Hurting in the Church. Fr. Thomas Berg
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?”