27 February 2020, The Tablet
Jean Vanier: The truth that breaks your heart
Jean Vanier on a visit to a L’Arche community
Photo:
Photo:
When she learnt that an
inquiry commissioned by L’Arche had found that the movement’s founder,
Jean Vanier, had engaged in manipulative sexual relationships with
several women, a writer and editor who had known Vanier for nearly
thirty years was devastated
It is some weeks now since I was warned that serious allegations of sexual misconduct had been brought against Jean Vanier. They came, I was then told, from two women, both of whom – I was told – had come forward after Jean’s death. Privately, and to my shame, I scoffed. With Jean no longer around to defend himself, what weight could these allegations hold? And anyway, who could believe that this saintly, gentle man, who had transformed the lives of thousands, could possibly have been an abuser?
I first met Jean Vanier in 1992, in the village of Trosly-Breuil, on the edge of the Forest of Compiègne. Just a short walk through the forest was the railway carriage in which, in June 1940, Hitler had witnessed the French sign their surrender to Germany – the same railway carriage in which a defeated Germany had signed an armistice in 1918 to end the Great War. There is film footage of the vengeful Führer hopping about with glee at seeing his enemies brought low. By contrast, Trosly-Breuil was a place of peace. Here, in 1964, Jean Vanier had founded L’Arche, where men and women with mental disabilities lived and worked alongside “normal” assistants. From small beginnings, L’Arche grew. There are now communities all over the world.
L’Arche was founded on the belief that the weak have much to teach those of us who think ourselves strong, and the communities have always felt to me, as to so many others, places of joy. Jean wrote: “Visitors are often astonished at the joy they sense at L’Arche. It surprises me too because I know how much suffering some people in our communities are carrying. I wonder then if all joy doesn’t somehow spring from suffering and sacrifice. Can those who are rich and live in comfort and security with everything they need, and who refuse to be close to those who are suffering, be truly joyful?”
I also felt, from the start, that what Jean Vanier had created in L’Arche was much bigger than himself. I hold fast to this now. L’Arche must survive, and it seems to me that the leadership of L’Arche has been exemplary in its response to the accusations against Vanier: calm, clear, swift.
After that first meeting, I visited Trosly often. Jean was always welcoming, and full of wise counsel. He encourage people to “welcome every invitation to humility” and he himself seemed to me to be deeply humble. In November 1994, I spent a month working as an assistant in one of the houses in Trosly. It seemed such a sane and happy time that re-entering the “real” world in early December, I experienced the psychological equivalent of the bends.
After I got married, and had children, it became harder to get to France. Jean rang sometimes, to chat, and to ask after my husband and my girls. Then there came a time when he was visiting the UK frequently to give retreats. I often met him off the Eurostar, and drove him to his destinations. They were happy journeys, full of laughter. He was always wonderfully attentive and courteous to his hosts, but would slip away when he could to pray, the Gospel of St John open on his knees. His active life, it seemed to me, was fuelled by a deeply contemplative one.
There is a whiff of something creepy, sinister or suspicious about some men. I never once had a moment of unease around Jean. My many friends who got to know him all say the same. So when, last week, The Tablet was given early access to the independent inquiry report into Jean’s behaviour, the shock was profound. I don’t believe that anyone could read this document and doubt its credibility – or fail to salute the courage of the women who have reported sexual misconduct by a man considered a spiritual giant.
There are, we now know, six of these women, and two of them came forward during Jean’s lifetime. While they are all “both humble and without any hatred or desire for revenge”, what they allege is grave. For most of them, their relationship with Vanier continued over several years. Sexual activity, which was “coerced, or took place under coercive conditions”, involved “everything except intercourse”. Generally, it happened in the context of spiritual accompaniment, and was given a mystical justification. As one woman says, “When I expressed my astonishment saying … how could I manifest my love to Jesus and to him, he replied: But Jesus and myself, this is not two but one, but we are one … It is Jesus who loves you through me.”
To make any sense of this, one needs to know about Vanier’s relationship with the Dominican monk Père Thomas Philippe, whom he met in 1950, and whose “spiritual son” he became. Vanier wrote: “Father Thomas’s theology gave me strong and solid principles. I’ve never really looked for anyone else. If people find that I am very free in my intellectual life, even in an interpretation of the Gospel of St John and in the development of an anthropology that is close to human and spiritual reality, it is because I am steeped in the thought and method of Father Thomas.”
