Devil’s in the Details of Catholic Humanitarian Jean Vanier’s Secretive Spirituality
Sensational sex cult soundbites from new 900-page L’Arche report are more plausible than at first glance.
I’d only ever really heard of L’Arche, without any real contact. A friend had briefly resided at one of it many communities where people with and without intellectual disabilities live together, and he spoke of kneading bread and full lives lived with purpose. Later, vague plans to visit a local community fell apart when an ordained academic colleague decamped on summer vacation with her family and then we never really quite got around to it afterwards. I’d never read any books by L’Arche’s founder Jean Vanier, either, but only knew him from a few photos, where his severely unkempt eyebrows reminded me of nothing so much as a dust-covered peacock that I had once seen as a child, where it halfheartedly flung its tail a bit open, only for it to be blown ragged and dragged forward by that day’s rather strong wind.
Even then, though, I had to wonder: was Vanier a simple man with his mind and heart somewhere else, or was there something a bit off about him, where he wasn’t so much unconcerned with the ways of the world, but rather somehow disconcertingly unaware of them?
After his death in 2019, the revelations about his abusive relationships with non-disabled adult women came to my attention, but only registered as yet another instance of an authority’s exploitation of those under them.
Thus, the first brief mention of the new 900-page L’Arche-commissioned report also struck me similarly, until a friend sent me an article highlighting Vanier’s persistent adherence to “mystical-sexual” practices and his decades-long fixation on incestuous relations between Jesus and Mary.
I was simply floored. The L’Arche communities, incest. How did those go together? It just did not compute. The report’s plain, distilled claim stated that a hidden sectarian core had produced all this abuse, as well as the separable and eminently worthwhile movement. But, the connection between the two simply escaped me. In no world did something like this seem like it could possibly be real.
And so I found myself diving into the report at length, and yes, everything really does make sense, although the bewildering details and emphases of news coverage disguise some patterns and drain the summation of the plausibility that it really and truly does possess.
To take a step back from the actual people and events, humans have an endless capacity to re-valuate and re-periodize, especially when it comes to matters of religion.
In terms of re-valuation, it’s important to remember that objects just are, but people can come to diametrically opposed conclusions about them. For example, years ago a Religious Studies acquaintance regaled me with some details of dietary logics that he had found: for something like lacto-fermentation where bacteria multiply and transform a vegetable into a pickle, one group conceptualized eating the resultant food as this wonderful imbibing of an explosion of life, while another forbade it because the bacteria also continually die and thus you’re imbibing vast quantities of death. Same food, different logic imposed on top of it. Here one might also think of a classic example from scholar Peter Brown, on the evolution of towns in Late Antiquity; as Christianity and its values shaped the Greco-Roman world, the contamination of cemeteries found outside town walls became brought inside and celebrated, in churches that venerated the relics of saints and martyrs.
In terms of re-periodization, people can supplement and reframe prior knowledge in light of some break in time, even if others don’t or wouldn’t accept the premise of that change. In a small way, this is what happens in ghost shows on cable TV; a poor little child dies of influenza, and then in a very perverse turn of events beyond anything that they would have ever been able to conceive of, a television crew shows up over a century later and hears of a dark presence in a house, and then some mention of a pioneer family in the county archives suddenly turns that oblivious and long-dead infant into a tyrant spirit repeatedly assaulting the living. More seriously, such a change formed Christianity; after the crucifixion, scripture was re-read around a messiah of a quite unexpected nature, and a new plan stretching from creation through the end of the world was suddenly thought to have always been there. Some believe this reordering is true and some don’t, but, academically-speaking, it’s indisputable that such a re-periodization has taken place.
When it comes to L’Arche, the skeleton of events is this: as a child of a Canadian diplomatic family, Jean Vanier fell under the influence of a French Dominican priest Thomas Philippe, who had developed a 1938 revelation into “mystical-sexual” practices affecting several convents and a group that he founded called L’Eau Vive; then, after facing down a Vatican investigation and trial and resultant 1956 sanctions, that priest and others like Vanier persisted and quietly re-coaleseced around what had begun emerging by 1964 as the principal foundation of L’Arche, although they were quickly hemmed in by the movement’s success and the inclusion of many others with different intentions and no knowledge of the continuing esoteric activity. As the report indicates, self-narrations of Vanier and his developing hagiography concealed these major biographical gaps; the discretion around the 1956 trial and generational changes among authorities also did not help, although as late as 1977 enough knowledge persisted to permanently deny Vanier access to priestly ordination, in a decision validated by Pope Paul VI.
