The Marcial Maciel affair forces us to ask the question of Evil. Our time avoids rubbing shoulders with it. What do we know about the work of the devil and what can we do to protect ourselves from it? After trying to hide the good in life, is it any wonder that evil comes to light? The works of the devil are innumerable, but the Holy Spirit can do everything, especially transform them.

You had to have the eloquence of Léon Bloy to affirm: “There is only one sadness, that of not being a saint”. This nagging question of holiness always comes back like a season that does not pass. There are many things we can get rid of, but never the question of holiness is one of them. It is consubstantial with us. As soon as we see or witness something right or wrong, something good or bad, we walk on the path of holiness. Whether towards her or against her. It takes a long time to realize to what extent the question of holiness is consubstantial with us. We are holy, we are a temple, we started from the Church which is holy, we are in the image of God who is Holy, and yet we shake ourselves, we fall, we struggle, we strive... So little results for so many promises. It is that the condition of saint requires a great deal of effort and gives little visible results.

“My God, give us priests, give us holy priests…”.
Faced with the evidence of the demon, Maciel, how to continue to praise the holiness of the priest? Faced with the evidence of the devil, how can we continue to praise holiness? But isn't asking this question already playing into the devil's game? Because only a man can ask this question and believe that he will succeed in answering it. He will believe he is doing an interesting work, he will have materialized what always eludes him. This sudden mastery of an inconceivable idea is only one more manifestation of the demon at work through the will to power. There is no understanding of evil by man. Nor is there any understanding of love. Real love. Of divine love. For man, there is only satisfaction. All this escapes us so much. We see holiness as a decoration, a recognition. We keep thinking backwards. It is not a question of what God will do to thank us for having followed his indications well. It is a question of asking ourselves what it will be possible for us to do to thank God for his benefits thus during the liturgy, the priest says: “Quid retribuam”. Human temptation is identified with the will to bring everything back to oneself. On earth. In a down-to-earth way. And that is the problem. The two great forces that guide the universe do not belong to this world. Marc Favreau's reaction summed up perfectly what a man can feel when he feels betrayed, bruised in his faith, moreover by the men who are responsible for protecting it.
Is it not loving priests too much, is it not radically mistaken to declare them saints? After all they are only men. They suffer from the same ailments as we do. In this article, Marc Favreau made himself the spokesperson for a legitimate feeling of revolt. Why, how to let the priest believe that he is holy, when he sins like everyone else? Much more than average as far as Marcial Maciel is concerned. Where is the corruption? In the formula? “Give us holy priests? » Is there fraud? Are we being fooled? Are all the priests in the world discredited by Maciel's demonism? The questions collide. Not a victim temptation so prevalent in our time. If any institution whatsoever is disfigured, if it acts in the wrong direction, if it is discredited by crime, how can such an institution still represent me? The questioning of holiness comes from man. Because man questions everything all the time. It's in his DNA. And if the man questions, he puts on his level. It de-hierarchizes. He begins to think for himself. After the apple, discord. He mostly talks about what he doesn't know. He speaks, and that is enough to make him lose the thread of his relationship with God. So the question is illegitimate, but it is "human" as common sense understands. To say that it is human says that it can be posed to allow man to access what he calls knowledge. Knowing that it will only ever be a matter of limited knowledge.

Is the institution to be raised to the pinnacle at the advent of a Saint Augustine and to be smashed at the discovery of a Marcial Maciel? Make no mistake: "Give us holy priests" is a call for help from man to God, "Give us holy priests" does not mean give us irreproachable priests. It would be too easy. Give us irreproachable priests and I will believe without problem. It is still a step of recognition one of the human faults most reproached by Christ. Give us holy priests means: give us priests who respect life and the Creator. The priest is a besieged citadel. The Church is a besieged citadel. The apocalypse is on. To deny it, to forget it, to laugh at it, is to play into the hands of the evil one. Every relativist is an agent of the evil one, often without realizing it. Respect for the Creator is almost gone. Respect for life is violated every day.

