The Contribution of L’Arche

Earlier this year, the L’Arche community published revelations about “credible and consistent testimonies” from six adult women without disabilities about “manipulative” and “emotionally abusive” sexual relations between Jean Vanier, the founder of L’Arche, and these women. The findings were made on a “balance of probabilities” rather than “beyond any doubt” standard of proof but the testimonies of the women were reinforced by the documentary and archival research that L’Arche conducted  (L’Arche International, Letter from International Leaders and Summary Report, February, 2020, larche.org).

When Vanier died last year, warm tributes had been paid both to him and to his work with people with an intellectual disability so these revelations caused much distress in the Catholic world and beyond. The revelations about Vanier followed similar revelations some years ago relating to his mentor and the person he called L’Arche’s “co-founder”, Fr Thomas Philippe.

Many commentators have rightly underlined the courage of the women who have come forward in relation to these cases. In any issue of abuse, the abuse victims must be centre-stage and their suffering and courage need to be highlighted, and were indeed highlighted, in the report published by L’Arche.

L’Arche also deserves credit for facing up so promptly to credible accusations about its founder and for the firmness of its response in “unreservedly” condemning his actions, “which are in total contradiction with the values Jean claimed.”

I worked for several months as an “assistant” or full-time volunteer with the original L’Arche community in Trosly in France in the 1980s and met both Jean Vanier and Fr Philippe, though I didn’t know either of them well. My experience was relatively short and I don’t speak in any way for the community today but these are a few brief reflections on L’Arche and Vanier, on the basis of my personal experience.

As a volunteer with L’Arche, I had direct experience of its positive contribution to the lives of many of its members. I am thinking particularly of the happy, home-like setting which it succeeded in creating for large numbers of people with an intellectual disability, some of whom previously had difficult or even anguished backgrounds.

A French researcher used the word enracinement or “putting down roots” in relation to L’Arche – he suggested that the community helped people to put down roots or settle in a place of love and solidarity. I recall one person, for example, who, on first coming to L’Arche, stood in a corner, with his back to other people, at meal-time. Some time later, he had become a smiling and joyful presence in his community. Such experiences could be replicated many times over as L’Arche did prove to be, in the words of one of Vanier’s books, a place of “community and growth’.

Living in a L’Arche house provided assistants like me with a strong sense of the unique value and dignity and indeed mystery of each person, including the person with an intellectual disability. That sense of the mystery of the person seemed to be linked to the mystery of suffering but could also be expressed in reflective or thoughtful moments as well as in beautiful smiles or in unexpected gestures of welcome and friendship.

During my life there as a volunteer, I also experienced L’Arche as a place of encounter and dialogue between those of different outlooks within the Church – for example, between those who emphasised pro-life and pro-family concerns and those who emphasised social justice concerns. While I appreciate that these terms can be somewhat reductive and are not mutually exclusive, I mean that people campaigning for the protection of the right to life of the unborn, including the unborn baby with a disability, respected a community which had at its heart people with an intellectual disability. Equally, people campaigning for justice for the marginalised also felt drawn to a community which was centred on persons with an intellectual disability, some of whom had previously languished in psychiatric hospitals.

Along with many others, Jean Vanier spearheaded an extraordinary growth of L’Arche around the world in a short time, from the 1960s on. One might also mention, in that context, the contribution of Faith and Light, also co-founded by Vanier, along with Marie-Hélène Mathieu, in pushing for people with an intellectual disability to come on pilgrimage, in large numbers, and in an atmosphere of joy, to Lourdes. Strange as it may seem, this was not something that had happened previously, or certainly not on a large scale, before the 1970s.

I frequently found nourishment in the writings and talks of Jean Vanier, which highlighted the centrality of the person with a disability rather than his own contribution to L’Arche. Given the recent revelations, however, I do acknowledge that there must now be considerable doubt about whether these writings will continue to be widely read into the future or even whether I will return to them myself.

Anyone commenting on the transgressions of another person, and particularly perhaps when that person is deceased, should keep in mind the famous injunction of Jesus in the Gospel: “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Nevertheless, along with many other friends of L’Arche, I feel sadness that the posthumous reputations of both Jean Vanier and Fr Philippe, are now, because of their own actions, permanently linked to damaging experiences of sexual misconduct and abuse.

Both men came from faith-filled family backgrounds. Vanier’s father Georges was a former Canadian Ambassador to France and the first Catholic Governor-General of Canada. His mother Pauline was also a remarkable woman of faith, who spent her later years living with L’Arche in France while Vanier’s sister Thérèse did much-respected work with the hospice movement in Britain as well as with L’Arche.   

Thomas Philippe came from a family of twelve children in the North of France, eight of whom became religious. Their uncle was a well-known Dominican priest and Thomas and three of his brothers joined the Dominicans.

Thomas was a gifted lecturer and preacher while his brother Marie-Dominique, who also joined the Dominicans, became disconnected from that order in the turmoil of the 1960s, and subsequently set up the Community of St John. Sadly, since his death, there have also been revelations that he engaged in sexual abuse with women whom he was counselling, revelations which have also been faced up to courageously by the Community which he founded. The French Dominican order assisted L’Arche in its enquiry and has also been carrying out its own investigations into the Fr Philippe  brothers, though they both lived quite separately from the Dominicans in the later decades of their lives.

As well as the serious wrong that they did, Vanier and the two Fr Philippe brothers also clearly did a lot of good. Moral theologians would be better equipped than I am to analyse how deeply flawed ideas about morality and particularly chastity affected the thinking of even committed Catholics in recent decades. What I feel that I can do today, however, is to pray both for those who had their trust betrayed by the co-founders of L’Arche and for those founders themselves.   

Most people will hope that the good work of lLArche itself around the world, and its very positive contribution to the lives of its members, will continue to flourish. The prompt and transparent actions of its current leadership in the face of the recent grave revelations will undoubtedly be a very positive building block in that context.