In a unique and valuable study, Shipwrecked in the Spirit: Implications of Some Controversial
Catholic Movements, Cultic Studies Journal, 1999, Volume 16, Number 2, pages 83-179 (for detailed
references, please see the original document: https://www.icsahome.com/articles/shipwrecked-in-the-
spirit-tydings), the American writer Dr Judith Tydings, an academic specialising in ‘new Catholic
Movements’, draws some valuable conclusions about research into these organisations. Even though her
study was written in 1999, today they are more relevant than ever.
As well as reviewing and assessing three books on the subject of ‘new Catholic movements’ - Beyond the Threshold: A Life in Opus Dei (Tapia, 1997), Les Naufragés de l'Esprit: Des Sectes Dans l’Eglise Catholique (Baffoy, Delstre, & Sauzet, 1996), and my own book The Pope’s Armada (Bantam, 1995) -Dr Tydings brings her first hand experience of the Charismatic Renewal in the US as she had been close to the Mother of God community in Maryland for twenty years, although she had parted company with it in 1995.
The most important aspect of this document, an extremely well-researched, scholarly piece, are her conclusions on the way in which such - often highly secretive - organisations can be effectively researched. Striking is her view that the conventional academic approach has not proved effective in the case of cultic organisations and why:
My review of the literature suggests that one camp, comprised mainly of academicians, tended to have neutral-to-positive views of groups that were traditionally termed "cults." In the 1970s and 1980s mental health professionals and some academicians began to criticize certain "cults" for their exploitatively manipulative practices. The media tends to report on the negative side of the cult phenomenon (Richardson, 1997). Academicians in the first camp, upset by this one-sided, negative picture, began to use the term "new religious movement" in order to restore a neutral-to-positive tone to their research. But their attempt to inject balance into the controversy seems merely to have aggravated it, for their writings are often interpreted as attempts to minimize reported harm; hence, the label "cult apologists" (Langone, 1993). The use of the terms “horror stories” (Saliba, 1995) and "atrocity tales" (Bromley & Shupe, 1981) in some analyses reinforced this perception, for these phrases imply that negative reports of former members are false by definition. These researchers don't call positive reports of former or current members "benevolence tales" or "spiritual growth tales"; only people who say "bad" things about cultic groups are telling "tales."
These observations provide an excellent background to the contrasting approaches to this subject - which certainly applies to Catholic movements with a cultic quality. Later in the study, Tydings also points out that further confusion has arisen from the fact that supposedly neutral, academic encounters on the subject of cults have sometimes been sponsored by cults themselves, with academics being hired, all expenses paid, by cults. Examples of cultic organisations with ‘fronts’ that carry out cultic studies include the Moonies and figures linked to the Tradition, Family and Property Movement, an extreme example of a cultish Catholic movement founded in Brazil in 1973 by the late Plinio Correa de Oliveira.
Tydings goes on to make a very important point for researchers today. She points out that:
Zablocki says, “in instances where a great many individuals independently report similar accounts of disenchantment, and where there are no apparent financial or emotional incentives for fabricating evidence, these accounts deserve to be taken seriously” (Zablocki, Exit cost analysis: A new approach to the scientific study of brainwashing. Nova Religio, 1(2), 1998, p. 231). Psychologist Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi warns that “recent and less recent NRM catastrophes help us to realize that in every single case allegations by hostile outsiders and detractors have been closer to reality than any other accounts. Ever since the Jonestown tragedy, statements by ex-members turned out to be more accurate than those of apologists and NRM researchers” (Beit-Hallahmi, Dear colleagues: Integrity and suspicion in NRM research. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.1997, p. 5).
A recent statement by Focolare co-president Jesus Moran goes some way to illustrating why the new movements are so hard to pin down. Speaking of the culture of the Focolare Movement, he emphasises the importance of ‘mentality’, contrasting this with more measurable and concrete aspects of culture such as political, economic and social aspects:
We have in mind [exercising] a cultural action in the widest sense, which certainly includes the political, social and economic dimensions - therefore a cultural action in the sense of an incarnation of a mentality, styles of life and thought. I emphasise the theme of mentality because I think it is a fundamental concept. Obviously, in this work the cultural agencies of the movement are fundamental - and that is because they express the experience of a people: the people of unity, which Chiara defined as people born of the Gospel.
So it’s not just a conceptual task, an academic work carried out at a desk. It’s culture in this wider sense of styles of life and mentality that become incarnate and become history. (Settimana News, 20 February 2021)
(http://www.settimananews.it/ministeri-carismi/focolari-dopo-assemblea-generale/)
Good luck to the academic with the cockeyed belief he or she can unpack that statement with the help of the movement’s own published material (which they both claim and attempt to practise) - whether it be the official statutes, the writings of Chiara Lubich or other leading Focolare figures - and present the world with an exact profile of the Focolare ‘mentality’.
Firstly, the Focolare movement’s main method of transmitting its core ideas was - and still is - via an oral tradition. Most of the knowledge of the movement received by new recruits at the time I joined the Focolare Movement in 1967 when it was 24 years old, was passed on by unpublished writings or sound recordings of Chiara Lubich, or in person by long-standing members of the Movement. Chiara Lubich’s ‘first companions’ were still very much alive and active. One of these, Doriana Zamboni, was based in London when I joined, because of the importance given to ecumenism in the United Kingdom. Most of the teaching given to potential full time focolarini at Loppiano and other formation centres was communicated in the same way.
Secondly, much of the focolare ‘gnosis’ - including its teachings or ‘thought’ as indicated by Moran - or what he terms its ‘styles of life’ - such as its structure and the way its rigid authority is dispensed - was and is clothed in the secrecy typical of cultish organisations. One need only think of the visions of Chiara Lubich, known within the movement as the ‘Paradise of 1949’, which until very recently were even kept hidden from full time members and have only been partially published (leaving out the most contentious assertions ‘because they might be misunderstood’). Just about everything which can be described as the essence of the movement, everything worth knowing, has not been published or made available to the public or even Church authorities.
The fact is that both the Church and the public have little access to what goes on within Focolare behind the endless bland spin. Even Cardinal Braz de Aviz - a long term internal member of the movement who owes much to Chiara Lubich recently said:
Today I find great difficulty with the movement. There are various questions on which I have not been able to get answers, because there are barriers that prevent you from setting up a dialogue; I find this very upsetting because the charism of unity has these walls which stop you from getting a response. For me this situation is a question without answers. At times I feel more at home in the Church, with all its sins, than inside the Movement. I don’t want to leave it, but I cannot find a way of having an open, free dialogue.
This explains why - given that internal members have been bred in its culture of secrecy - only ex-members, the vast majority of whom are victims of the movement’s various forms of abuse of authority, and have had the courage and gumption to leave, can tell the outside world about the ‘mentality’ - in other words, according to Jesus Moran, what the movement is really about.
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