“I believe in the one, holy and apostolic Church”. Our credo in its astonishing conciseness constantly reminds us that the Church is holy. Or again: “Don't cry if you love me. If you knew what the gift of God is and what heaven is! If only you could hear the song of the angels from here and see me in their midst! If you could see unfolding before your eyes the horizons and the eternal fields, the new sites where I walk! If for a moment you could contemplate like me the beauty before which all beauties pale. (St Augustine). Let us remember that Jesus knows the weakness of Peter before Peter. Does that prevent him from giving her soul charge? Faced with Peter's emotional outburst, Jesus reaffirms to him his weakness as a man. While Peter wishes for immediate recognition, to go with Christ, to follow him everywhere, to decide him now in an irremissible way, Christ makes him wait. Waiting against exaltation. Do you love me ? I will give my life for you. Do you really love me ? With all this Greek subtlety of the verb to love (3. article on agape). Pierre wants immediate recognition. He wants Christ to tell him everything right away. He wants it to be visible. He wants it to be ostentatious. He wants it established. Recognition, man suffocates from this need for recognition that God does not give him, not necessarily. The Devil gives immediate recognition. The power. Waiting against exaltation. What is this holiness? What is the will of God? What does He want from us? The Church is holy because it comes from Jesus and Jesus is the door, the only door to God. The Church is holy because it comes from God. “Of Jesus Christ and the Church, it is my opinion that they are all one. (Saint Joan of Arc).

Holiness does not prevent defilement, it cleans it. Holiness does not prevent the fall, it arises from it. Holiness is not the eradication of disease, it is its remedy. How many diseases are known to men without them knowing their origin? Holiness is the possibility of height. Holiness does not eradicate evil, it defends us against its power. It forces us to look up, it pushes us to escape the grip of evil. Holiness has weapons: the beautiful, the good, the good. Holiness was not instituted for the strong and the brave, it wants to be this magnifying glass which cannot cease to shine for those who slide towards misery. Worse still: holiness is not justice. How can man do with this quality which is not one? The man would like something down to earth, concrete, immediate, pragmatic. He wants the wicked to pay, evil to be punished. Holiness delivers no righteousness. Not: what will the Lord give me for having done well, but what will I render to the Lord for all his benefits? We see that as soon as we think we have made enough effort to believe, we still have to climb a step. A new soul supplement. As a summary of holiness. Of this little holiness, this sweet holiness, which man can collect in his hands to tame, but which does not respond when called upon. This little holiness that doesn't look like much, that seems so harmless, that doesn't intervene, that doesn't have the expected role…. Where is it located? Is it even reasonable? Can we trust it? That holy c*** didn't protect us from Marcial Maciel. She left us prey to our demons, empty, rehashing the legend of this demon and his legacy, this legion of Christ. How to bring back to life what has been ransacked? How to find hope? Holiness did nothing, the Church did not know how to do anything, the demon came dressed in the holy clothes of the priesthood.

