MEN OF POWER have always abused that power. Every woman knows it, which is why none of us were surprised when #MeToo came for the church. But we weren’t prepared for Jean Vanier.
The details of Vanier’s story are well known by now, but they bear repeating. Vanier, who died in May 2019 at the age of 90, was the internationally celebrated co-founder of L’Arche, a global network of homes where people with and without intellectual disabilities live together in community. A Roman Catholic layperson who never married, Vanier was regarded by many as a living saint; his New York Times obituary hailed him as “Savior of People on the Margins.” His writings on spirituality and community were best sellers and universally revered as modern classics.
Vanier was also a sexual predator. A report following a posthumous investigation by L’Arche International, the organization that Vanier founded, revealed that he sexually abused at least six women in his spiritual care between 1970 and 2005. These six cases are the ones we know about. The women, none of whom knew each other, offered remarkably similar accounts of Vanier’s strategy of sexual predation within the context of spiritual direction.
L’Arche’s summary report is excruciating to read, because it reveals a pattern of manipulation and exploitation shot through Vanier’s role as a spiritual director. “He told me that this was part of the [spiritual] accompaniment,” one survivor reported. Even as she told him she was struggling to “distinguish what was right and what was wrong,” he pushed on, offering bizarre scriptural warrant from the Song of Solomon and—perhaps most chillingly—his contention that in their sexual interaction, “This is not us, this is Mary and Jesus.”
Preying on vulnerability
THE TEMPTATION IN a situation like this is simply to draw a firm line separating the good from the evil, as if motivations can be so easily divided. In Vanier’s case, however, we also have to entertain the possibility that the two branches of his life stemmed from the same root: that the sensitivity to vulnerability and communal belonging that gave birth to the undeniable beauty of L’Arche was the very thing Vanier exploited for his own sexual gratification in his private spiritual direction.
Hitherto overlooked aspects of his biography suggest as much. In 1950, as a young man of 22, Vanier resigned his postwar military commission to seek out peace. He became a student at L’Eau Vive, a small philosophical and theological institute in France founded by a 45-year-old French priest, Father Thomas Philippe, whom Vanier would later call his “spiritual father.” The relationship proved determinative for the course of Vanier’s life.
Thirteen years later, Father Thomas was chaplain at Le Val Fleuri, a small institution for men with developmental disabilities, and he invited Vanier to visit him there. The institution was, as Vanier describes it, a terrible place: dank, dark, violent, wretched. But amid all that, Vanier saw it to be “beautiful.” “This is my experience of having been in many dark places—prisons, psychiatric wards, slums, leper colonies. There’s something frightening, but also something beautiful, a sense of wonderment. It’s mysterious.”
This encounter with the intersection of terror and wonder inspired Vanier the following year to invite three men with profound intellectual disabilities to move into a shared home with him. Two of these men, Raphaël Simi and Philippe Seux, are frequently named in accounts of L’Arche’s history, though rarely acknowledged as the movement’s co-founders. (The third man is rarely mentioned at all, and his name seems lost to history.) It’s clear, then, that like most origin stories, L’Arche’s is almost always told in an overly romantic way. Accounts tend to emphasize Vanier’s purchase of a broken-down house in a small (i.e., charming) French village, for example, as a mark of his definitive turn away from privilege toward something humbler.
Indeed, I’ve never seen the story told in a way that reckons with the fact that a dilapidated building might not be the best place to live for people with profoundly unique needs. It’s also rarely mentioned how the experiment failed, because Vanier didn’t have the requisite skills and experience to care for men with as significant disabilities as those of Simi and Seux and, it seems, even more so, the third anonymous man.
But, romanticism aside, this failed experiment did lead to a much more successful one, inspiring L’Arche and the countless people who have created vulnerable communities across difference since that day.
