The Betrayal of Witness Reflections on the Downfall of Jean Vanier Edited by STANLEY HAUERWAS and HANS S. REINDERS THE BETRAYAL OF WITNESS Reflections on the Downfall of Jean Vanier Copyright © 2024 Wipf and Stock Publishers. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401. Cascade Books An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3 Eugene, OR 97401 www.wipfandstock.com paperback isbn: 978-1-6667-7230-2 hardcover isbn: 978-1-6667-7231-9 ebook isbn: 978-1-6667-7232-6 Cataloguing-in-Publication data: Names: Hauerwas, Stanley, 1940–, editor. | Reinders, Hans S., editor. Title: The betrayal of witness : reflections on the downfall of Jean Vanier / edited by Stanley Hauerwas and Hans S. Reinders. Description: Eugene, OR : Cascade Books, 2024 | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: isbn 978-1-6667-7230-2 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-6667-7231-9 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-6667-7232-6 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Vanier, Jean, 1928–2019. | Arche (Association)—History. | Sex crimes—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Psychological abuse—Religious aspects— Christianity. Classification: BX2347.8.M4 B48 2024 (paperback) | BX2347.8.M4 B48 (ebook) version number 041124 Chapter Six Disabling Virtue Patrick McKearney What is good about L’Arche? The 2023 Report from the Study Commission mandated by L’Arche International shows us that the story we have been telling about L’Arche is wrong in more ways the one.1 How can we state that there is anything good about L’Arche now that we know that it was founded through deception, secrecy, and manipulation? How can we hold onto an image of L’Arche as embodying an ideal of warm, vulnerable, and egalitarian intimacy when we know that Vanier created and used this image to obscure a darker, more brutal reality? Should we even question, as the report does, whether that ideal, as it was articulated in Vanier’s own theology, has something wrong at the heart of it that led directly to the abuse? Such skeptical interrogation of our projections is important in this moment, in which people across L’Arche have unanimously condemned Vanier’s actions. But that will not by itself resolve the question “what is good about L’Arche?” And that is because that question requires not just a clearer apprehension of the facts, but also a debate about what the good of L’Arche is. That is, it is about not just what L’Arche, in practice, has turned out to be, but also about what we think it should be. Underneath the unanimity brought about by this particular moment, there are substantial differences between ways of articulating what L’Arche is good for, or the ethical end that 1. Study Commission, Control and Abuse. 89 90 The Betrayal of Witness it works toward. There exist contrasting, even competing, ethical visions of L’Arche. One such moral imagination is evident in the response to Vanier’s actions, even within a document as seemingly so simply about “the facts” as the report itself. This dominant response continues a tradition of foregrounding a particular understanding of L’Arche as fundamentally about the compassionate virtues of the nondisabled members. But my own research on L’Arche has acquainted me with a quite different one. I have worked in a particular L’Arche community in the UK—in varying capacities such as carer, committee member, advocate, and friend—but I am also a social anthropologist who has worked on L’Arche for about a decade. Within the L’Arche community I worked in, any foregrounding of the moral virtues of the nondisabled was typically rejected. New members of the community were, instead, trained into a different perspective on L’Arche, in which the people with intellectual disabilities are the main moral actors. In this chapter, I surface the difference between these two moral imaginaries of L’Arche: one focused around nondisabled compassion, the other around the people with disabilities. I do so in order to present the latter to audiences not familiar with it and the challenge that it presents to the former narrative. My aim in confronting us with the difference between these competing visions is to press upon us a debate about the character and purpose of L’Arche that this moment affords and demands of us. Nondisabled Virtue Vanier’s writing emphasized the importance of a particular type of humble, vulnerable, and open compassion. He often articulated this through a contrast between a “culture of power” and a “culture of relationships.”2 He called the nondisabled to give up their attempts at power and to learn, instead, virtues of gentleness, patience, and vulnerability. He articulated encountering people with intellectual disabilities as a particular challenge on this front. This is because they are normally interpreted primarily as people who do not have many things that the “outside world” values: strength, money, status, attractiveness. It is by letting go of valuing those things, and focusing on the value of relationships themselves, that nondisabled members of L’Arche learn to form kind, open, and intimate relationships.3 L’Arche communities 2. Wakefield, “Jean Vanier’s World,” para. 14; Vanier, Community and Growth; Vanier, From Brokenness to Community. 