Ad Hominem attacks - the weapon of weakness

For anyone who keeps up with comments on the focolare.net website, the leading website for ex-members of the Focolare Movement, it is striking that hardly any former member dares reveal their identity.  For me this is a devastating indictment against Focolare - revealing the powerful culture of fear it has instilled in members and which endures long after they have left the organisation.

Fear of what? Physical reprisals?  Unlikely.  Attempts to silence them by threats or persuasion?  Possibly.
I believe, however,  that the roots of this fear reach far deeper - it is a nameless, irrational horror cultivated in members of the fate awaiting those who fall away.  I remember how, when ex-members - especially those who had been in authority - left the movement, they would be spoken of in hushed tones as lost.  They were the rotten apples, in foundress Chiara Lubich's words, that  would infect the barrel.  Lurid tales were told of how low they had sunk.  The ultimate success of oppression is when the victims internalise it - self-hating gays, women who submit to laws that subjugate them, those who are downtrodden by caste or class systems and connive with their oppressors.  This is evident in those who leave the movement and secretly retain the belief fed to them in their years inside that all outside it are somehow lacking and those who leave are evil or even damned.

But there is a more concrete weapon that Focolare and other similar Catholic movements employs against ex-members who go public with their criticisms, as I learned when The Pope's Armada was published.  It is that form of character assassination know as the ad hominem argument, when the character of the messenger is attacked rather than the message.  Apart from being fallacious, this is the argument of weakness -  the last resort of those who know they are unable to counter criticism.

In my case, the first sign of what was to come occurred even before The Pope's Armada was published.  The British weekly newspaper The Catholic Herald ran a front page story announcing that a critical book on the New Catholic Movements was about to be published in the United Kingdom and I was its author.  Immediately, my mother received a phonecall from an English focolarina who I had encountered both socially and professionally long after leaving the movement (we both worked in the media) and who knew that I was gay and had met my partner.  Anyone who knows the internal workings of Focolare would realise that this would be done with the backing of the highest authority.  She quizzed my mother about the contents of the book - fruitlessly, as my mother knew nothing at that time  - and then repeatedly asked her, 'Is Gordon still with *****?'  As at that time I had not yet come out to my mother (she was still recovering from years of serious depression), this caused her great distress.  At best this was pointless mischief-making, at worst a kind of blackmail - as if signaling what the movement was prepared to do to blacken my name. It must have come as a shock when they read the book and found that I was totally open about being gay.  I had anticipated such attacks and decided that the best weapon was complete openness for my story to make sense and indeed my sexuality was central to the account of my mistreatment at the hands of the movement.  I had rightly decided that the best way to counter such an organisation - which thrives on secrecy - was to go public, withholding none of the salient facts.

Interestingly, a Vatican Cardinal, when asked if he would allow me to interview him for an article I was writing, told me that he had been  'very disappointed' in The Pope's Armada.  My criticisms, he opined, should have been limited to the private sphere, within the confines of the Catholic Church.  Such advice now sounds hollow, even sinister after all the paedophile coverups of recent years.  But it illustrates the mind-set of Rome - don't hang out your dirty linen in public.  There is another reason why the Cardinal's remark was disingenuous: the Vatican deliberately ignores the evidence of ex-members of organisations.  Some years ago I interviewed the postulator of the cause of Saint Jose Maria Escriva, founder of Opus Dei.  The postulator was a priest member of Opus Dei (one of the changes Pope John Paul II had made to speed up the canonisation process was not to have an independent postulator and also to abolish the Devil's Advocate, whose task was to do his best to oppose the candidate's canonisation).  This priest told me he had been 'very frightened' (his words)  that ex-members might come forward with evidence against Escriva. He breathed a sigh of relief when the Cardinal who presided over the Congregation for Canonisations informed him that they had a policy of ignoring the evidence of ex-members.

The reaction of Focolare to the publication of The Pope's Armada lacked the refinement of the Vatican.  They forbade members of the movement from reading it, backing up the ban with unrestrained ad hominem attacks, designed to undermine my credibility.  They were told that I was a homosexual, had been to see a psychiatrist and was divorced.  The majority of the population, at least in western society, would probably respond, 'So what?' For the sheltered members of the Focolare Movement, however,these accusations would be deeply shocking.  The irony, however, was that all these points were mentioned by me in the book.  Indeed, I had been sent to see a psychiatrist by my superiors in the movement in the hope that they could change my sexual orientation and marriage had also been their suggested solution - so they were to some extent implicated in my divorce as well!   Subsequently, these accusations have been elaborated into libelous allegations such as one that I read in a comment on focolare.net that I had 'abandoned' my wife and 'three' children ( I have two, as far as I am aware, and still enjoy a close and rewarding relationship with them).  Of course, none of these accusations have any bearing on the truth or otherwise of The Pope's Armada.

Such attacks were aided and abetted by traditionalist Catholic journalists.  When The Pope's Armada was first published in the UK, it had the misfortune of being reviewed in two quality daily newspapers by prominent Catholic writers well to the right of the Catholic spectrum.  One, a novelist and traditionalist Catholic, compared me to ex-nuns and monks in the 19th century who wrote salacious, largely fictional, accounts of their supposed experiences in Catholic religious orders.  These accounts were probably the work of militantly anti-Catholic Protestants.  The implications was that my book was also a work of fiction written with a similar purpose.  I don't think any self-respecting journalist would attempt a trick like this today,  but at that time the New Movements were largely unknown, even among Catholics.  Nevertheless,  this was just a more subtle, seemingly erudite, version of an ad hominem attack and equally weak as it did nothing to counter the facts revealed in the book.  Obviously these rather over-zealous right-wing Catholics were anxious to defend Pope John Paul II - who had been such a keen supporter of the movements - and avert scandal.

Most critical reviews of exposes written by ex-members of Catholic Movements (eg Opus Dei) employ the same argument: ex-members are not to be believed because they are just settling old scores   This was dramatically disproved in the case of Vows of Silence which exposed the crimes of Father Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ - indeed it opened a can of worms and the truth turned out to be much worse.  I believe this is the case with the New Movements.  They are so impenetrable, only ex-members have had access to the evidence.   The Pope's Armada also opened a can of worms and since I wrote the book I have heard many more stories, all much worse than anything that appeared in the original British edition of the book.  It is important that these stories should be told in full and without fear.  I can understand that for many ex-members the thought that their most intimate secrets, confided to groups or individuals while they were members, might be made public would be a source of concern.  But I am convinced that the best weapon of those who have suffered at the hands of the Movements and experienced their worst aspects is total openness - ultimately far stronger than their weak, cowardly and, above all,  deeply un-Christian ad hominen attacks.