Can L’Arche escape the twisted legacy of its own founders?

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Michael W. Higgins is Basilian Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought at the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College and a senior fellow at Massey College.

It is monstrous in size and in content.

L’Arche International’s full report, Abuse and Hold: An Investigation of Thomas Philippe, Jean Vanier and L’Arche, is almost 900 pages long, but even the detailed synopsis and conclusion are weighty enough in their own right to call for concentrated attention.

What we find in these distillations is a detailed examination of the roots of a spiritual and psychological pathology that has infected L’Arche – an international organization given over to the care and flourishing of the intellectually disabled that has been a model to the world – and Jean Vanier, a Canadian icon whose lineal pedigree and universal acclaim as a great humanitarian were once without parallel.

Shortly after Mr. Vanier’s death in 2019, various testimonies by women claiming to have been abused by him surfaced. L’Arche International, keen on getting ahead of the narrative, released the information and pledged to mandate a commission to undertake an exhaustive review of the origins of L’Arche and the role of its two co-founders, demonstrating full transparency, rigorous scholarship and untrammelled freedom to dig into the deepest caverns of the organization’s history and the two men.

It was a no-holds-barred investigation, involving historians, theologians, a sociologist, a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst. The stakes were high; the integrity of L’Arche itself could be compromised.

Unearthing the truth in a history layered with myth, prevarication, twisted theology and emotional dysfunction, to say nothing of the vulnerability of those they preyed upon – dozens of nuns and other women who worked for L’Arche at its original location in Trosly, France – is no easy feat. The ministry and legacy of L’Arche must be disengaged from the two men whose corrupting vision and spiritual fraudulence have been revealed to be at the core of its origin story.

Thomas Philippe was Mr. Vanier’s “spiritual father.” His peculiar blend of Marian theology and mysticism was an esoteric system of spiritual direction that insisted on erotic intimacy between the spiritual father and the one trusting his confidence. It was a strategy of seduction couched in mystical language.

Père Philippe was a delusional Dominican friar who had repeatedly run afoul of his brother Dominicans, as well as the Vatican. He had been investigated by the Vatican’s Holy Office, and his teachings and behaviour were formally condemned in 1956. But the sanctions were ineffectual, the result of resistance by those who believed he was being maligned – despite the seriousness of his dangerous ideas.

In 1938, he wrote about a mystic union with the Blessed Virgin Mary in the chapel of Trinita dei Monti in Rome: “I was caught in my whole body, all night, in recollection and very intimate union with Her. It was like knowing Mary anew.” In one sense, this is rather conventional piety invoking mystical discourse to speak of a deepening spiritual relationship with the mother of Jesus. But Père Philippe goes much further; for him, the “very obscure graces” he receives legitimize his erotic urges. His sexual organs thus become means of initiating nuns and young laywomen into his mystico-sexual practices, a way to explore the very relationship between Jesus and Mary.

This is the stuff of blasphemy. No less a French intellectual luminary than Jacques Maritain wrote in his diary that “to my mind, Fr. Thomas is mad. Fr. Marie-Dominique Philippe knows that fact and says that his brother is a saint, everything is O.K. Another madman. The devil is raging in this incredible affair. … For me this is an extraordinary case of schizophrenia – too rich a wine [a sincere craving for sanctity etc.] in a double-bottomed goatskin, the rot of which had made the wine turn into perversion.”

What Mr. Vanier knew that Mr. Maritain did not was that the cabal of initiates gathered around Père Philippe, including his brother Marie-Dominique, and his sister, the Prioress Mother Cécile, were apparently as adept at sexual predation as the spiritual master himself. His sister was a grooming enabler, the Ghislaine Maxwell of this sordid drama, accused in the L’Arche report of pushing her nuns “into the arms of her brother” and of “incestuous” relations. The rot was extensive, insidious, encased in secrecy and ruthless in nurturing a culture hidden in plain sight. And Mr. Vanier was fully onside. He wrote in his autobiography that Père Philippe “loved me and accepted me the way I was. It was liberating for me. It is wonderful to be seen, to be recognized as a person who has a destiny and a mission.” That destiny and mission were, in great measure, defined by Père Philippe.

As the L’Arche report notes: “Philippe was convinced he was announcing a new age for the Church. His message was too innovative to be understood. … This attracted hostility, and, in his view, the disgrace of being considered mentally ill.” The Vatican condemnation also sealed the loyalty of Père Philippe’s followers and ensured that at some point he would resurface in a new capacity, drawing on his special spiritual gifts.

And he would resurface in 1964, with the founding of the first L’Arche home in Trosly – a return from the wilderness of exile facilitated by Mr. Vanier himself. This allowed Père Philippe to continue his predatory behaviour unhindered, building a network held together by the notion that the initiates, the tout-petits or little ones, were “chosen” to be the recipients of his “mystic graces.”

The Philippe cult was an aberration of Catholic mysticism, a Gnostic sect with its own antinomian code, in which its mesmerizing leaders held in their thrall the young, the impressionable and the vulnerable, making the case that they were special in the new world of spiritual freedom wherein the erotic is divinized.

Both Père Philippe and Mr. Vanier drew on their self-invoked privileged relationship with the divine to channel their lust as they perfected their seductions in sacral terms: “It’s not us, it’s Mary and Jesus” and “Jesus and I are not two, we are one … and it is Jesus who loves you through me” – two phrases that appeared in some of the victim testimonies. Mr. Vanier at one point describes his genitals as a “sacrament of love.”

Rome was blindsided. Although Cardinal Paul Philippe (no relation) tried his best to monitor the cult in its early years, the two L’Arche co-founders’ careful veil meant that effective supervision was limited. As was customary at the time, the Vatican conducted its investigations in secret, so knowledge of Père Philippe’s spiritual modus operandi was limited to a few people. The Dominican Order itself was negligent in exercising its authority, and now there are formal investigations of the order’s own failures, initiated by the order itself.

The L’Arche report’s investigators note that this “narcissistic perverse nucleus within the Catholic Church” has spread to other spiritual or ecclesial communities, including many that are now being vigorously reformed or suppressed by Pope Francis. The commission also raised the point that Mr. Vanier’s spirituality is distinctly his own, born of his eccentric anthropology, unconventional reading of Scripture and exaltation of the heart over reason in opposition to the hierarchy of the institutional Catholic Church that declined to ordain him a priest. They write: “Jean Vanier’s mystical discourse proves to be elusive, disjointed and not very credible on both the rational and theological level.”

But it cannot be denied that his profile before his fall was extraordinary. He was seen as a living saint in our time, admired by multitudes irrespective of their faith, the darling of monarchs, pontiffs, presidents and prime ministers. And now that reputation is in tatters.

L’Arche, however, will endure, in no small part because it did with its report what Harvard historian Jill Lepore described, when speaking of the recently released Jan. 6 committee report: “For all its weight and consequence, [it] never asks why anyone believed Donald Trump.” The L’Arche report does ask why one would believe Père Philippe and Mr. Vanier, and in doing so proves that L’Arche is trying, with integrity, to make sense of the consequences.

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