Walter Hughes, Ottawa

In 2020, this newspaper reviewed the original 2020 “L’Arche Report” alleging that Jean Vanier had sexually abused whom he was accompanying on their spiritual journey. While we expressed concerns about Vanier’s treatment of these women, we said that the report’s allegations were vague and that no woman had stepped forward to complain publicly, despite six having made allegations.

We also pointed out that much of the 30-page report focussed on a priest named of Father Thomas Philippe and said little about Jean Vanier.

L’Arche International responded to criticisms by commissioning a study on how the founding of L’Arche came about and what were the dynamics within L’Arche that facilitated the cases of abuse centered there. The purpose was not to judge nor prosecute anyone involved in the scandal reported in 2020, but to better understand what happened, so that those involved in L’Arche could better understand their history.

The study took two years and involved six researchers / investigators from five disciplines: history, sociology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, sociology, and theology. They had access to multiple archives of documentation, including 1,400 intimate letters either written or received by Vanier, his published books and his thesis. They interviewed 89 people, including victims or survivors of abusive relationships, their partners, friends of Vanier, and members at L’Arche. This is reported and analyzed in an 855-page report, summarized in a separate 127-page document.

FINDINGS

At L’Arche, Jean had intimate physical contact with several women whom he was accompanying spiritually. Although he was a single man and these women were adults, such contact was inappropriate. As an older man, thought to be ‘saintly’, much lauded for his spiritual books and seminars and for founding of L’Arche, including the household in Trosly-Breuil, and consenting to act as her spiritual advisor, Jean Vanier exuded a great deal of authority, and should have maintained a respectful distance.

Instead, Vanier typically initiated the sexual grooming of several women. These women were in each of the various marital states: single, married, or religious.

What sort of intimate acts? The report describes Vanier regularly kneeling next to the person to whom he was giving spiritual direction, then laying his head on that person’s bare chest. During prayer or in conversation, they might hold hands, put their heads close together, with foreheads touching, or they might hug one other. Over time, these intimate gestures would become more intense, with kisses on the mouth, then caresses, including in the erogenous zones of each person.

In several cases, physical contact was committed without the victim’s clear and explicit consent. The women who sought spiritual guidance from Jean were gently led down a path towards more and more intimacy. The absence of coitus led Jean Vanier to consider these as non-sexual practices. This was the doings at L’Arche.

Prior to the establishment of L’Arche, Vanier was not only a member, but a leader of an international network of priests, religious and lay women engaged in sexual activities. Rendezvous were pre-planned and held in friends’ apartments or other hideaways but may have also occurred within convent walls. These trysts continued after L’Arche began.

Among the men, the women in this sex ring were called “les tout-petits” (‘the toddlers’). (The Commission uses ‘initiates’ to reference the same people who supported the corrupted mystic of T. Philippe.) The study provides a lengthy history of several of the initiates involved, mostly of the nuns, including prioresses. This was the case as well with some nuns who were sexually abused by Fr. Thomas Philippe’s brother, Fr Marie-Dominique Philippe, in the scandal of the Order of the Brotherhood of St. John, as this paper reported in 2020. The Study reported, that in the sex ring, there was a passing along of lovers between the two brothers and Jean Vanier.

While the Report gives many details of individual cases of sexual abuse, it does not explain the doctrine that these three men were teaching the women in their care. It was confusing to the novices, who trusted in these supposedly holy men. For example, the Study heard that Father T. Philippe and his initiates were able to convince the nuns that the Blessed Virgin Mary had given special dispensation from rules prohibiting sexual relations.

It was said that Jesus and his mother also engaged in sexual adventures with one another. When challenged about such statements, Vanier explained to the woman that she ought not be too intellectual about religion. Jean wrote to one woman:
Jesus above all wants us to penetrate those mysteries through Love, through the life of love and not only through speculative intelligence: “Close the eyes of your intelligence.” (Report, p. 33)

Such a line tells women not to think too deeply about what he is saying, just accept it no matter how uncomfortable you may feel. This tactic of anti-intellectualism is evident in the lack of structured argumentation in his writings, as well as their paucity of references to other authors, ‘and none to renowned Catholic theologians.’ (p. 816)

Traditional Church teachings were neglected. His spirituality was full of theological deviations. He stepped outside the Church. For good reason did the Church deny Vanier priestly ordination, even though he had applied twice.