The branch of Vanier’s life that led to L’Arche, however, was not the only one that sprang from L’Eau Vive and Father Thomas. As is increasingly clear, Vanier the predator came from the same place. In 1952, the Catholic Church removed Thomas from ministry, supposedly for health reasons. At that time, he was told not to communicate with Vanier or with any of the students from L’Eau Vive.
In recent years, it came to light that both Thomas and his brother, Marie-Dominique, also a priest, had perpetuated and covered up for each other’s sexual abuse of numerous women. As the new L’Arche report indicates, Thomas and Marie-Dominique and several other conspirators—including other students from L’Eau Vive and a group of nuns—had perpetuated this abuse together, using the same bizarre theological and mystical justifications as Vanier.
Vanier denied any knowledge of what he called the brothers’ “sexual perversions” when they were revealed. What is now clear is that Vanier had been their disciple all along, extending their sexual malevolence through his own ministry. In the 11 years between 1952 and 1963, when contact between them was prohibited, Vanier communicated discreetly with Thomas using code names and acted as a proxy for Thomas’ continued leadership of the theological school. The similarities in their patterns of abuse are definitive. The Vanier who abused women was not a fallen saint, succumbing to the temptations and opportunities afforded him by his rising fame. This was who he had been all along: a man exquisitely and terribly attuned to the vulnerabilities of others.
Usurping the power of God
GIVEN VANIER'S LIFELONG proximity to and care for people with intellectual disabilities, most reporting on these matters generally takes pains to note that the women he abused were not disabled—presumably because the additional layers of vulnerability involved in disability would have compounded his sin. At stake, of course, is the capacity to give consent. But even if Vanier never abused any L’Arche members with disabilities—and we may never know—the question of consent haunts what has already been revealed.
I can imagine the response of each woman when she learned that he had agreed to take her on for spiritual direction. I’m sure she was surprised, grateful, and more than a little bit nervous. When he invited her to meet him in his private room for their session, she probably felt a twinge of concern before brushing it away with the embarrassment of ingratitude. He lives in community, she might have thought; his room is the only place that has the requisite privacy for spiritual direction. The hypervigilance that all women carry in our bodies to protect ourselves from sexual predators didn’t seem to be necessary here. Then later, when he told her to come to his room at 10 p.m., she probably felt another twinge before chastising herself again. He’s being generous with his time, she might have thought, of which I’m not even worthy. This is Jean Vanier, after all. If I can’t trust him, who can I trust?
Who knows how long he stretched out the pursuit, how long he reached a little further but not too far? How long she ignored her twinges of apprehension until dismissing her intuition became second nature? Long enough that when, as one woman put it, “the spiritual accompaniment transformed into sexual touching,” she didn’t simply say “no” right away. It can be easy to blame the victim in the report who said, “was I consenting? I think at the beginning yes, but as time went on, the more I believe that I was not consenting.” We think of consent as happening in the moment, not revocable after the fact. But when it comes to the predatory power of a globally recognized charismatic figure such as Vanier, consent can be complex.
The problem with formal reports in cases like these is that they jump right to the moment that things are no longer so fuzzy, when they cross the border where they’ve changed from seeming normalcy to the shocking need for a “no.” Such reports don’t capture the lead-up that makes those borders so permeable in the first place: the ways in which a “new normal” has been slowly established. “No” seems obvious with hindsight; explicit and implicit yeses are a little bit trickier to track in the moment. Vanier, it’s clear, counted on that. He didn’t charge across the borders: He just kept shifting them slightly—and he did so with all the theological, ethical, spiritual, and charismatic authority that a man of his stature had at his disposal.
Sexual abuse is always about power. But not just the power one person has to exert over another. Vanier’s power was much more insidious and, thereby, much more powerful. It’s not that he could tell the women what to do and then they’d do it. It’s that he could make up the hidden rules that controlled what kinds of conversation could and could not be admitted to the realm of possibility. This included his power to keep consent from even entering the arena of conversation. But he also had the power to define the theological frame of conversation. Given that the spiritual director takes the person in their care on a theological journey that draws them deeper into the heart of God, that’s a lot of power to hold.
