Response to the “Understanding and Healing” report ~ Easter 2024

Introduction

When parents die, every family needs time to discover how the same events, the relationship with father and mother, and the interactions between siblings have been experienced in great diversity. The joys, disappointments and wounds of one sibling are not the same as those of the other, and sometimes they are even the opposite. Without respectful dialogue and mutual listening, it’s impossible to get close to what has really been experienced, and often even to what has really happened. The Family of Saint John  (brothers, sisters, oblates, friends, parents and loved ones), at the very moment it began this work, veered towards a rereading that no longer reflects the diversity of its members. The text proposed here is intended to help us resume this work, and to help us move away from the mechanisms of division, scapegoating, accusatory simplification and, ultimately, the massacre of fraternal communion. Establishing responsibility in a family tragedy begins by admitting that we are part of it.

The report “Understanding and Healing”, published in June 2023 by the Congregation of the Brothers of St. John, names Father Marie-Dominique Philippe and those under his influence as the main culprits behind the evils of the St. John Family, and seeks to show that the teaching given there is one of the determining causes of these misfortunes. The following pages have been written as a right of reply to the theological part of the report. Indeed, many of our brothers, sisters and relatives have been deeply disturbed by what we must call the hypothesis of a systemic evil, which the report sets out to demonstrate. We felt it necessary to re-establish the truth where it can be undeniably established: the objective content of the teaching of a man who has long been regarded in the Church as a reference of rigor and doctrinal probity.

The purpose of this text is to respond to the doctrinal criticism – or rather, the criticism of Father M.-D. Philippe’s teaching – contained in the “Understanding and Healing” report. Because this “doctrinal” criticism, to which we wish to respond, is part of the demonstrative movement of the report as a whole, we have had to take account of the report as a whole, but without addressing the first and third parts as such¹. The report claims to demonstrate the existence of a system of abuse in the Community of Saint John, basing it not only on Father Philippe’s actions, but also on his doctrine. This initial hypothesis and the desire to demonstrate it seem to us have so invaded the minds of the editors, that a confrontation with what was actually taught or written by Father M.-D. Philippe seemed necessary to us. The flagrant and innumerable contradictions between what he actually taught and what the report suggests, claims or asserts will become clear.

The report’s assertions appear to us to be so far removed from what has been written or taught that we felt it necessary, for the most part, to give a voice to Father M.-D. Philippe himself. A simple reading of his writings shows that Father Marie-Dominique Philippe’s “doctrine” radically escapes the suspicion of systemic perversion, and thus calls into question the report’s overall hypothesis. What then remains of the perversion trial to which Father Philippe is subjected, as is the entire Community of Saint John? It’s a question that remains to be debated, but there is no doubt about the ambiguity of the motives underlying the settling of scores between members of the Family of Saint John, to which all this gives rise.

Father M.-D. Philippe never ceased to say that he didn’t have the “charism” of government, and that he tried to exercise it to the best of his grace and defects. Aware of this, he never taught as if he were giving the whole of what was needed to form religious men and women, lay people and priests. He was not an “encyclopedist” who worked on everything with equal competence. Above all, he sought to provide a solid foundation for the human, Christian, consecrated and priestly life of those he taught. He knew that his teaching was fundamental, but that in certain areas it needed to be supplemented, discussed and challenged; indeed, there are some subjects that he went into less depth than others, for example in the philosophy of nature, political philosophy and the theology of liturgy.

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¹ The “historical” and “psychological and systemic” sections would require an entirely different type of response, because they concern people rather than texts. The objectivity of a teaching has the advantage of being able to be formalized, while discernment about actions and relationships between people remains in the realm of conjecture.

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Our work is therefore not a panegyric. Above all, it is intended to give voice to another voice, to introduce at least a debate, to rebalance points of view, to allow inflections, emphases, less-developed aspects, those that today need to be reworked, deepened, completed, extended, to be done so. Many have received a great deal from the search for truth, discovered and learned from their founder, teacher and elder. Many have also been able, in good times and bad times, to verify the validity of what they had received, and the right interpretation to be made of it. Who can deny that some – and we should try to understand why and in what way – were left in the dark or in a state of interpretative ambiguity? But these misinterpretations cannot be made the measure of what was really given by Father Marie-Dominique Philippe and received by most. It was then necessary to challenge this bias by bearing witness to what, for so many diverse people, remains a treasure trove of wisdom to which they remain indebted.

Contents :

Chapter 1 takes the report’s assertions as its starting point and confronts them with Father M.-D. Philippe’s actual teaching and the texts that attest to it. Since all dimensions of his research are called into question, the responses should be of equal scope. The observation is that none of the assertions is based on what has been taught (experience as a starting point; the determining gaze of first philosophy; the status of ethics; dialogue between the different parts of theology, etc.), but on the risks of misinterpretation.

Chapter 2 highlights the unjustifiable interpretive biases that determine the methodology and rhetoric adopted not only in the doctrinal section, but in the report as a whole. It makes us more aware of the way of seeing, understanding and reacting induced by the false certainty of finding in Father M.-

D. Philipe’s teaching the seeds of a culture of abuse. Even when everything points to the contrary, the assumption is maintained and exerts a deleterious influence on the reader.

Chapter 3 sets the scene for Father M.-D. Philippe’s philosophical and theological journey. The work undertaken by the young religious he was, the elaboration of an itinerary at the heart of the debates in the Church of his time, its intention and its outcomes.

Chapter 4 seeks to free the “charges” from the affective prism of their reading and understanding, in order to show what is at stake and how these questions have been treated in depth by Father M.-D. Philippe. They correspond to what determines the exercise of human life: ethical prudence, the alliance between soul and body, the exercise of justice and mercy, the divine economy, nature and person, the vocation of persons in relation to one another.

Chapter 5 seeks to understand the breadth of Father M.-D. Philippe’s thought by highlighting the key elements of his approach: they correspond to the crest paths of Philosophical Wisdom and Christian Wisdom.

(to be continued in a series featuring excerpts from each chapter)