Father Thomas Philippe did not leave behind a written statement of doctrine, nor any effort to promulgate of what was supposedly given by the virgin Mary to pass on to the world. Nor did Jean Vanier leave behind his understanding of this doctrine or how it developed in his hands. In fact, witnesses said that Vanier explicitly told them to keep these things secret. Some may consider that this teaching did not come from the Most Holy Virgin, as the two men alleged.

Was this a con, developed by T. Philippe to convince trusting, religious women to provide sexual favours? Certainly, these were the type of women that the men targeted. Many were Religious, that is nuns, but many others were lay women with a fervent love for God. The men seemed particularly attracted to innocent women who either intended to take a vow of chastity, or had taken such a vow, including within the holy sacrament of marriage.

Jean was able to get away with such practices because of the authority that he had. He was very amicable in personality. He was the founder and leader of L’Arche, and that created an imaginary halo around him in some minds. His public religious discussions were all acceptable to the Church.. He lectured on authority, so probably understood the legitimate exercise of it. He was father and shepherd of L’Arche, and people loved him for it. He was the rockstar of the saintly set. But there were misgivings. He was also landlord and could say who belonged and who did not. He involved himself in people’s private lives and their major decisions, not only the interior and spiritual life of the person, but also the personal and professional life choices.

The omnipresent spirituality made it difficult for individuals to express their own viewpoints that might differ from Vanier’s. He had a manner of asking that was near impossible to refuse. In short, he exercised an abusive control over people.

HOW DID IT BEGIN?

It started with a painting of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The ‘Mater Admirabilis’ (’Mother Most Admirable’) can be found in the monastery of Trinità dei Monte, at the head of the Spanish Steps in Rome. It portrays Jesus’s mother, Mary, as a young woman, sitting on a cushioned wooden chair, with one foot on a low footstool.

She sits in a rich dwelling. Objects beside her include a lily bending towards her, a distaff and a spindle, and a basket with an open book laid overtop, as if it had just been put down for a moment as the woman meditated. Sources suggest that these items represent purity, work and diligence, and contemplation of the Word of God.

In 1938, at the age of 33, Father Thomas Philippe, priest, saw the painting. The Report gives his recollection, eighteen years later, of his reaction to the painting: he said he had experienced a mystical-sexual union with the Virgin Mary who allegedly revealed a ‘secret’ to him: Jesus and Mary were supposed to have had mystical-sexual relations with the aim of rehabilitating the flesh and inaugurating the mystical relations that will be experienced in the Kingdom.

The Roman Catholic Church asks its believers to be chaste, even in marriage; chaste, in this case, not meaning celibate, but using sex solely for its proper purpose. Priests and Religious are called to be celibate. The Commission Study quotes a late 19th Century French psychiatrist, Benjamin Ball, about the “madness of chaste love.”

Dr. Ball was writing before Sigmund Freud had developed his theories of sexuality and the psychological problems of his patients. Still, the Doctor’s assessment was that: … many priests worshipped Our Lady ethereally. The devotion that shines through many works by many serious theologians were the effects of unconscious erotomania: an expression of love for a woman veiled by piety ….

During the century between 1850 and 1950, there was a strong movement within the Roman Catholic faith to honour the mother of Jesus. In 1854, Pope Pius IX formally defined the dogma known as the Immaculate Conception, which asserts that, the mother of Jesus, herself, was conceived and born without sin. This was the third Marian dogma, the two earlier ones being that Mary as “mother of God” and Mary as perpetual virgin.

Each of these dogmas had been defined in the early centuries of the Church. In 1950, Pope Pius XII defined the dogma of the Assumption, saying that Mary was taken up body and soul into heaven. Fr. Thomas Philippe went to Rome specifically to hear the proclamation of this fourth Marian dogma. He took young Jean Vanier with him, even though he had arrived at the school only two months prior.
By quoting Dr. Ball, the Study at least implies that T. Philippe may have been one of those priests with an “unconscious erotomania” for the Blessed Virgin Mary. Father Philippe was confident that Mary had given him a mission to bring a message of erotic union to the Church and to the world. The image of Mary and Jesus in intercourse was an argument to allow an ethic ‘on earth as it is in heaven.’ Subsequently, the priest committed sexual acts against adult women to whom he was giving spiritual guidance.