3. Reimer, Living L’Arche. Patrick McKearney—Disabling Virtue thus should embody this kind of peaceful way of relating in order to rebut the competition and violence of a contemporary capitalist and consumerist society.4 Vanier’s seeming embodiment of these virtues was valued across the religious, political, and social spectrum. It is striking, for instance, that he was lauded in the British press by commentators from the right and the left, religious and secular.5 Within academic circles, also, Vanier and L’Arche received positive attention from the social sciences,6 psychology,7 and writers on disability.8 Once again, the virtue of compassion was the linchpin in his and L’Arche’s broad appeal. Kevin Reimer’s secular psychological research, for example, takes exceptional compassion as the center of the movement Vanier founded. It investigates, from that premise, how this moral virtue is cultivated and sustained at such high levels by the nondisabled members of L’Arche such that they are able to care for the people with disabilities so well. The discipline of theology, especially theological ethics, repeatedly took up L’Arche as an important and positive example of ethical and specifically Christian community.9 This included a veneration of Vanier and his compassionate virtue that paid strikingly little heed to denominational boundaries. It is also surprising, given what we, thanks to the report’s work, now know about just how far Vanier evaded Catholic Church discipline, that he was received with similar deference within the Catholic Church. As the report itself puts it: For decades, in the Catholic organizations close to L’Arche and in the media, Jean Vanier appeared as the living embodiment of the Gospel, the star layperson of the Catholic renewal under the pontificate of John-Paul II.10 A similar sentiment is echoed by British journalist Mary Wakefield: Jean Vanier is now 88 and, if you ask around in Catholic circles, it’s whispered he’s a saint. He still lives in Trosly-Breuil, but in his spare time he’s a sort of secret superhero for peace—flying 4. Vanier, Community and Growth; Hauerwas, “Seeing Peace”; Hauerwas and Vanier, Living Gently. 5. Wakefield, “Jean Vanier’s World.” 6. Angrosino, “L’Arche”; Reinders, “Human Vulnerability”; McDonald and Keys, “L’Arche”; Reimer, Living L’Arche; Sumarah, “L’Arche”; Angrosino, “L’Arche.” 7. Reimer, Living L’Arche. 8. McDonald and Keys, “L’Arche”; Burghardt, “Brokenness/Transformation.” 9. E.g., Ford, Christian Wisdom; Downey, Blessed Weakness; Hauerwas, “Seeing Peace”; Young, Encounter with Mystery; Banner, Ethics of Everyday Life. 10. Study Commission, Control and Abuse, 13. 91 The Betrayal of Witness 92 around the world to broker between powerful players. Justin Welby called on him this year to mediate between cross bishops, and it’s said he made them all wash each other’s feet. Though Vanier’s life has been punctuated with great accomplishments and prestigious awards, it’s that first invitation to Raphael and Philippe that seems most impressive.11 There have occasionally been people who interpreted Vanier as virtuous as a charitable and philanthropic figure. But anyone with even a passing acquaintance with Vanier’s work and L’Arche’s practice know that this emphasis on compassion was never about charity—but rather about a turn towards egalitarian intimacy and reciprocity. Vanier tells the story of the founding of L’Arche in just this way. He writes that he had initially felt like it was his religious duty to provide charity to the cognitively disabled people he invited to live with him, but he discovered that he was instead forming equal relationships with them.12 The household he had formed with “benevolent” intentions was turning out to be a familial environment in which these individuals could really belong as worthwhile members of a community, rather than as recipients of a presumptuous grace.13 This way of telling the story implies that L’Arche calls the nondisabled toward not charity but rather this specific kind of compassionate descent: to give up their power, individuality, and status in order to form reciprocal relations with those with disabilities.14 This is importantly different from a model of charity that maintains those hierarchical relations in the act of giving: noblesse oblige only being possible if the poor are poor and the rich are rich.15 This reading of L’Arche rejects that kind of compassion, and lauds instead the genuine renunciation of one’s higher position. The virtue here is letting go of what one had, not on giving from a place of strength. But we should also note that this model works by treating the nondisabled as in a genuinely hierarchically superior position to begin with: they really do have something to give up. Indeed, Vanier narrated his own story, and found many who would join him in doing so, as characterized precisely by this compassionate descent from worldly strength to humble compassion. If egalitarian reciprocity is the end point of this story, Vanier’s initial status is key to the descent and renunciation aspects of this trope. His own and others’ narrations of him typically began with his noble background—son 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. Wakefield, “Jean Vanier’s World,” para. 7. Vanier, Ark for the Poor. Spink, Miracle; Vanier, Ark for the Poor. Nouwen, Selfless Way of Christ. Douglas, Natural Symbols. Patrick McKearney—Disabling Virtue of the governor-general of Canada, academically talented, etc.—precisely for the contrast it made to the life he went on to lead: a humble one among humble people.16 Not all of the authors cited above followed Vanier completely in this way of telling the story, and Vanier’s own writing was importantly ambiguous. But there are many cited here, such as Reimer and Wakefield, who followed it closely—and many more within the media, academia, and the church who did the same. This way of narrating his life reads him as exemplary, not inasmuch as he retained his hierarchical status, but inasmuch as he compassionately gave it up in service of people more needy than him.17 Disabling Virtue I conducted fifteen months of ethnographic research on a L’Arche community in the UK, including working and living as an assistant in one of the houses for over a year, conducting over sixty interviews, and visiting other L’Arche communities in the UK. While working in this community, it was not uncommon for us assistants to receive praise from members of the public or local churches when we were out and about supporting a person with intellectual disabilities. People regularly described us as “volunteers” rather than workers; coding our work as compassionate inasmuch as we were sacrificing something in order to give those with disabilities a fuller life. Even friends and family began to interpret me as special inasmuch as I was able to do this work. Though they did not interpret me as some kind of altruistic saint, and generally recognized how much I valued the relationships I was forming, they would still say “I could never do it” with a distinct hint of admiration. Much to my initial surprise, experienced assistants in L’Arche did not accept these compliments. They rejected them and were very critical of the place they came from. As one long-standing carer called Peter once told me: You know a lot of people idealize L’Arche, and think the assistants are very good. But sometimes that’s more a way to keep your distance from it than anything. Another long-term worker called Elina similarly claimed that the idea that we need to give compassionately to people with intellectual disabilities came from “a fear about not wanting to get involved with people.” As my time in L’Arche wore on, I came to discover that this was because assistants 16. Spink, Miracle; Wakefield, “Jean Vanier’s World.” 