In 2014, a canonical inquiry found Père Thomas guilty of serious sexual abuse of women. Vanier denied any knowledge of this, but letters from Père Thomas, released since Vanier’s death, prove beyond doubt that he knew about it. Their methods were strikingly similar. “From being a victim of his spiritual father,” says Stephan Posner, International Leader of L’Arche, “Jean went on to become a perpetrator.”
Randall Wright, who made an outstanding film, Summer In the Forest, about Vanier and L’Arche, told me some time ago that when he visited him shortly before his death, he found him “deeply troubled”. I’ve now learned that Pierre Jacquand, head of L’Arche in France, also visited him not long before he died. “I asked him how he was. He answered, ‘I’m OK, but anxious, because I am still the spiritual son of Père Thomas.’ At the time, I didn’t understand what he meant. Today, I realise that he preferred to lie to us … rather than to be unfaithful to Père Thomas’s theories.”
Often, in retreats, Jean would dwell on Peter’s denials of Christ. He
believed that it wasn’t cowardice but truth that impelled Peter to
shout “I do not know that man!”: Peter quite literally did not know
Jesus brought low. For many of us, now, those words ring in our ears as
we think of Jean Vanier: “WE DO NOT KNOW THAT MAN!”
One friend, when the news broke, told me it was the last straw for her. She wouldn’t buy into the Catholic Church any longer. Tempted to feel the same, I’m haunted by those other words of Peter, when Jesus asks whether he will now leave him, “Lord, to whom shall we go?”
Meantime, I’m deeply moved by the emails from friends that have been arriving steadily since the news broke. Timothy Radcliffe OP, one of Jean’s friends, and hitherto one of his greatest admirers, emailed from Jerusalem: “Maybe Jean did indeed finally become the person whom we thought that he was always. Maybe at the end, all the complexities and the shadows of his profound filiation to Thomas Philippe were transcended and he found that simplicity of heart and mind for which we all search. Maybe in that sense, he became indeed the person whom you love. It was just that the journey towards that simplicity was much longer and more tortuous than we had realised, and perhaps more than he had realised too. Jean’s inner suffering must have been so great on that journey, but now he surely rests in peace.”
Randall Wright suggests that what’s happened is a warning not to put heroes and leaders on pedestals, and to find goodness instead in very ordinary lives. He points to the end of Middlemarch: “For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who live faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
And a friend who is a monk writes: “I have seen the announcement from L’Arche and can imagine how you must suffer. I am offering up some extra prayers. Still, remember that even instances of objective evil do not cancel out the good a person has done. We all want to canonise people quickly, forgetting that the battle of light against darkness continues until the end. But the light does conquer.”
Maggie Fergusson is The Tablet’s Literary Editor.
It is some weeks now since I was warned that serious allegations of sexual misconduct had been brought against Jean Vanier. They came, I was then told, from two women, both of whom – I was told – had come forward after Jean’s death. Privately, and to my shame, I scoffed. With Jean no longer around to defend himself, what weight could these allegations hold? And anyway, who could believe that this saintly, gentle man, who had transformed the lives of thousands, could possibly have been an abuser?
I first met Jean Vanier in 1992, in the village of Trosly-Breuil, on the edge of the Forest of Compiègne. Just a short walk through the forest was the railway carriage in which, in June 1940, Hitler had witnessed the French sign their surrender to Germany – the same railway carriage in which a defeated Germany had signed an armistice in 1918 to end the Great War. There is film footage of the vengeful Führer hopping about with glee at seeing his enemies brought low. By contrast, Trosly-Breuil was a place of peace. Here, in 1964, Jean Vanier had founded L’Arche, where men and women with mental disabilities lived and worked alongside “normal” assistants. From small beginnings, L’Arche grew. There are now communities all over the world.
L’Arche was founded on the belief that the weak have much to teach those of us who think ourselves strong, and the communities have always felt to me, as to so many others, places of joy. Jean wrote: “Visitors are often astonished at the joy they sense at L’Arche. It surprises me too because I know how much suffering some people in our communities are carrying. I wonder then if all joy doesn’t somehow spring from suffering and sacrifice. Can those who are rich and live in comfort and security with everything they need, and who refuse to be close to those who are suffering, be truly joyful?”
I also felt, from the start, that what Jean Vanier had created in L’Arche was much bigger than himself. I hold fast to this now. L’Arche must survive, and it seems to me that the leadership of L’Arche has been exemplary in its response to the accusations against Vanier: calm, clear, swift.
