On Being Jean Vanier

Convivium, 28 February 2020

With the saintly founder of L’Arche capable of great wickedness, what snares imperil the rest of us?

Readers know of my great admiration for the first family of Canadian Catholicism, the Vaniers. I have written often about Georges and Pauline and most recently in Convivium about their son Jean on the occasion of his death last May. All of it has been laudatory.

The revelations that Jean Vanier, for at least thirty-five years, was engaged in sexual misconduct – coercive and manipulative – with at least six women were therefore completely unbelievable to me, except that they are true. It is devastating to know that he did such great harm to those women. I would prefer not to know, except that the only remedy for long term deceit is the truth. Justice certainly demands that the exploited women are told the truth. The truth, though, is a burden of its own.

We published here a column by Brett Fawcett that largely captured my thoughts. I would like to explore further, though, the question he poses there:

[Vanier’s] sins seem to discredit his entire thought and, with it, his entire work. How can we take his spiritual counsel seriously when we see what he used his spiritual counsel for behind closed doors? How can we hear his words about community being a place where we lower our walls and share with each other when we know how he invaded other people’s intimacy under the guise of mentorship? To think of the multitudes of people living in L’Arche—those innocent, childlike people, blissfully unaware of Vanier and his crimes—who now unwittingly exist in the shadow of these findings is sickening. 

Of course, without Vanier those multitudes of people would be living without L’Arche, where their innocent and childlike characters are loved and honoured. The good that Vanier did is not simply a series of deeds in the past that can be simply left there, to be condemned or ignored. The good he did lives still, and many lives and much happiness depend upon it. 

Continue reading at Convivium:
https://www.convivium.ca/articles/on-being-jean-vanier/