THIS IS ONE way to tell the founding story of L’Arche:

The main character is a sailor-turned-ethicist named Jean Vanier. The son of the governor general of Canada, he was, as his biographer Anne-Sophie Constant wrote, “a child of privilege, he had danced with princesses, dined with politicians and philosophers, and circled the world twice.”

As the story goes, Vanier gave all that up in 1964 when his spiritual mentor, Thomas Philippe, a Dominican priest, took him on a tour of the psychiatric facility where Philippe was a chaplain. There, Vanier discovered, as he put it, “an immense world of pain.” This is not an exaggeration: At the time, asylums, which were notorious for overcrowding and abuse, functioned more as prisons than treatment centers. Inside these walls, Vanier heard an invitation — from Jesus and the men with intellectual disabilities — to do something.

So Vanier bought a broken-down house in Trosly, France, and invited two men from the mental institution to live with him. He named the home “L’Arche,” French for “The Ark,” a biblical symbol of protection in a storm-tossed world. Vanier traveled around the globe to tell the story of their life together, and soon L’Arche communities sprouted up in Canada, India, Australia, Haiti, and beyond — a constellation of communities where adults with and without intellectual disabilities have aspired to live, work, pray, and play together as equals. L’Arche became integral to the movement for the deinstitutionalization of people with intellectual disabilities, and Vanier became a best-selling Christian writer and hero to all of us looking to practice a faith that prioritized those on the margins.

When he was introduced to give lectures, Vanier often said, “I feel uncomfortable when people say nice things about me.” Yet the world had lots of nice things to say, bestowing upon Vanier countless awards, including the French Legion of Honor, the Companion of the Order of Canada, and the Templeton Prize. But for me, a certain 2010 accolade feels the most poignant: Astrophysicist C.J. Krieger discovered an asteroid and named it after Vanier. Vanier is above us; Vanier spins on a different celestial plane than the rest of us.

Before he died, Vanier was often called a living saint. Upon his death in 2019, Pope Francis sent his sympathies, asking Jesus to welcome Vanier into heaven as his faithful servant. It’s the type of eulogizing that you expect for someone who saw beauty and divinity where others saw shame and destitution.

It’s an inspiring story that changed thousands of lives: At the time of Vanier’s death, there were 147 L’Arche communities in 37 countries, home to approximately 10,000 people with intellectual disabilities. The protagonist of the story also saved my faith, showing me how Christianity is capable of destabilizing dangerous institutions, rocking the boat, building new arks.

Unfortunately, it’s a bad story.

A long shadow

NINE MONTHS AFTER Vanier died, L’Arche published a summary of an external investigation revealing Vanier had instigated “manipulative sexual relationships” that were “emotionally abusive” with six nondisabled women, all L’Arche assistants to whom he was supposed to be offering spiritual direction.

This report tells a different story, one in which Jean Vanier is still the main character, but now recast as a villain.

The report preserves the anonymity of the women who came forward but does share quotes from their testimonies, with some details redacted: “I was very upset and very vulnerable,” said one woman who is identified as a victim. “He told me to come late (for spiritual direction). We prayed, I got an invitation to meet him in (xxxx). It was very intimate, he did everything except intercourse.”

According to the report, Vanier told these women that when they interacted sexually, “This is not us, this is Mary and Jesus. You are chosen, you are special, this is secret.”

The allegations of abuse, deemed credible by the inquiry team, spanned a period of more than 30 years, from 1970 to 2005. Yet, a shadow of sexual exploitation hung over L’Arche from even earlier: The man who introduced Vanier to the plight of intellectually disabled people, Thomas Philippe, had, in 1956, been stripped of his religious authority by the Catholic Church for sexually and spiritually exploiting women at l’Eau Vive, the community where Vanier also resided before founding L’Arche.

Vanier never stopped feigning ignorance about Philippe’s sins: “I was simply oblivious to the fact that he was making use of a certain Marian spirituality in such a perverse manner,” Vanier wrote in 2016 — even though Vanier used those same perverse mystical practices to pursue manipulative sexual relationships with L’Arche assistants. The 2020 report said that Vanier was made aware of Philippe’s abuse “as early as the 1950s,” and Vanier’s refusal to denounce these practices allowed his mentor’s spiritual influence to spread to other communities.

In the report, one victim explained why she was afraid to come forward: “I realised that Jean Vanier was adored by hundreds of people, like a living Saint, that he talked about how he helped victims of sexual abuse, it appeared like a camouflage and I found it difficult to raise the issue.”

Sometimes, when I think about the story of L’Arche’s creation, I catch myself zooming out to a bigger founding story — to Earth’s inciting incidents. It’s an imperfect analogy, but: In the final stage of the Earth’s creation, our infant planet was pummeled by asteroids, which likely carried a significant amount of water, making life on Earth possible. But the impact of an asteroid also brings destruction. One entity can both create and destroy.

The power of charisma

AFTER L'ARCHE MADE its investigation public in 2020, Tina Bovermann, the president of L’Arche USA, told Sojourners, “[These revelations] point to a very important question in our society and L’Arche and elsewhere ... What is the place of the charismatic leader?”

