Today I had the privilege of attending Mass and having lunch with Fr. Álvaro Corcuera, L.C., the worldwide General Director of the Legion of Christ and the successor of Fr. Marcial Maciel, the order’s founder. Fr. Álvaro is a gracious and personable priest, and I think he is a very positive presence for the Legion during these trying times for the order. He spent more time greeting and chatting with the students and faculty of our school after Mass than with our benefactors or Regnum Christi families. He came to visit the school, and that’s exactly what he did despite the large turnout of Regnum Christi faithful from throughout Houston. At lunch, where about 30 of us ate and talked with Fr. Álvaro, he listened far more than spoke, and he even was kind enough to take a few private moments with me to ask how I was recovering (I am on crutches due to a severely sprained ankle). Fr. Álvaro was accompanied by, among others, Fr. Scott Reilly, who is the director of the Legion for the entire southern half of the United States. All in all, it was a very pleasant and touching experience.
After lunch, I stumbled upon the news that the Legion has decided to sue ex-Legionary Paul Lennon, who runs the ReGAIN website, a site devoted to providing information that is critical of the order and its lay organization, Regnum Christi, and materials that are circulated within the order. The Legion is suing Lennon, a former Legionary priest, over his distribution of allegedly stolen materials that exchanged solely among the Legionaries. Here’s part of the Washington Post’s write-up:
The argument is unfolding in Alexandria Circuit Court in a lawsuit the Legion filed last month that seeks to block Lennon, a Legion member for 23 years, from disseminating on a Web site letters and documents it says are the order’s private property and intended only for internal use.
Some internal documents chronicle the conservative group’s strict rules of conduct, including directives on how a legionary, as the order’s members are known, must butter his bread, part his hair or sit in a chair. The documents also include the group’s “private vows,” which say that members must never criticize the order and must report anyone who does.
The Legion accuses the Alexandria man of distributing stolen property and “malicious disinformation” about a fast-growing Roman Catholic Church order with tens of thousands of followers worldwide.
Under a recent court order, Lennon must turn over any Legion property by Sept. 14, including documents, computer disks and CDs.
Besides Lennon, the Legion is suing Regain Inc., the corporation that owns http://www.regainnetwork.org, a Web site critical of the Legion. Lennon is its president. Other former Legion members and relatives and friends of former Legion members are involved in the corporation and the Web site, Lennon said.
And so after a deeply impressive day with Fr. Álvaro, I am a bit concerned over this lawsuit. While the documents that Lennon is distributing are private, I suspect he didn’t acquire them illegally given the fact that he was a Legionary priest for over two decades. The Legion’s interest in the cessation of their distribution seems to me me to be just as much an issue over their content as it is an issue of privacy. This is a case I will be following closely.
September 6, 2007 was an interesting day for me with the Legion.
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