Hurting in the Church. Fr. Thomas Berg
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