Throughout these events, scattered sources haphazardly provide glimpses of what seems to be a coherent evolution of the now-infamous “mystical-sexual” practices. In 1938, Thomas Philippe stood in front of a Roman fresco of Mater Admirabilis and “received very obscure graces” that centered on his genitals; eventually, this became fit into a supersessionary narrative where his versions of Jesus and Mary made manifest the redemption of the fallen nature of the sexual organs and together undertook earthly intercourse, interactions that correspond to their continuing heavenly activities and prefigure the common fate of the blessed in eschatological happiness. Here, although not mentioned in the report itself, these conceptualizations seem to refract very occasional speculations of Augustine, where uncontrollable sexual arousal was thought a result of Adam and Eve’s Fall; within a sort of twisted logic, Jesus and Mary lacked original sin and therefore possessed Edenic physiology, and thus, coeval with the Kingdom, their unpolluted sexuality could start to unfold an accordant erotic redemption among an elite portion of humanity. In any case, Thomas Philippe engaged in a period of experimentation marked by events like group prayer with naked women and, after the failure of a Marian promise of contraception, a 1947 abortion and subsequent veneration of the fetus as a relic. Subsequently, and as was in effect by the time of Vanier’s 1952 sexual initiation, the practices seem to have largely stabilized as non-penetrative intercourse where participants considered themselves as somehow embodying Jesus and Mary and enacting these cosmic secrets. After the reconstitution of the sect through L’Arche, such practices continued among a very small group and could surface obliquely like in Vanier’s abusive interactions with non-disabled adult women.
Indeed, lest it be questioned, sectarian persistence did hover around the origins and edges of L’Arche. The devotee Jacqueline d’Halluin who initiated Vanier in 1952 suggested the organization’s name, composed a major institutional prayer, and surfaced in long-term governance of a para-institutional site where Thomas Philippe resided. That priest also helped shape early community statutes. Most strikingly, Vanier himself commented in 1964 that L’Arche (“the ark”) floats on L’Eau Vive (“the living water”). Concurrent was an overwhelming emphasis on secrecy, including coded letters, rare cryptic sections in Vanier’s public writings amenable to multiple interpretations, and continual manipulation of information, like a 1959 letter where Thomas Philippe suggested that the well-connected Vanier be guarded with the Pope because “the Good Lord is not enlightening John XXIII in this affair” and “Mary prefers the whole domain to remain hidden.” As the report strikingly observes, “To fight against such a group would have required considering a priori each member of the ‘sect,’ identified or only suspected in 1956, as a liar for life,” a task more befitting “a counterintelligence service than a dicastery of the Roman curia.”
Yet in spite of all this new information and perspective, the issue highlighted in current reporting still persists – how does the existence of L’Arche as a “screen” organization co-exist with a sincere charitable impulse? This question is made all the more pointed by how many spiritual figures didn’t know everything that we know now but still saw something very wrong, whether a Carmelite nun warning Vanier’s mother away from Thomas Philippe in the late 1940s, or philosopher Jacques Maritain noting in his journal in 1952, “The devil is romping around in this incredible affair.” Indeed, in Vanier’s own relation, no less than Pope John XXIII told him alone in the elevator during a private 1959 audience with his family, “You must leave Father Thomas.”
Although subtle, perhaps the single most important explanatory factor found in this new report is a preoccupation with the miraculous, particularly anything attributed to Mary. Early on, Thomas Philippe saw his work fulfilling a local prophecy of something afoot greater than Catherine of Siena, but apparitions were particularly revered by the sect’s members. In the early 1950s, Vanier chauffeured Thomas Philippe around, including to La Salette; for a time starting in 1959, Vanier himself took up residence at Fatima; and, in 1971, the first mention of Vanier in Le Monde is for organizing pilgrimages of the disabled to Lourdes. Mary, of course, was the supposed revelator to Thomas Philippe, and Vanier reportedly brought people to the Mater Admirabilis fresco on pilgrimages in the early years of L’Arche. Accordingly, the fundamental issue at the heart of this scandal is not so much abuse writ large or mystical-sexual practices per se, but rather a certain credulous sort of Catholic with a propensity to be drawn towards Medjugorje or worse, thus rendering themselves vulnerable to aberrant claims of special revelation and all the places that can go. In other words, at the heart of L’Arche’s troubling history is not abuse, but rather an uncritical mindset that so prized the wondrous, that it got drawn into arranging all of existence around theologically-rationalized abuse purportedly heralded by Mary. Thus, although ultimately manifesting in this particular instance in a very extreme and disturbing form, this mindset is not all that dissimilar from one present among many Catholics, and is therefore as compatible with genuine expressions of charity there as it is elsewhere.
Major organizations with deep founding flaws are unavoidable. The Nobel Prize began with a dynamite fortune, and the U.S. Constitution with slavery and restricted suffrage. With things Catholic, think of Covenant House, or the Legionaries of Christ. Within this spectrum, L’Arche is an easier case of rehabilitation. It is already coming to terms with its history, and in some sense it is almost like a larger institutional manifestation of a situation probably familiar to the religious orders peopling the shrines at places like Fatima and Lourdes – a pilgrim who’s attached to some very strange beliefs and practices, but who also a has a true goodness that must be nurtured and grown.
Thus, although at first unbelievable, the new report’s fundamental evaluation does stand and is indeed plausible: there once existed a strange sectarian core but, despite its abuses, it created something else that is worthwhile and should live on.
And now, when I see Jean Vanier, I do see someone who is off, but I also see something that I never really expected – the possibility of a pose, of someone so strongly beholden to strange beliefs and forces, that they nourish this entire furtive existence that they seek to wall off from anyone who might even think to be looking. One can only think, how strange. And, one can only hope that the day will come when Vanier’s picture is not seen at all and, apart from the commemoration that every abuse deserves for healing and prevention, his memory is eclipsed by the reputation of a renewed and thriving L’Arche.
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Author’s Note — If present without hyperlinks, information has been carefully gathered from and double-checked against the L’Arche-commissioned report.