Modern man doubts the good. He prefers to dwell on evil. He has a taste for the stain that embodies his time. It allows us to affirm that defilement is everywhere. It is a penchant for renunciation. It allows you to get rid of everything. Only the individual counts, so he is relieved of responsibility. The individual has become a voyeur of existence. This taste for defilement is a renunciation of life. Modern times want nothing to be hidden. Everything must be exposed in the idea of ​​transparency; there is a sort of desire for purification that is carried out. Show it all and believe it say it all. Obviously any person gifted with his elementary faculties sees in this a headlong rush. A desire to wallow in defilement by relying on its universal character. The defilement is everywhere, it is far from being the case of the good. Defilement is therefore more universal than good. The absence of good is so glaring. Why continue to refer to it? Good no longer speaks to people. The idea, crazy, pursues its own train, the absence of good, the omnipresence of defilement, imposed the idea that there was no longer anyone who could claim good. That anyone who claims to be a spokesperson for good was an impostor. The most reprehensible being of course the religious and the Catholics seen as moralists, impediments to living in circles. This religion embodying an old order, giving lessons, which has wallowed so much in the mire… It is not only discredited, but it should still disappear. The modern world ignores the good by opposing defilement to it. The slightest task, the slightest misdeed renders history obsolete. Modern man has learned so much to be wary of good, opinion groups, such as the media confusing information and envy, have shown him so much that good is a jumble that basically never really existed, that it was so easy to show its unfounded character by showing the evil of the exercise that the case is heard. Only defilement is universal. Defilement is universal because it is universally shared. She has become an Esperanto. This complicity with defilement is a decoy. The modern world is fond of this kind of easy allegiance; they immediately allow an affirmation of power. A reality TV show offers immediate satisfaction, the participants so often embody stupidity, the cretinism of not judging them. Power reveals human weakness, because it is immediate, quick as lightning; it offers the immediacy demanded by the times, it has the simplicity to become universal. But the man omits an important point, and no one could blame him for it, he omits that good and evil are not of this world. They act in the world, but they are beyond the reach of men. Since evil does not belong to this world, there can be no justice concerning it. To evil, to real evil, no human response can satisfy. There can be no justice concerning him. It cannot be repaired. Holiness is that beacon that turns us away from evil. She can do nothing against the evil committed. But she raises. It keeps our heads above water. Everything is a little less heavy to carry in his company. Modern man has turned away from life. He forgot the basics. To believe that life can escape evil is to forget what life is. The life created by God. Life mixing natural and supernatural. Life full of ubiquity. God is everywhere, all the time. But so is evil. The demon invites himself adorned with the most diverse and varied finery. To attack holiness is to open the door to the devil. It is a human way of acquiescing to evil. To all those who slam the door to holiness, we must hope that they never have to hold the door against the devil, they will be helpless. Prayer slowly builds a dam of holiness, the absence of prayer brings man closer to his misery. Monastic life has been patiently building dykes for humanity for centuries. If holiness has arms and a dam, evil constantly blurs all limits, all hope, all certainty. Evil is nothing but this mist. But what mist! Resembling a gap in the world, it grabs modern man and makes him dangle mountains and marvels. The prey is so easy, so little inner life irrigates it… Beyond this border, nothing has any meaning, everything is upside down, no description could relate what cannot be defined. The greatest writers when they approach evil cannot describe it, they describe fear to us, they describe to us what is earthly, they cannot speak evil. (4. Joseph Conrad. Excerpt from In the Heart of Darkness) The figure of Maciel makes Kurtz think of “In the Heart of Darkness”, a demonic figure relying on power alone, a source of acute intoxication.

So ? Who was Marcial Maciel? How does he chip away at the figure of the saint? For any conscious man (of what is a man conscious if not of good and evil?) there is a step to take which announces vertigo. The conscious man is precisely the one who refuses to see the abyss. He does not apprehend it. He cannot apprehend it, for emptiness would suck him in, emptiness is temptation in its splendour. To approach, to look at the abyss is already to submit to its temptation. Unlike God, evil can very well be seen in his lifetime. It is even what he wishes. To grab us. Some preys are easier than others. Solitaires are often ideal prey. Loneliness makes you brittle, manipulable, it causes discrepancies. The destruction of everything that creates a bond between men will always be one of its major objectives. Marcial Maciel, who we now know has been working in the shadows for a very long time, did he feel alone? When does Maciel encounter evil? We would like to know. We would like to unravel the mystery. We would expose ourselves to the evil power that bewitched him. It is tempting to know at what moment Marcial Maciel looks the devil face to face? This fateful moment no one knows, no one knows and will never know. Even Maciel had perhaps buried it, forgotten it, or on the contrary, and this is not contradictory, was he desperately looking for it to find all its intensity? Having no regrets at the end of his life indicates no evidence of his state of mind. Was he this incarnation of evil, minister of the devil, in the Church of God or, as has been said, a victim of split personality, forgetting his acts as they appeared? His end, if his end was as said, cynical and callous, then surely he was a minister of the devil. To evoke it, to evoke Maciel's intimacy with the devil is already to participate in this intimacy. The devil has so many charms at his disposal. Maciel's cult of personality, in opposition to humility (cementing the dike of holiness) speaks in favor of the demon. What vertigo to see Maciel kissing the papal ring, conversing with Pope John Paul II, our bewitched, troubled, confused holy pope. When we listed all of Maciel's misdeeds, we said nothing. We said morality. Morality is everything and nothing at the same time. She is everything, because she summarizes the crimes and explains the crime. She is nothing, because she has not begun to lift the bark of the human heart. Morality never looks face to face. She refuses the dizziness. She cannot be caught. It relies on justice. It is not concerned with the will to power, only with the results. Morality is in fact a statistician. No offense to many, morality is pragmatic. Which means that it omits the human. The human would take him too far. The human response to evil is... human. Too human.