After that first meeting, I visited Trosly often. Jean was always welcoming, and full of wise counsel. He encourage people to “welcome every invitation to humility” and he himself seemed to me to be deeply humble. In November 1994, I spent a month working as an assistant in one of the houses in Trosly. It seemed such a sane and happy time that re-entering the “real” world in early December, I experienced the psychological equivalent of the bends.
After I got married, and had children, it became harder to get to France. Jean rang sometimes, to chat, and to ask after my husband and my girls. Then there came a time when he was visiting the UK frequently to give retreats. I often met him off the Eurostar, and drove him to his destinations. They were happy journeys, full of laughter. He was always wonderfully attentive and courteous to his hosts, but would slip away when he could to pray, the Gospel of St John open on his knees. His active life, it seemed to me, was fuelled by a deeply contemplative one.
There is a whiff of something creepy, sinister or suspicious about some men. I never once had a moment of unease around Jean. My many friends who got to know him all say the same. So when, last week, The Tablet was given early access to the independent inquiry report into Jean’s behaviour, the shock was profound. I don’t believe that anyone could read this document and doubt its credibility – or fail to salute the courage of the women who have reported sexual misconduct by a man considered a spiritual giant.
There are, we now know, six of these women, and two of them came forward during Jean’s lifetime. While they are all “both humble and without any hatred or desire for revenge”, what they allege is grave. For most of them, their relationship with Vanier continued over several years. Sexual activity, which was “coerced, or took place under coercive conditions”, involved “everything except intercourse”. Generally, it happened in the context of spiritual accompaniment, and was given a mystical justification. As one woman says, “When I expressed my astonishment saying … how could I manifest my love to Jesus and to him, he replied: But Jesus and myself, this is not two but one, but we are one … It is Jesus who loves you through me.”
To make any sense of this, one needs to know about Vanier’s relationship with the Dominican monk Père Thomas Philippe, whom he met in 1950, and whose “spiritual son” he became. Vanier wrote: “Father Thomas’s theology gave me strong and solid principles. I’ve never really looked for anyone else. If people find that I am very free in my intellectual life, even in an interpretation of the Gospel of St John and in the development of an anthropology that is close to human and spiritual reality, it is because I am steeped in the thought and method of Father Thomas.”
In 2014, a canonical inquiry found Père Thomas guilty of serious sexual abuse of women. Vanier denied any knowledge of this, but letters from Père Thomas, released since Vanier’s death, prove beyond doubt that he knew about it. Their methods were strikingly similar. “From being a victim of his spiritual father,” says Stephan Posner, International Leader of L’Arche, “Jean went on to become a perpetrator.”
Randall Wright, who made an outstanding film, Summer In the Forest, about Vanier and L’Arche, told me some time ago that when he visited him shortly before his death, he found him “deeply troubled”. I’ve now learned that Pierre Jacquand, head of L’Arche in France, also visited him not long before he died. “I asked him how he was. He answered, ‘I’m OK, but anxious, because I am still the spiritual son of Père Thomas.’ At the time, I didn’t understand what he meant. Today, I realise that he preferred to lie to us … rather than to be unfaithful to Père Thomas’s theories.”
One friend, when the news broke, told me it was the last straw for her. She wouldn’t buy into the Catholic Church any longer. Tempted to feel the same, I’m haunted by those other words of Peter, when Jesus asks whether he will now leave him, “Lord, to whom shall we go?”
Meantime, I’m deeply moved by the emails from friends that have been arriving steadily since the news broke. Timothy Radcliffe OP, one of Jean’s friends, and hitherto one of his greatest admirers, emailed from Jerusalem: “Maybe Jean did indeed finally become the person whom we thought that he was always. Maybe at the end, all the complexities and the shadows of his profound filiation to Thomas Philippe were transcended and he found that simplicity of heart and mind for which we all search. Maybe in that sense, he became indeed the person whom you love. It was just that the journey towards that simplicity was much longer and more tortuous than we had realised, and perhaps more than he had realised too. Jean’s inner suffering must have been so great on that journey, but now he surely rests in peace.”
Randall Wright suggests that what’s happened is a warning not to put heroes and leaders on pedestals, and to find goodness instead in very ordinary lives. He points to the end of Middlemarch: “For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who live faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
And a friend who is a monk writes: “I have seen the announcement from L’Arche and can imagine how you must suffer. I am offering up some extra prayers. Still, remember that even instances of objective evil do not cancel out the good a person has done. We all want to canonise people quickly, forgetting that the battle of light against darkness continues until the end. But the light does conquer.”
Maggie Fergusson is The Tablet’s Literary Editor.
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