My youngest son is Daniel Vanier Flynn. We call him Davey.
The “Daniel” is for my father.
The “Vanier” is for Jean Vanier, the man who founded L’Arche, who was a friend to the disabled, and who used his reputation for holiness and wisdom to sexually coerce and manipulate at least six women over four decades.
My wife, Kate, thinks we should change our son’s name. He’s only two, Kate points out, and he won’t remember what his middle name once was. He hardly remembers it now.
Kate is practical and efficient. The night the news broke, she was ready to excise Vanier from our home.
She was grieving, but she was also scanning lists of “V” saints, trying to decide who might be a suitable replacement.
Of course I also thought of Davey, asleep in his crib, carrying the name of Jean Vanier. But I wasn’t ready to change his name. And I didn’t know why.
I read more news, as much as I could find, while Kate made lists on her phone, next to me in bed.
I wanted to find something that would help me understand. This man seemed to know God intimately. How could he spend decades spiritually and sexually abusing women who trusted him? How could it be true?
Those most wounded by Vanier are, of course, his actual victims, the women whose trust he exploited to sate his lust, or yen for power, or whatever perverted inclination he was trying to satisfy. They’ll struggle mightily with shame and guilt. It will be hard for them to trust that God is real, or loving, and that they’re actually worth loving. The psychological effect of sexual abuse is profound, and when coupled with spiritual abuse, the damage is amplified.
Next hurt are those with whom he lived and those whom he cared for — those who trusted him personally.
On the periphery of the pain are people like my family, who learned something from Jean Vanier, and who thought he was holy. But our pain is real. Because Jean Vanier meant something to Kate and me.
—
Almost nine years ago, we adopted a baby boy with Down syndrome. Less than a year later, we adopted a newborn baby girl, who also has Down syndrome. We knew nothing about disabilities when Max and Pia came home with us. We read a lot, but it was Vanier who stuck closest to our hearts.
Vanier, who founded with disabled people a community of love, offered us a way to make some sense of our own children’s disabilities.
I often feel that I have some responsibility to put the right face on disabilities. Have an anecdote about how cute my children are. Justify their existence. Explain away the intrusion they represent — spiritualize it, or at least offer a life lesson. Make the accommodation of my children seem worthwhile.
Vanier felt to us like someone who didn’t need that. Someone we wouldn’t have to explain ourselves to, or pretend for. Someone who would want to be with us, as things really are, even in the tedious, loud, uncomfortable, demanding normality of our family life. Someone who didn’t see people for their utility.
Vanier taught that all of us are wounded, and broken. That all of us are disabled, in one way or another. And that our brokenness — our sinfulness, even — can be a locus of friendship, and intimacy, and communion, especially if we invite other people close enough to help us carry crosses.
Disabled people show us, Vanier taught, that projecting illusions like strength and self-sufficiency stands in the way of admitting our own brokenness, and stands in the way of ever really loving one another. That divine intimacy, even, comes from bringing our wounds and weaknesses to God.
Vanier didn’t have to be perfect to teach those lessons. But he did have to be honest. And he wasn’t.
—
It is possible he struggled, I think to myself. That he didn’t want to do what he did. That he was trying, for decades, to get away from it. That he was ashamed, and he didn’t know how to stop.
But he grievously misrepresented himself.
He wrote and spoke of relatively benign flaws with the appearance of great humility, while concealing his criminal abuse. He pretended not to know about the abusive practices of his spiritual mentor — even while they mirrored his own. He left women scarred and hopeless, he blasphemed God himself, and he never owned up to any of it.
People thought he was a kind of spiritual master, and even while he rebuffed them, he knew they kept thinking it. And, in one way or another, with books and lectures and documentaries and appearances, he let them.
All of that has led me to something like a crisis of faith. At its worst, it becomes nearly a kind of epistemic despair.
Of course, that feels like a cliche. It is a cliche. But it is no less true for its banality. I thought this man was holy, and he wasn’t. And now I am surprised to find myself wondering if holiness is real.
If he wasn’t holy, I thought to myself those first few days, was anyone? If he spent a lifetime meeting the peculiar demands of loving people with disabilities, and wasn’t transformed in holiness, can I be? Is no one really freed from sin?
McCarrick made me angry, but he never made me question the Christian proposition. I never expected that he was holy. That someone I already thought lukewarm turned out to be wicked was no real surprise. Other bishops too, who have proven to be wicked, have evoked in me no emotional response. I’ve known too many bishops, as men of flesh and blood, vice and virtue, to expect them to be any particular thing.
