(LUXEMBOURG)
The Tablet [Diocese of Brooklyn NY]
February 12, 2025
By Tom Heneghan
The Verbum Spei Fraternity was entrusted with a parish and a university chaplaincy in the archdiocese in 2016.
The Archdiocese of Luxembourg ended its nine-year collaboration with the Mexico-based Verbum Spei Fraternity after learning that Pope Francis had laicised a member priest who had fathered two children with a woman follower.
In a statement, the archdiocese reported that after inquiries it found that the fraternity had split from the Brothers of Saint John and still supported the “harmful” teachings of the order’s sexually abusive founder, the late Fr Marie-Dominique Philippe, it said in a statement.
Philippe formed the Brothers of St John in France in 1975. He died in 2006 and was renounced by the order in 2019 amid a wider scandal which also implicated his brother Fr Thomas Philippe and the founder of L’Arche Jean Vanier, both also dead.
“The pastoral collaboration between the archdiocese and the Verbum Spei Fraternity is terminated with immediate effect,” the archdiocese said, adding the paternity question had prompted its review.
The Philippe brothers were Dominicans who used a theory of “friendship love” to justify sexual abuse. The statement said the “new knowledge of the potential danger of the philosophical doctrine” and the “harmful consequences if put into practice” had led to the decision.
It said Verbum Spei priests would be allowed to celebrate liturgies in two churches until their planned departure this summer, but an unnamed priest was ordered to stop exorcisms and hearing confessions immediately.
The fraternity was founded in 2012 in the Diocese of Saltillo in northern Mexico. Four years later, the Archbishop of Luxembourg Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich entrusted it with a parish and a university chaplaincy in the archdiocese.
The leader of the community in Luxembourg joined signatories of a 2013 letter vowing to “do everything in the future to defend the honour and reputation of Fr Marie-Dominique Philippe, and, even more, to ensure the continued spread of everything he sought to pass on to us”.
The mother of the two children was a foreign student manipulated by the priest, La Croix reported. After meeting other abuse victims, she went to Cardinal Hollerich to denounce the group.
The archdiocesan statement said Verbum Spei was not a religious institute and its priests were part of the Saltillo clergy. None of the priests were found to have committed any sexual abuse during their time in Luxembourg.