Jean Vanier, founder of L'arche, was a serial abuser

[bore]

A religious leader who founded a celebrated organisation for people with learning difficulties sexually abused six women in France, an internal report says.

Canadian Jean Vanier set up the global network L'Arche in France in 1964 and died last year aged 90.

The organisation runs homes and centres where people with and without disabilities live together, operating in 38 countries with around 10,000 members.

Read More: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-51596516

It's hard to overstate how big this news will be in the Christian World. Vanier in his lifetime received almost universal adulation from the whole spectrum of church and society (though there is no suggestion any of these people knew), and I expect there will be a real moral reckoning in the consciences of hundreds of thousands about these revelations.

The report seems absolutely damning (particularly striking, from a supposedly devout Christian was this line “It is not us, it is Mary and Jesus. You are chosen, you are special, it’s a secret) though I guess L’arche International deserve a lot of credit for the fact that this came to light because of them, not, as has mostly been the case in the church and society, in spite of them.

I didn't actually know much about Vanier, the sum of my knowledge came from wikipedia, a few about us pages and a couple of obituaries, so, besides general positive feelings he wasn’t really a personal inspiration to me, but I do know a lot about L'arche as an institution, so there are lots of people I know for whom he was, who read his books, modelled themselves on him and in some cases counted meeting as one of the best moments of their life. They are not his foremost victims, those are the women who had to endure not just abuse but then decades of their abuser being feted as a living saint, but they are also his victims.

There now has to be a full scale re interpretation of Vanier’s life and the L’arche’s foundation and history, but I think it would be a mistake to take the more severe, but paradoxically easier lines that he was either an evil man whose actions were predicated around building a plausible veneer so he could get away with abuse, or that he was a saint corrupted by the adulation his work inspired and the acclaim he accrued. In the former case his actions, and we know he was intelligent, don’t really make sense in that if you wanted to be in a position to abuse people, quitting your job and letting 2 very disabled people move into your house isn’t a great opening gambit. In the latter the report suggests that, though the abuse documented started in 1970, there are questions to answer about his relationship with his Dominican mentor from the 1950s. Both might be factors, but they’re not the whole story.  The messy truth is that people can be sincerely compassionate in one area and abusive in an another. We will never know what went on in Vanier’s mind when he abused, how he reconciled his actions with his words, his actions with his other actions. But that’s a mystery we don’t need the answer to. Even if we had it, if it had been written down, it would only tell us about the singular man, Jean Vanier, and therefore what we already know, that humans are complicated, capable of acts of great kindness and evil, and, above all, weak.

What then should we make of this? There are I think three things to keep in mind. Firstly, there is a very good reason why they used to delay canonisation until decades after the saints death, and this is another reminder that the church should return to that approach. Secondly, there are so very few people in this world that we know (yourself, and maybe your very closest family and friends) are clean. If Jean Vanier, who by all appearances seemed to be a living saint, was an abuser then who are we not suspicious of? Everyone doubts everyone, which is a catastrophe, it is no way to live, but what can we do? Innocence has been taken from us. Finally, no matter how evil his actions were, we must not forget that Vanier did not own L’arche, he did not own the work that came from him. The fundamental principles and institutions he betrayed are still good, still make a real difference to tens of thousands of people, and it would be a further tragedy if they were to disappear in the cleansing fire.

[afleitch]

The messy truth is that people can be sincerely compassionate in one area and abusive in an another.

While I certainly agree with that sentiment, to be a little flippant for a moment, I think the vast majority of people go through life without engaging in decades of sexual and manipulative abuse of people that pass through our lives. As I've said a few times, I was involved for a decade in government work involving victims of sexual violence and abuse and while what Mr Vanier has been found responsible for is not common, it is characteristic of what can happen with that sort of prestige and influence. A quick google of the gushing praise after his passing is a little nauseating.

My own view is that he was, by his actions clearly a terrible human being. As was his mentor.

And for me, that's that. There are many contrasting parts of people lives where nuance is important. I don't think this is one.

And it appears that one set of investigations eventually led to the other. L'Arche have been both very public and transparent about both sets of allegations and that is rare. The organisation itself deserves full support going forward.

It's actually quite painful comparing what Vanier and Phillipe got away with given that fate of Henri Nouwen.

[bore]

The messy truth is that people can be sincerely compassionate in one area and abusive in an another.

While I certainly agree with that sentiment, to be a little flippant for a moment, I think the vast majority of people go through life without engaging in decades of sexual and manipulative abuse of people that pass through our lives. As I've said a few times, I was involved for a decade in government work involving victims of sexual violence and abuse and while what Mr Vanier has been found responsible for is not common, it is characteristic of what can happen with that sort of prestige and influence. A quick google of the gushing praise after his passing is a little nauseating.

My own view is that he was, by his actions clearly a terrible human being. As was his mentor.

And for me, that's that. There are many contrasting parts of people lives where nuance is important. I don't think this is one.

And it appears that one set of investigations eventually led to the other. L'Arche have been both very public and transparent about both sets of allegations and that is rare. The organisation itself deserves full support going forward.

It's actually quite painful comparing what Vanier and Phillipe got away with given that fate of Henri Nouwen.

You're absolutely right to say that, judging Vanier as a person, there really is no doubting that he was terrible. There is no excuse, no possible counter balancing actions for, over the course of decades, both covering up and engaging in the systematically abusive acts that were revealed today.

What I was trying to advance in that paragraph was not the morally abhorrent claim that unrelated positive actions can cancel out this behaviour, or the banal claim that bad people can do good things, but the assertion that people who are in totality horrible can do good things for the right reasons. That is, Vanier was probably sincere in his motivations to help the disabled. Does that matter? Not when it comes to how we see him personally, but I think it does demonstrates an important point, that humans motivations and choices are incredibly complex, even when, like here, we can reach a (negative) holistic judgment of the person.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Vanier was almost literally the last person in the world of whom I would have suspected this or wanted it to be true. Needless to say, that's not the case any more.

However, as both other posters in this thread have said, L'Arche taking it upon itself to conduct this investigation and make the outcome of the investigation public deserves all the praise we can give it. This has completely destroyed my esteem for a personal hero of mine, and that's a blow from which it's going to take a very long time for me to move on (not nearly as much so for me as for his victims, of course), but it's actually increased my admiration for the organization that he founded.

ETA: There's a Solzhenitsyn quote (himself somebody on whose legacy I think it's appropriate to have distinctly mixed feelings) to the effect that "the line between good and evil passes through each human heart", and that often comes to mind for me when confronted with news like this. Not in that I'm trying to equivocate, still less trying to justify; in the past I've applied this quote to those French antisemites who became Holocaust rescuers because they resented the idea that Germans could solve France's Jewish problem better than Frenchmen could, so it's not a line that I use to indicate that I approve of somebody.