We started from a human situation, we started from man. Marcial Maciel, a young seminarian, shows an aptitude for using his talents. From the seminar, does Maciel become animated by manipulating others, by perceiving what pleases them, what they are sensitive to? Is it like this from the beginning, and what beginning are we talking about? Did he, as a child, have breakfast with the Devil? Has he begun to pull the thread of the ball of evil in the seminary? Testimonies here and elsewhere remain a drop in the ocean of evil. Testimonies are often used for justice, for morality. All this human jumble explains nothing, because it means totality. What believer has not endured the stubbornness of a bad idea, an evil idea? Who has not been crossed by a desire for power, a desire for violence at a calm moment, a moment which would normally have called for bliss? Who hasn't welcomed the sermon by looking it in the eye? Who hasn't been intoxicated by power? To welcome is to open the door to the demon. It is severing our relationship with God. The human mind knows nothing of its own crossroads. He knows almost nothing about himself. This is how he can escape from himself. We understand better the usefulness of the dam. When Maciel's personality is brought up, drugs are everywhere. This argument makes us understand the hold of evil on his personality. It is foolish to explain the actions of Marcial Maciel by doses of morphine. The doses of morphine are here a pretext. They surely allow Maciel to rediscover a little of the drunkenness of evil when the Prince of this World attends to other concerns. Did Maciel rock the day when sexually torturing another seminarian, he succumbed to the power over joy? Thinking evil on earth always causes distorted judgment on the surface. This is how the victims feel wronged.

Like certain diseases, evil acts in man and it is difficult to say why it occurs. Looking for reasons is like finding scapegoats. Childhood, society, among others, are exhibited as the main culprits. Yet society is only revealing what lies fallow. And then let's not forget that it is society that judges society, which often comes out as undeclared envy. By considering society as the source of the problem, it is easy to stick all sorts of fantasies there. Man never ceases to carry possibility, and this is precisely what weighs on him: man finds his freedom in possibility, this choice with which he arms himself to decide his life. Nobody decides for the man. Letting believe that society can influence it turns out to be an ideology. The company is not guilty. He is the man who chooses the easy way out. And it is here that the reductio ab absurdum takes place. Our time is so fond of it. As the good is too distant, too remote, too unattainable, the good as a value will be replaced by labels, hide-sex of moralism, making it possible to find a kinship in the ambient humanism, this hybrid refuge concealing all the misery of the epoch: racism represents this new standard value that is so simple, so smooth, so easy to describe. Nothing to do with the good whose atonality exasperated. Racism touches the finger. Unfortunately if we describe racism, or better racist, we only scratch the surface of the evil. By removing the good from the vocabulary, by omitting the depth of what it forced us to grasp, evil became common. And that's exactly what he wanted. There are no more saints, there are only men who sail here and there, lavishing little arrangements between friends, little arrangements with life. Since the end of the Middle Ages, a perpetual quest to replace the transcendent with the immanent. Any desire to remedy this is defeated.

Antiquity taught us that evil can come out of good. Antiquity called this process tragedy. Evil can come out of good, yes. What about the contrary? Let us recall the facts: Marcial Maciel meets the devil, he decides to act while wearing the clothes of the priesthood (which proves that he is not sick), he brutalizes, he rapes, ravishes, men, women, children, he It is impossible to have an accurate account of its victims. Someone conscious in Maciel's presence must smell like beading sweat. If he knows. And the devil excels at making believe that we know when we forget the essential. The devil is a playwright. To believe in holiness is to believe in the devil. It is to believe that there is a life before evil, and that there is a life after evil. To say that good comes out of evil, to say that evil comes out of good, admits an eternal struggle in man. To admit this agonism is to recognize that a man is judged as much by his fruits as by his roots.

It is terrible to have to admit that Marcial Maciel, this man who soiled everything in his life, who soiled the communion, his habit, his office, whose soul swelled up on its own, it is therefore difficult , not to say terrible to admit that the Legion of Christ is a success. Because the devil found a lot to do as usual, he found himself face to face with the Holy Spirit who does not stop blowing and who has made the crimson buds green by the proximity of Hell. The devil only wins if life is extinguished. The Holy Spirit never stops blowing on the embers of life. Let life stop and the Prince of this world will have won. This is how he wins in revenge. Thus suppressing the Legion of Christ, reviewing it to condemn it and stoning it would play into the hands of the evil one. Quite the contrary, each new bud of the Legion of Christ responds scathingly to the infamy of evil. Because life goes on.