In the early 1950s, the Vatican recalled the priest and investigated his teachings and his activities. At the time of his canonical trial, authorities in the Vatican and from his Dominican Order judged T. Philippe to be mentally ill. They subjected Philippe to psychiatric analysis. A psychiatrist in Nice said that the patient showed signs of paraphilia, a sexual deviation involving objects, activities, or even persons that are atypical in nature.
A Sulpician psychiatrist called him delusional. The renown philosopher, Jacques Maritain, who knew Philippe, called him schizophrenic: “an overly rich wine (sincere thirst for piety, etc.) in a false-bottomed wineskin with rot perverting the whole.” Following the investigation which ran between the years 1951 and 1956, the Vatican prohibited the priest from exercising any priestly ministry and in particular spiritual guidance.

ARRIVAL OF JEAN VANIER

Jean Vanier was the son of Georges and Pauline Vanier, the former a diplomat and war hero. Pauline was under the spiritual direction of Fr. Thomas Philippe. There is no evidence of Philippe having sexually abused Pauline Vanier. Jean met Father Thomas Philippe through his mother.

Jean Vanier was a ‘good boy’, amiable, devout and diligent. He was somewhat sporty but not much of a student. He joined the navy during the Second World War. In 1950, at the age of twenty-two, he made the decision to devote his life to God. First, he must discern what form will his vocation take. With his parents’ blessing, he went to L’Eau vive to study under Fr. Philippe.

L’Eau vive, in a commune south-east of Paris, was founded by Fr. Philippe in 1945 as a religious college which provided a foundation in theology and philosophy as well as an introduction to contemplative life based upon Carmelite mysticism and a strong Marian devotion.

Thomas Philippe accepted Jean Vanier and chose to give him special instruction into his own brand of spirituality. There is no evidence of Jean being sexually experienced before his arrival. L’Eau vive may well have been the first institution in which he was in mixed company. T. Philippe would have intimate conversations about life of the spirit with his disciple while leaning his head against Vanier’s bare chest.

This would be how Philippe initiated all his special relationships, and his followers would begin their onward tutorship in the same way. However, Jean would be the most special disciple. When Philippe was called away to Rome to be investigated, Phillipe chose Jean to manage L’Eau vive for him.

Philippe had set up the school on two levels. There were the regular school for the students who came for the college. There were also several women who came to share Fr. Philippe’s spirituality and to ‘pray’ with him. The Report does not claim that Vanier and Philippe had homosexual relations. Instead, it refers to a most special night when Jacqueline d’Halluin, one of Philippe’s lovers, met with Vanier to pray. She fell into Jean’s arms and inducted him into the full meaning of Philippe’s spirituality. Some wonder whether Philippe had asked her to do this.

This encounter was on Sunday June 15th, 1952, a most memorable day in Vanier’s log. Not only did it mark his full coming of age, but it was, in his words, ‘the source of life and conviction that carried him through the next ten years, leading to the foundation of L’Arche.’ In the minds of the Study Team, the relation between Jacqueline d’Halluin and Jean Vanier was the closest to a love relationship and lasted decades.

The Vatican knew that J. Vanier was managing L’Eau vive for T. Philippe and was suspicious of him. Pope John Paul II advised Vanier to distance himself from Father Philippe. Vanier was told that he could not become a priest until he denounced Fr. Philippe and retrained at a recognized seminary. Jean knew that his actions and T. Phillippe’s actions were unacceptable to most people in or out of the Church. Vanier could not do that, believing that the Fr. Philippe was called by God to proclaim a message that was not understood by the Church.

When Philippe was subjected to investigation, Vanier used subterfuge and misdirection to get around the mobility-and-contact restrictions imposed on his teacher. The two men, Vanier and Philippe, had clandestine meetings for the five years of the canonical investigation, and communicated through cryptic messages. They hid their beliefs from the Church and took their supposedly divine mission underground.

End of Part One
Part Two in June Edition