Can L’Arche escape the twisted legacy of its own founders?
are weighty enough in their own right to call for concentrated attention.
It was a no-holds-barred investigation, involving historians, theologians, a sociologist, a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst. The stakes were high; the integrity of L’Arche itself could be compromised. Père Philippe was a delusional Dominican friar who had repeatedly run afoul of his brother Dominicans, as well as the Vatican. He had been investigated by the Vatican’s Holy Office, and his teachings and behaviour were formally condemned in 1956. But the sanctions were ineffectual, the result of resistance by those who believed he was being maligned – despite the seriousness of his dangerous ideas.
What Mr. Vanier knew that Mr. Maritain did not was that the cabal of initiates gathered around Père Philippe, including his brother Marie-Dominique, and his sister, the Prioress Mother Cécile, were apparently as adept at sexual predation as the spiritual master himself. His sister was a grooming enabler, the Ghislaine Maxwell of this sordid drama, accused in the L’Arche report of pushing her nuns “into the arms of her brother” and of “incestuous” relations.
Both Père Philippe and Mr. Vanier drew on their self-invoked privileged relationship with the divine to channel their lust as they perfected their seductions in sacral terms: “It’s not us, it’s Mary and Jesus” and “Jesus and I are not two, we are one … and it is Jesus who loves you through me” – two phrases that appeared in some of the victim testimonies. Mr. Vanier at one point describes his genitals as a “sacrament of love.
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