Manipulating truths about desire
WHILE SEXUAL ABUSE is always about power, it is also about sex. And if we are to reckon fully with what it means that Jean Vanier, of all people, was an abuser, we will have to deal with the theological category of desire. Because Vanier learned how to manipulate a truth about desire and God to his own abusive ends.
It is not incidental that Vanier’s abuse was part of his practice as a spiritual director. Spiritual direction is intense: part therapy, part prayer, and—at its best—part mystical approach toward God. Traumas surface. Emotions erupt. Transference and countertransference are normal. In other words, like most other forms of therapy and direction, spiritual direction is a context in which it is normal for eros to arise. In healthy practices of spiritual direction, the director recognizes this relational potential and holds a firm boundary for the well-being of the person under direction. Vanier, it seems, exploited the vulnerability inherent to the practice for his own gratification.
Passion for God is complex and not entirely unerotic. Sexual desire and desire for God are intimately connected to each other precisely because God’s own desire is always luring us toward an ecstatic participation in Divine life. The mystics were on to something when they described union with God in sexual terms. So too is evangelical praise and worship music with its consistent erotic undertones: in the secret, in the quiet place, and all that. Just as we catch glimpses of God’s love in our love for one another, so too can we catch glimpses of God’s desire in our desire for one another—and this is not limited to, but certainly is inclusive of, desire that is sexual. We are finite creatures reaching toward infinite possibilities, all the while oriented within the reality of eternal life. It’s no wonder things can get confusing. What any of us does with that confusion matters. What Vanier did with it was wrong.
The place where desire for God and sexual desire connect is the intersection of terror and wonder that Vanier knew so well. This is probably why Christians—for better and for worse—legislate desire so carefully. We tend to be divided over which of its forms can fall within the realm of God’s sanctifying grace. I’m not going to take up those arguments here. I do want to claim that this site of terror and wonder—this place where sexual desire teaches us more about our desire for God and where our desire for God teaches us more about our sexual desire—is sacred. And the sacred can never truly be safe.
Our hearts are restless , St. Augustine famously promised, until they find their rest in Thee. When that mystical desire arises in spiritual direction, it’s the spiritual director’s job to redirect that energy toward God: to direct that restless heart toward rest in Thee.
I think Vanier knew all about restless hearts, and that he sought to make them more restless still. Then, instead of redirecting them toward rest in God, he kept luring them toward himself. He used it to inflict a set of manipulative sexual-spiritual practices on a group of vulnerable women in his care: women who he in fact had the power to make vulnerable precisely by their being in his care. Vanier stole God’s rightful place. He made of himself an idol.
If we’ve learned one thing from the #MeToo movement, it’s that we’re a long way from the utopia where men of power no longer abuse that power to harm women. Others are more hopeful than I am; some even think we can get there, but I strongly doubt that, on this side of the reign of God. As women, and some men, have shared their stories of abuse, though, we’ve learned to better recognize that evil among us. Because if the #MeToo movement has taught us a second thing, it’s that we’re not alone.
Vanier warped and twisted theology to manipulate and destroy women’s lives. But theology has always been misused this way by some, and Vanier’s cruelty is more a reminder of this fact than a revelation. Bringing an end to—or, let’s be honest, perhaps at best for now just stemming the tide of—spiritual and sexual abuse by Christians will require more than just addressing individual assaults on a case-by-case basis. It will require a wholesale reimagining of how we understand even our most sacred theological categories. Even what appears to be good can be twisted to evil in the wrong hands. Vanier reminds us that we can really never know whose hands those are.
Natalie Wigg-Stevenson, curator of the online resource “Transgressive Devotional” and author of Transgressive Devotion: Theology as Performance Art, teaches at Emmanuel College in Toronto.
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