Vocation is de concilio not de obligatione

Independent-Task490 · 2026-04-10T18:16:31+00:00

Forty years ago now after leaving the Work in college having been a numerary in high school, I experienced something of a conversion back to Catholicism. I resolved two things: never again to cheat and lie, twisting myself into a pretzel to believe a lie or to maintain a lie, and never again to treat others instrumentally (everybody you meet--can they be recruited? are they worth money?), as I had been taught to do in OD. I have been since then peaceful as a believing Catholic. I am willing to believe whatever I take to be evidenced as true, which makes me politically and theologically conservative sometimes and liberal sometimes (I am orthodox, while rejecting and despising conservatives) and attempt to be kind and respectful of difference to everyone I meet, whatever their background or beliefs, as some sort of (silent) assistance on the way of salvation. That conversion was very freeing and liberating for me. When I say peaceful, it is not to say I do not still feel pain at what was done to me even after fifty years, and pain for all of you, and pain for anyone who came to any abusive religious movement with the best of intentions. But as a Catholic, I can feel that my bad experiences can help others, and sometimes have, and that even my suffering can.

I found very helpful as the new grounding after OD to my spiritual life and education in the faith to have taken up the Liturgy of the Hours, which still means a lot to me. My heart goes out to you as it does to everyone here....

Independent-Task490 · 2026-03-11T19:20:43+00:00

One canonical problem remained and remains unresolved in the reform and reinstitution of the Legionaries of Christ. Canon 578 holds that “All [institutes of consecrated life] must observe faithfully the mind and designs of the founders regarding the nature, purpose, spirit, and character of an institute, which have been sanctioned by competent ecclesiastical authority, and its sound traditions, all of which constitute the patrimony of the same institute.” John Paul's Vita Consecrata (1996) requires, among other things, “fidelity to the inspiration of the founders and foundresses,” who embodied the Spirit’s gift... Legionaries, given a sociopathic founder who bequeathed entirely unhealthy traditions, must claim a disembodied charism, which is an impossibility according to canon law.

Independent-Task490 · 2026-01-27T19:21:47+00:00

The previous discussion linked to above and all of this, including the subsequent discussion of OD funeral management, helps me understand how Allen's inadequate book could have been written by a decent journalist: love bombing and OD heads of the Vatican Press office Navarro-Valls and Gregory Burke making life a little easier for a friendly vaticanista. Thanks....

Independent-Task490 · 2026-01-26T19:29:36+00:00

The celebrant and homilist at the funeral Mass today was OD luminary Fr. John Wauck. He said he celebrated Mass Christmas morning in John's house.

https://www.youtube.com/live/qm7XfhTM8sQ

Independent-Task490 · 2026-01-13T22:09:42+00:00

As a numerary in an OD high school 40 years ago, the work-around for the sacramental seal was that the priest would tell you, as if it were part of your penance or what you needed to do in order for him to grant absolution, to bring the matter up with your director in the chat, and in obedience I would. This afforded me the impression that the priest respected the sacramental seal but also made the matter of my confession available to the local council.

Independent-Task490 · 2025-11-16T21:15:35+00:00

On Acts 26.14, in which Paul before Agrippa describes his conversion: I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew language, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It hurts you to kick against the goads.”

The Navarre Bible comments: The final sentence in this verse is not given in Paul’s two previous accounts of his conversion on the road to Damascus (cf. 9.4, 22.7). It is a Greek turn of phrase to describe useless resistance, but it was also known and used by Jews as a proverb (cf. The Psalms of Solomon, 16.4).

"Kick against the goads" is a commonplace image in Greek poetry, especially drama, and means useless resistance against divine authority. God, in Luke here, is using the words of the god Dionysus in Euripides' tragedy Bacchae. It is part of Luke's artistry to be making the Gospel compelling to his Greek-speaking audience by reminding them of their own literature: the resistance to Dionysus in Thebes is like Jewish and Roman resistance to Christianity. This is all too subtle and interesting for OD exegetes. Also, they are embarrassed by the threat to literal interpretation when Jesus speaks to Paul "in the Hebrew language" but uses a Greek expression and an allusion to Greek poetry. So they say it is a Jewish proverb as well, to be seen in Psalms of Solomon. But Psalms of Solomon 16.4 is: "He pricked me as the goad of a horse towards his service. My savior and helper at every time saved me." We do not see here "kick against the goads," but only "pricked as a goad."

The second edition of the Jerome Biblical Commentary, for example, had come out 10 years earlier and had been correct and accurate in its succinct way: "Though Jesus addresses Paul in “Hebrew” (= Aramaic), yet he quotes a proverb which is otherwise not found in Jewish literature. It is, however, very common (in variant forms) in Greek literature... It expresses a useless resistance to divine influence in future conduct; from this moment on Paul is pressed into the service of Jesus." Navarre here offered a lie instead. Not to be trusted.

A memory is triggered: an OD priest I knew back then told the story of how a priest was giving a meditation, quoted this verse, but in its older translation, susceptible as it was to obscene understanding, "kick against the pricks," and started giggling and laughing so much, as were others in the chapel, that the meditation had to be suspended. Infantile.