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that question.

Maybe I hoped the question would become less relevant. Remember those couple of years when the good guys turned out to be the bad guys? I’d say, maybe to a friend, maybe to God, and we’d shake our heads and exhale the memory away. Or maybe I imagined the question had an easy answer: Bad theology begets bad behavior. Get rid of complementarianism and you get rid of the abuse. But it turns out abuse doesn’t pick favorites — not generationally, not theologically. What is the place of the charismatic leader? It’s a question that sparks more questions: What if vulnerability facilitates spiritual connection and sets the stage for sexual exploitation? What do I do with the books on my shelf written by Vanier and John Howard Yoder and former cardinal Theodore McCarrick and so many others? If a person who turned out to be abusive shaped my understanding of God, how has that distorted my conception of the Divine? And most important, how do we create healing for the survivors? How do we make sure no one else becomes a victim?

Over the past year, I’ve posed these questions to more than a dozen L’Arche community members, past and present — including Bovermann. In August 2022, I asked her the question she posed in February 2020. What is the role of a charismatic leader? She told me that she doesn’t want to be a charismatic leader. Yet charisma is not inherently bad, she said. Maybe it’s even a necessary catalyst at the beginning of any significant movement.

“We are human beings, and we relate because we are touched and inspired,” she said. “So, it’s not about charisma. It’s about how we contextualize and hold charisma [accountable].”

Katelyn Beaty, author of Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits Are Hurting the Church, agrees that charisma is not inherently bad; a charismatic messiah is at the center of Christianity, after all. The problem, Beaty told me, is that “charisma can sometimes be mistaken for a godly giftedness: Because you’re so well-spoken, because you can get up in front of a crowd and preach a really good sermon, you must be uniquely called by God. And I don’t really believe that.”

I thought of the articles that deemed Vanier a living saint.

“We all kind of start to believe,” Beaty said, “that [these charismatic leaders] must be in this position of prominence because ... they just seem to have more spiritual wisdom and insight than the rest of us mortals.”

When we elevate leaders to a separate, higher orbit, it is dangerous for their souls, and it is dangerous for our communities. It’s easy for organizations to become dependent on influential founders, both financially and ideologically. Their speeches at college campuses, churches, and Christian conferences can bring new supporters into the fold — and secure whopping honoraria. Their names can become synonymous with the movements they kick-start — and if you’ve been abused by such a leader, coming forward can feel especially loaded. You’re not just accusing Jean Vanier, mere mortal, you’re accusing Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche, living saint, savior to those on the margins. How do you stop him without stopping the movement he ignited?

I don’t want to be afraid of charismatic leadership, but I do want to drench it in accountability. I like to be captivated, inspired, and transformed, but I’ve lost my taste for trusting awards and honorary titles. And I think change could begin with revisiting our creation myths.

No single stories

I ASKED BOVERMANN how she might retell the story of L’Arche’s founding now, knowing what we know about Vanier.

“I’ve always felt that L’Arche is a mosaic of a lot of founding stories,” she said. “L’Arche is founded when people with and without intellectual disabilities come together and build community, wherever that is.”

But a hero’s journey is easier to tell. It has a clear setting, plot, and lead actor.

“Because we had this charismatic guy sitting there somewhere in this little village in France, [we had the perception] that this is the founding story, but the truth is — and the real experience is — that all of us who are L’Arche people have an experience of engaging relationships, of longevity, of commitment, across difference,” she said.

Charismatic leaders take up a lot of space. And if we’re not careful, a founder’s story will become the single story of a movement, such that if the founder topples, the whole movement may crumble beneath him.

But it really doesn’t have to be that way. As Bovermann told me: “If we are a movement of communities that build relationships of equality, then that is at odds with the notion of a charismatic leader.”

SO HERE IS another way to tell the founding story of L’Arche:

In 1964, Philippe Seux was living in an overcrowded, God-awful institution for people with intellectual disabilities. When a tall stranger by the name of Jean Vanier invited Seux to leave the institution and move into a broken-down cottage in Trosly, he accepted.

“In the psychiatric hospital, there was nothing to do — just sit on your arse all day doing sod all. When some lads misbehaved, they were given injections to calm down,” Seux recounted in the 2017 documentary Summer in the Forest. “It was quite a relief to be out of there, I can tell you.”

By saying “yes” to the invitation — by leaving something horrible and known for something risky and unknown — Seux became a co-founder of L’Arche. Raphaël Simi also said “yes.” So did a man named Danny, but after two days, Danny decided to return to the hospital. And so Seux, Vanier, and Simi became the co-founders of L’Arche.

Tragically, Vanier abused his spiritual authority in the community, coercing multiple nondisabled women into sexual relationships. He died in 2019 knowing he had been accused of sexual misconduct, but he never publicly admitted it or apologized for how he hurt those community members — actions that threatened to undermine the entire mission of L’Arche.

But enough about him.

When someone asked Seux what it felt like after those first few months to live at L’Arche, he answered, “I was like ‘phew.’” Nearly 60 years later, thousands of others have had the chance to feel the comforting exhale of community love.