When Asked What I Think Of The Fall Of (St.) Jean Vanier

I have looked in my archive to see if I ever wrote anything about Jean Vanier the latest big name in Catholicism to have fallen in revelations of sexual scandal and don't see that I've written about him, in a post, at least.  I've always been really antsy about the declaration of people as living saints knowing that a close investigation of their lives will inevitably not match the hype.  Thank God no one is about to mistake me for anything like one.  I can agree, totally, with Jamie Mason's view of this:  

Since the news broke Saturday morning that Jean Vanier had coercive, nonconsensual and abusive sexual encounters with at least six adult women, my social media feeds have been filled with folks trying to make sense of these revelations.

I admit that Vanier was not someone I looked to for spiritual inspiration. Though he was not a priest, my years of experiencing the clericalism of both the clergy and the laity had made me weary and wary of the Catholic tendency towards hero worship, particularly of grand older men.*

The best and most admirable of us - even those of us who don't have disturbing and troubling sex lives or associations with gangsters and fascists  or hoarding wealth and power (generally all of those are to be found together) - fall short of what is considered to make a saint.  And in this case, as someone pointed out yesterday, Vanier had ample warning, from THE VATICAN! from the 1950s that the de-frocked Dominican degenerate Fr. Thomas Philippe who encouraged him down the path that led him to sexually abuse six women - none, so far as we know now, were the disabled people that his L'Arche communities were founded to house and care for.  The Vatican warned Vanier that Phillippe's offenses weren't only found in  his heretical preaching,  they were a matter of his actions. 

It must be noted that the revelations made against Vanier came from the present leadership of the L'Arche communities that he founded - which is to their credit that they were the ones who not only dropped the dime, they blew the whistle. And they certainly knew that they were risking everything in doing it, Vanier, as "living saints" so often do, was the icon, brand name and trade mark for the institution he founded and anything that discredited him would discredit the institution and the work it does.  I'm sure that in the same way another institution which I respect, a secular one in that case, blew the whistle on wrong doing high up in it, L'Arche will take a hit and so will those it serves.   If it comes out that some of the disabled members of its communities were abused, it could be a fatal blow that will put a lot of them out of homes and support.  

There was a similar revelation that could have hurt the credibility of another important group, Catholic Worker but it was indirect.  It was when one of the two founders of it,  Peter Maurin could be linked, though only through his writing, as far as I can see,  to the bizarre figure of Eric Gill who I was reminded of as soon as I read about the revelations about Vanier.  Gill who Maurin admired enormously, was revealed decades after his death to have been an incestuous sexual abuser. incest and bestiality, among things he, himself, recorded in his diary even as he was, to the word, a Catholic artist - though always one who produced erotica as well.*   Though from everything I can see, Peter Maurin was as much duped by Gill as anyone.  

Which leads to what I think is an unanswerable question.  What do you make of someone who is both admirably good but with a really bad and dark area in their life?   What does it mean that someone who is good does such bad things?  

I think the problem is as much in unrealistic presentation of human beings as saints.  There are few if any of us who don't have deep flaws, those who have only minor ones might be the best we have any right to hope to encounter.  The concept of purity might lead to someone like Vanier to enjoy the status of a moral hero but he, certainly, knew better.  Gill most certainly did as he is the source of the knowledge for some of his worst acts.  They must know their celebrity is based in a lie, their lack of candor while going along with the PR campaign only makes things worse. 

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At this point, for reasons I won't go into, I'll address the political downfall of someone who never presented himself as a secular-saint in this because I think it is a perfect example of how complex these issues can be, of what happens when we insist on sainthood from the wrong people at the wrong time in the wrong way.  The price Al Franken paid in the MeToo* reaction was certainly unjustifiable.  His alleged offense, consisting of some puerile show-biz hijinks which the "victim" of it fully participated in, herself, (and far more raunchily) was mildly naughty but it was certainly stupid to allow it to be used to end of his Senate career.  

It was clearly a hit job by the Roger Stone wing of Republican ratfuckery which the "victim" was clearly a part of.  That Franken was dumb to have put himself in a position where that photo could have been used that way is something that I'm sure he realizes now but which is typical of show-biz behavior - just one of the reasons I look at the show-biz celebrity endorsements of Bernie Sanders and others and wonder what pictures like that could be publicized.  I admire Franken as a Senator, I regret that he ever had a show-biz career to generate that kind of weapon to be used against him. 

Franken being removed from the Senate is certainly not in any way related to the downfall of the posthumous reputation of Jean Vanier or much of any of the others who have fallen in the Me_Too phenomenon.   Franken being removed from the Senate shows that Democrats are held to an entirely different standard of purity than Republican-fascists are.  It was unjustifiable and unjust and wrong and harmful to the anti-fascist struggle. 

We really have to make distinctions between things that are important and things that aren't, things that cross a line A LINE THAT EITHER COVERS EVERYONE IN THE SAME WAY OR IT TURNS INTO A REPUBLICAN-FASCIST WEAPON, or people like Franken will be out of office as criminals like Trump and Jim Jordan are in office. 

Women are certainly not better off with Al Franken out of the Senate. 

* I will note that that tendency, especially about "grand older men," is on full display in the secular-left to a troubling extent right now. 

* After finding out about Gill I had the same question I had about the very recent revelations about the Tracy-Hepburn pseudo-affair that covered up both of their many covert and Lesbian sex lives, how come no one saw it for what it was?  I mean the Tracy-Hepburn affair was alleged to have been conducted from Tracy's permanent home-away-from-his-home in, for Pete's sake, George Cukor's pool house.