One of the 20th century’s revered Catholic leaders perverted Catholic doctrine about Jesus and Mary to justify his own sexual compulsions and abuse women, an initial expert report found.
ROCCA DI PAPA, Italy — The findings of an initial expert report were astonishing: One of the 20th century’s revered Catholic leaders, who built an international movement of community care for people with intellectual disabilities, perverted Catholic doctrine about Jesus and Mary to justify his own sexual compulsions and abuse women.
“I believed in something, in a vision that then is revealed to you and you’re told it’s not like that,” said Azucena Bustamante, who oversees five L’Arche communities in Honduras, Mexico and the Dominican Republic. “It does frustrate me — the damage it has caused to a lot of people who believed in this, and then found out everything we were made to believe, it’s a lie.”Vanier, a former Canadian and Royal Navy officer, founded L’Arche in 1964 in northern France.
The Vatican was informed of Philippe’s deviant practices by two victims in 1952; four years later it sanctioned Philippe for “false mysticism.” The Vatican forbade him from public or private ministry, ordered L’Eau Vive dissolved and its members forbidden from reconstituting the community. L’Arche’s leaders have apologized to the victims, thanked them for their courage in coming forward, and assumed responsibility for not having spotted the abuses earlier. They say they questioned Vanier repeatedly as soon as the first victims came forward, as well as what he knew about Philippe’s 1956 Holy Office condemnation, but that he lied to them.
One of the Vatican’s top experts in abuse prevention, the Rev. Hans Zollner, praised L’Arche for its “fearless” courage in exposing the painful truth about its past and said the phenomenon of spiritual gurus misusing their authority can’t be ignored any longer by the church.
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