something that includes both the holiness that he appeared to embody—which, by God’s grace, many of his followers really do embody—and the reality of his duplicity. If the compound of apparent holiness and actual duplicity could constitute the charism of the founder of a religious institute, members of the Legionaries of Christ and Regnum Christi could reasonably continue with Maciel as their “Father Founder.” But I think those who have hitherto regarded Maciel as Father Founder might still salvage, from the wreckage resulting from his wrongful behavior, much of what they stand to lose—but only if they can obtain the Pope’s help in identifying new leaders to serve as founders of a re-formed, and reformed, institute and lay apostolic group.

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