But I saw Vanier in a different way. I saw him as a kind of icon, through which Christ, I thought, was magnified. I thought he was a sign of the presence of God. But of course he wasn’t.
It is foolish to expect so much of people. I’ve warned friends against it. It is one thing to see Christ in another person, I’ve said, but it is naive to trust uncritically anyone but God. I know well the danger of succumbing to the cults of personality that surround spiritual figures. But I thought Vanier was worth trusting. A lot of people did.
I hope he will go to heaven, and I‘ll pray for his soul. But I thought he was a saint. It seems quite clear that I was wrong.
—
It was Vanier’s spiritual writing that most influenced me. I thought it came from real spiritual experience. Now I doubt that’s true. A man who abuses religion is probably not gifted with a deep life of prayer.
I suspect if I went back and read through his scriptural commentary, I’d find it tinged with narcissism, egoism, and equivocation I didn’t see before. Maybe it was there, and I didn’t want to see it.
I don’t think that everything he wrote is a lie. I think he wrote about human experiences with some wisdom and insight, and about spiritual experiences with some formation in the wisdom of real mystics and true saints. I think there is truth in his work, but it isn’t his truth. And I wonder whether he wrote out of love for his readers, or to manipulate his victims.
Whether his work must be condemned unequivocally is a philosophical question to which I do not have the answer. But it doesn’t much matter to me. I learned some things from him that will stay with me, I think, but I need to separate those truths from the person who delivered them.
Anyway, I don’t want to read him again. I don’t have the stomach for it. And I don’t want to take the risk that I’ll still love his work, or be again deceived by what he has to say.
I know this is why God gives us the Church. I know that the Church, in her wisdom, and through the test of time, carefully discerns men and women of heroic virtue — saints worth imitating and venerating. But the Vatican’s saint-making department is an office full of sinners, some of them facing criminal investigations. Believing that God works through those guys to help people know who was really holy takes faith. I know it’s true, but in the days after the Vanier news, I found myself plagued by doubt.
The apologetic answer I have at the ready is not yet a consolation. I laugh, because I’ve offered it before to suffering friends, and no one has told me how hollow it sounds.
—
While I muddle through the predictable stages of my prosaic and suburban existential crisis, Kate keeps coming back to the name. I keep insisting we should wait.
I don’t know what I’m waiting for. There will be no deus ex machina for Jean Vanier. Nothing will reverse this story. I know about men who abuse the language and the intimate vulnerability of faith — I have interviewed the victims of men like that. In Vanier’s case, six women had the same story. He’s not going to be exonerated.
I know that everyone is a sinner, that most people are an admixture of good and bad. I have accepted that Daniel, for whom my son is also named, is not a saint. All of us must make peace with the sins of our fathers.
But Vanier was apparently a systemic sexual abuser who was held up as a servant of God. This is not about taking the bad with the good. This is about depravity and deception. I am reading Jonathan Edwards, and wondering if he went far enough.
All the same, I want to wait. Mostly, I realize, because I don’t have wisdom about some better name for my son.
I have been a Christian for a while now. I’ve not faced a crisis quite like this, but I’ve earned some scars over the years. I know this wound will also scar over.
Eventually we’ll give all this to the Lord. We’ll take the good, and surrender the rest, and our faith will likely emerge unshaken. We’re lucky — it won’t take us a lifetime to work through any of this, as it will for the women he harmed, and the people he was close to. We’ll feel shame, and anger, and disappointment for a season, and then we’ll move on.
I’ll work out the cliched doubts of my existential crisis.
My hope will be restored, I’m sure. My faith will be burnished. The Lord has not yet disappointed me. I’ll continue to follow him, and he’ll continue leading me closer to him. I’ll keep trusting in that.
And soon enough I’ll give my son a new name. He shouldn’t have to carry this one. But it’s going to take me a little while.
A name is a direction, I realize — a kind of commissioning. I wanted to put my son on a path I thought was illuminated by love, by generosity, by humility, by joy. I wanted to put him on the path I thought that Jean Vanier had walked. I wanted my son to be like that man — but now I don’t.
A new name bespeaks a kind of resurrection — new life. But I haven’t yet found a way forward from Calvary.
It’s Lent, and I am still waiting for the Resurrection.
JD Flynn is a writer and editor.
