BishopAccountability.org
	Why Bad Trees Bear Good Fruit By Steve Skojec February 16, 2009 http://steveskojec.com/2009/02/15/why-bad-trees-bear-good-fruit/ “By their fruits you shall know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit, and the evil tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can an evil tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit, shall be cut down, and shall be cast into the fire.” - Mt. 7:16-19 If you’re a Christian of any stripe, it’s likely you’ve heard this passage at some point in your life. It seems sensible enough, to the point where I can only imagine it rarely garners much deeper reflection. Scripture is full of more meaningful passages to contemplate. The problem is that when taken as a metaphor for human action, it can be used to justify bad behavior and ward off legitimate criticism. In fact, when compared to the real experiences most human beings have had, the most commonly understood meaning of this passage is so obviously false as to render it absurd. Of course bad (human) trees bear good fruit - if they didn’t, no one in their right mind would have anything to do with them. This is clearly the case with the Legionaries of Christ, who seem most fond of using this scripture passage to deflect negativity about their “movement.” Austin Ruse of C-Fam, like his fellow ex-traditionalist Pete Vere, is the latest to play a version of this card in defense of the Legion’s “charism” (a charism which I have yet to see defined as anything other than “self-propagation”): The president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM), Austin Ruse, has penned a letter calling on the Legionaries of Christ to remain faithful to their charism because, as he writes, despite their failings of their founder, it has brought souls into Heaven. “There are souls in Heaven because of the charism of the Legion of Christ and of Regnum Christi,” begins Ruses’ letter. And this is to be attributed to “the spiritual insights and writings of the Legion’s founder Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado,” he says. In spite of “what Marcial Maciel has done,” the C-FAM president maintains that “the Legion of Christ and Regnum Christi remain one of the bright lights in this era of the Church.” “A shadow is cast over all of this because of the profound moral failings of their founder. But his failings do not nullify all the good that they have done and will do for the Church and for the Kingdom of God.” Ruse speaks as if he’s spent time on the inside, referring vaguely to the “Kingdom” (of God) in the way that all Legionaries do. Of course, as a member of the Legion or of Regnum Christi, one can only believe that they are “building the Kingdom” if they believe that the propagation of the movement is the way in which that building takes place. All activities - every activity - is ultimately, at its core, a recruitment activity. The entire “movement”, in my experience, was self-serving, even if those active in the movement believed that they were serving Christ and were thus motivated to carry out these superficially Catholic but truly inwardly-focused apostolates. Is it really any surprise that a movement rooted so concretely in the person of “the Founder” - himself a narcissistic sexual predator - would innately cultivate a character of self-preservation, isolation, secrecy, and deception? The members of the “movement”, - and here I include a vast number of the professed or ordained religous - are (in my opinion) victims of a sham order which was not designed to focus on the spiritual kingdom of Christ, but rather the temporal power and fleshly satisfaction of Fr. Maciel. The question then lingers - how is it possible that the Legion has done so much good? How is it that there “are souls in Heaven because of the charism of the Legion of Christ and of Regnum Christi”? The answer is simple - nothing motivates people like zeal for what they believe in. Think of the faith of Catholics who believe they are working to re-establish the faith which they hold dear against the opposition of a hell-bent world. What resources such individuals bring to the table! What dedication, what conviction, what allegiance to any who give them reason to believe they are on their side in an all-but-lost cause shown favor by God Himself! Is it any wonder that orthodoxy, not laxity, is what draws the most fervent and willing recruits? Cafeteria Catholics are ultimately selfish - unwilling to make sacrifices and instead placing demands on what religion should do for them. They are focused on their own gratification, and not on service. They have already demonstrated that they are unwilling to listen to authority, and will chart their own course, leadership be damned, if that is what it takes for them to find satisfaction. But those who crave authority, who desire hierarchy, who respect the Magisterium - they are willing victims to those who would dare use the Sacraments to gain power over them. Give them chant, give them solid preaching, give them good confessors, show them devoted seminarians, offer them spiritual direction and focus them on a cause, and they will go to the ends of the earth for you. Does any honest person believe Fr. Maciel didn’t recognize this, even if many of his subordinates had no idea what they were a part of? In every case that has personally touched me, my family, or my friends where abuse by priests has come to light, this is the realization that I have reached - they exploit our faithfulness, our docility, and our zeal. They use it to convince those who are weak enough to believe anything their heroes tell them to do things that they would have otherwise found repugnant. I am not casting aspersions on the “weak” - we all look for heroes, and to that extent, we are all vulnerable. Some of us are simply by nature more intractable than others, and at some point in our indoctrination something clicks, and we know that we are living a lie. It happened to me. It has happened to others as well. If I weren’t such a difficult person, so unwilling to accept authority for authority’s sake (something that has often manifested in my life as a vice, not a virtue) I might never have pushed back. For a moment, let’s move beyond the Legionaries for another case study. Last night, I spoke with one of several friends who knew another priest - Fr. Donald McGuire - recently convicted of the sort of crimes which Fr. Maciel has long been accused of. This friend attributes much of his personal formation to Fr. McGuire, and I can personally attest to the wisdom in the collected vignettes my long-time friend has presented to me over the years from this particular priest. Despite possessing a fairly accurate judge of character, I can say that having personally met Fr. McGuire on more than one occasion, I detected nothing amiss. But I suppose I (and my friends) are in good company, because neither did Mother Teresa, who counted Fr. McGuire among her confessors. The ability of these men to use spiritual power to deceive remains hard for me to comprehend, and yet, they all follow a pattern - using “good fruit” to lure people into their rotten plans. An article about Fr. McGuire from last year relates: Documents show that McGuire had a pattern: He would persuade a family to let their teenage son intern with him, and quickly move the boy into his room. And then, according an alleged victim who asked that his name not be used, McGuire would give the boy a sexual education, using the sacred rite of confession. “We underwent something called a ‘general confession,’ whereby you just lay out your sins,” the alleged victim, a young man, told NPR. “And the priest will help you, talk you through it, maybe give you some guidelines for the future. And his guidelines were to teach me about sex.” He says the guidelines included naked showers, massage and pornography. Between 1999 and 2002, the young man says he traveled with McGuire every summer, Easter and Christmas, and lived with him at Canisius House, a residence with other Jesuit priests. The people I know were not among the victims, and say that they derived enormous spiritual benefit from Fr. McGuire’s Ignatian retreats. They too participated in the general confessions that Fr. McGuire occasionally exploited to his own ends. They saw solid Catholic teaching in what Fr. McGuire had to offer, but in retrospect, one can’t help but wonder if he used his great wisdom about the faith in a calculating way to draw victims in. It certainly sounds like it. While in cases like Fr. Maciel or Fr. McGuire there is a desire on the part of themselves or their followers to be as exculpatory as possible, serial predation is NOT the same thing as falling into sin, getting up, and trying to live virtuously again. There is a component to willfully, carefully creating the circumstances in which others can be victimized that goes far beyond a sin of passion or an incidental indiscretion. It shows full consent, and a long-term cultivation of evil action. When it is coupled with great spiritual good which can at the very least be said to have granted these predators access to their victims, it strikes me as particularly demonic. The fact is simple: the Devil is astonishingly creative and seductive, and bad trees under his care are most certainly capable of bearing good fruit.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.