ROME
Catholic News Agency
By Jean Boudet
When it concluded on February 25, the Extraordinary General Chapter of the Legionaries of Christ, meeting in Rome to complete the drafting of new Constitutions and elect new leadership, issued eleven documents that represent the Congregation’s future. The Legionaries, once again autonomous, have emerged from a period of “examination and renewal” that began five years ago in 2009 with their public acknowledgment of their Founder’s scandalous double life and continued with an Apostolic Visitation (2009-10) and three and a half years of supervision under a Pontifical Delegate, Cardinal Velasio de Paolis (2010-14). The Constitutions, now awaiting Vatican approval, was the principal work of the Chapter, but these eleven communiqués and decrees, innovative in several respects, address generally a series of topics that widely concerned Legionaries during their self-examination and express the goals the Constitutions will legislate. The Chapter documents both apologize for past deficiencies and convey optimism for a productive future.
(The eleven documents, including a presentation letter and two attachments, comprising some 120 pages, have recently all been made available in English translation of their original Spanish here)
In its May 2010 report, the Visitation saw the “need to redefine the charism… preserving its true nucleus.” So most pressing on the Legionaries was to reformulate and to insist on the validity of their charism. The charism of a religious community, to use John Paul II’s words in Vita Consecrata (1996), expresses a “specific spirituality, that is, a concrete program of relations with God and one’s surroundings, marked by specific spiritual emphases and choices of apostolate, which accentuate and re-present one or another aspect of the one mystery of Christ.” But, first, could a valid charism have been conveyed by a criminal Founder?
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