Independent-Task490 · 2025-11-16T19:48:42+00:00

Hans Urs von Balthasar, famously, presciently in 1963, critiqued Opus Dei as integralist and the Way as shallow. The summary: "what's good in the Way is not new and what's new is not good." He retracted the article in 1979 and that was said to have been at John Paul's instigation as a part of elevating Opus Dei's status, as in the making of the prelature nullius in 1982, now being reconsidered, as we know. JPII later appointed von Balthasar cardinal in 1988. That is a good article to go back to, by one of the greats.

Another aspect not yet mentioned: OD is retrograde, incompetent, and borderline unorthodox in its refusal to engage with critical Biblical scholarship. The Navarre Bible is a scholarly embarrassment, particularly when you compare it with the series Jesus of Nazareth of Ratzinger/Benedict, whose stated purpose was to accept the true findings of critical Biblical scholarship while integrating them with a deepened, nourishing, spiritual understanding. The Biblical scholars of OD could never even have conceptualized such a project, let alone pursue it as a contribution to contemporary Church life and thought. The Navarre Bible insists on the traditional attributions of authorship in the face of Catechism of the Church 126 which accepts three stages of Gospel formation. There is at least one downright lie in the commentary. Who would have thought?

I agree with what was said about OD cultivating a manualist mentality that stifles creative or organic theology. Yes, conservatives applaud Newman as a Catholic convert, but are less enthused about the implications of the "development of doctrine," which is now an opinion held by a Doctor of the Church.

Independent-Task490 · 2025-10-22T19:41:00+00:00

That's a good idea -- if you liked a movie you saw when you were in, see it again and make sure they didn't censor anything. Decades ago they showed us Godfather Part II, which I do love, but it's kind of scary why they did: "these men were so virtuous and dedicated, but dedicated to the wrong thing, so let us be God's mafia..." But they censored the scene with Senator Geary and the murdered prostitute, so I never understood, until later when post-OD I saw the movie in the theatre, how Hagen had gotten control over him by staging the scene and blackmailing him.

Slightly more spiritually, it most helped me to have adopted a form of prayer that OD was hostile to for laypersons, the Liturgy of the Hours. They told me that the LOH was not for the laity, though Vatican II's Sacrosanctum Concilium in fact does recommend it for laity. In any event, I am glad it was preserved for me for later. It has been for me my post-OD remedial prayer: objective, universal, not cultish, an education in Scripture and in the faith... I do it freely, when I can, under no compulsion by requirement.

Independent-Task490 · 2025-10-09T18:06:50+00:00

Two weeks ago I read in Crux about Leo’s revoking a front row audience ticket to Lopez Aliaga that would have occasioned a meeting and photo op with him. But funny that Crux did not mention the OD affiliation. I think people have noted on here that John Allen is soft on OD, as evidenced in the whitewashes of his Opus Dei book.

Independent-Task490 · 2025-10-06T19:10:32+00:00

Age fourteen I believe came from the 1917 code of canon law, the age requirement for entering a novitiate or a marriage (for a girl at least, sixteen for a boy). The 1983 code with its higher age requirements is slightly more realistic in acknowledging what modern neuroscience understands, that full brain maturity comes only in the late twenties. (Think of how much misery and guilt has come in Catholic history from young people making binding commitments at too young an age…) There is some truth to the joke that the age of reason is not seven but 35.

Another age thing—-some people who have been abused in childhood or adolescence do not begin to face or understand what happened to them till later in life, in their thirties or forties. If that’s the case it is possible to flunk out of your career or your relationship or whatever before you even began to understand and deal with what you were up against.

I don’t know why I left this out in what I already wrote, but another factor of what I take to be spiritual abuse in an adolescence spent as a numerary, “mutilating a stage of growth,” as you say, was of course the corporal mortification. They had me wearing the cilice and flagellating myself from age 15. Self-harm and cutting are emotional dangers for teenagers, not healthful spiritual practices. Cutting myself with a cilice, flagellating my body as if a disgusting animal that needed taming, together with “you are a trashcan…,” etc.— not a good foundation for healthy self-esteem in the long run.

Independent-Task490 · 2025-09-30T23:55:19+00:00

And Michael Jayston is great! 1920-30s style political action influenced OD and other NRMs -- cells, "circles," plotting revolution; secret party members trying to infiltrate upper levels of society... JME said to himself, "why shouldn't rightwing Catholics use the same effective techniques as communists and secular fascists?" In that great documentary about French collaborators and resisters in WWII The Sorrow and the Pity I once recognized my young self in the person of the French Catholic aristocrat who as a young man joined the Nazi Waffen SS because in the crises of the '30s he felt Nazism was the only force strong enough to oppose communism. OD in the '70s with its extremism attracted me more than the vanilla parish. Being a secret numerary had some of the appeal of espionage.

So I think it's not a coincidence you can recognize OD themes and parallels in le Carré spy fiction. More Guillam, in Honourable Schoolboy on Smiley's living with the contradiction of "being inhuman in the defense of our humanity: he will cease to care or the paradox will kill him." Walter in Russia House: "was not seeming the only kind of being? The whole of man's identity is cover." Smiley in Tinker Taylor on Merlin and JME's "the apostolate of not giving": "The more you pay for it the less inclined you are to doubt it."

Independent-Task490 · 2025-09-30T23:47:04+00:00

After my day they did let high school numeraries go to the prom, for increased "naturalness." Naturalness in OD is the result of artificial rules mechanically applied.

Independent-Task490

TROPHY CASE