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The Sunday Magazine

Reconciling the good and evil embodied in Jean Vanier (and the rest of us)

The revelations that the beloved humanitarian, Jean Vanier, engaged in "manipulative sexual relationships" with six women between 1970 and 2005 came as a shock — and a betrayal — to his legions of admirers. Michael Higgins — one of North America's leading thinkers on Catholic theology and papal politics and the author of a biography of Vanier — and Colleen Dulle — a writer at the Jesuit magazine, America — join Michael Enright to discuss the struggle to reconcile the good works of Vanier with his apparent capacity for evil.
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Jean Vanier founded L'Arche, an international network of communities where people with and without intellectual disabilities live and work together. An internal report revealed in February that Vanier, a respected Canadian religious figure, sexually abused at least six women. (Lefteris Pitarakis/The Canadian Press/The Associated Press)
The Sunday Edition31:40Reconciling the good and evil embodied in Jean Vanier (and the rest of us)

Jean Vanier, the founder of an international movement caring for people with intellectual disabilities, was on a plane of secular sainthood like that of Mother Teresa. He was known to the world as a "saviour of people on the margins," and his organization, L'Arche, operates around the world. But Vanier's darker side was revealed last week.

A year-long investigation by L'Arche France found that, over the course of 35 years, Vanier had engaged in what were called "manipulative sexual relationships" with six women. Most of the women were staffers and nuns. No disabled person was involved.

The investigation also found that Vanier had initiated sex as part of a "spiritual direction" under the mentorship of a bizarre priest named Fr. Thomas Phillipe.

The disclosures raised a number of questions, most profoundly: How can a person who has done much that is good in his life, turn out to have also done much that was evil?

Colleen Dulle is a writer at the Jesuit magazine America. She also hosts a weekly podcast called Inside the Vatican. (SJ-Bild)

"I think I'm gonna be grappling with this for a long time, like many people," Colleen Dulle, a writer at the America: The Jesuit Review told The Sunday Edition's Michael Enright. 

"Who would have expected a person like Jean, who so many of us revere as a living saint, to commit this kind of abuse?" said Dulle.

Dulle added that the revelations may not have had as profound of an impact had they been "something like financial improprieties or some other kind of fall from grace."

"It's the nature of this particular thing that's so difficult to handle," she said.

Michael Higgins is Distinguished Professor of Catholic Thought at Sacred Heart University. (Sacred Heart University)

Michael Higgins, a distinguished professor of Catholic Thought at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut also weighed in.

"The anger, perhaps, is greater now because I think we've come to believe or we've been acclimated to the notion that clerics abuse … Vanier was the exception as a spiritual leader," said Higgins.

"We have come to think that they [spiritual leaders who are lay people] are rather the exception to the rule; that we can be concerned about those that come out of a clerical lineage, but not those who are lay people. So these disclosures about Vanier's behavior are deeply distressing on several grounds, not the least of which of course directly refers to the experience of these women," he added.

Click 'listen' above to hear the full conversation.

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