17. Spink, Miracle. 93 The Betrayal of Witness 94 held an alternative interpretation of L’Arche that rejected compassion, even of the humble kind, as an ethical ideal for the nondisabled because they see it as distorting relationships with people with intellectual disabilities in two interconnected ways. The first reason is that, as one carer put it, interpreting L’Arche as a practice of giving by the nondisabled assumes that people with intellectual disabilities are primarily passive, dependent recipients of the moral gifts of others—and thus needy and burdensome in and of themselves. People in the community describe that idea as not only inaccurate but also demeaning. That is, they regard practicing self-sacrifice as only deepening the marginalization of these individuals from social and ethical life—further preventing them from ever being related to as agents who could have something to contribute to the lives of others. As Hilary once told me: People with learning disabilities live with loss from the day they’re born. Some have been deeply loved but there are losses all along that they cannot cover up. [As assistants] we come in and help them, and therefore they are always receiving. But they know that they are of value when they have something to give. Compassion, in other words, is an ethic of donation that makes no real space for return, and so ignores the possibility that the recipient might, themselves, be an actor, agent, and giver. The second problem that carers in L’Arche have with the frame of compassion is that it assumes the hierarchical difference that initially separates people with and without intellectual disabilities is real. As Vanessa put it: L’Arche was never about “us helping them,” but about the ways in which we can transform and develop together. There may be differences in our intellectual disabilities, but no difference at all in our shared humanity. And as Laura put it: Living with people very close in community, it’s not like you just give, you receive as well. Carers in L’Arche work consistently to undermine the idea that the nondisabled might have a higher place in a hierarchy, from which they must descend to help these poor disabled people. They do so by critiquing the idea that the nondisabled have anything to give and that the people with intellectual disabilities need anything. In a series of training sessions run by more experienced carers and managers in L’Arche, us carers were encouraged to see ourselves not as Patrick McKearney—Disabling Virtue highly capable and generous benefactors, but rather as people who also depend on intimate relationships with others for their own well-being. Hilary, for instance, led us in reflecting on a variety of documents that spelled out L’Arche’s ethos. She urged us to think of our job not as a charitable or professional act of giving but, instead, as a way of entering into relationships with people. She did not say that we needed to cultivate virtues like compassion, patience, or generosity. The only way we could enter into relationships, she said, was by learning to become more dependent and vulnerable ourselves. This was most clearly instantiated in a ritual where members of L’Arche—disabled and not—wash one another’s feet on Maundy Thursday in the build up to Easter. Hilary described the symbolic importance of the event this way: You, as an assistant, wash their feet all the time. But for once, allow someone else to wash your feet. You become vulnerable before them. Deep within us all we feel good when we can help somebody else. Mutuality is much more about being able to say “I need you. I can’t do it on my own. And you might need me as well.” Experienced assistants rarely articulate their time in L’Arche through reference to their own acts of will—and especially through reference to their own generosity. They, instead, typically reverse this equation, and describe a moral transformation in L’Arche that reversed their initial altruistic expectations. Kim described just such a shift to me in these terms: Being in L’Arche has really challenged me. Just being with people with disabilities. Now I realize I’m staying because it’s good for me, not because it’s good for those with learning disabilities or for the community. I get much more from them day-to-day than they do from me. Long-term carers in L’Arche frequently narrate their own story in a way that effaces their own influence upon their lives, and foregrounds that of others. Elina wove this kind of self-effacing reversal into her narrative as well: Like everybody, you think you’re coming to make a difference. But the reality is that it changes you more than it changes the people [with disabilities]. I wanted to save the world you know. But we don’t ever have that much effect. We all want to see it; I’m just the same. We all have that arrogance that we want it to be about us. 95 96 The Betrayal of Witness As these practices work to undermine the idea that the nondisabled are strong and have something to give, they also challenge the idea that those with disabilities are weak and in need. When newcomers and visitors to L’Arche arrive in the community they are typically subjected to a barrage of stories that emphasize the surprising agency of these individuals.18 Every evening in the large house where I conducted my research, all five residents with cognitive disabilities, along with the assistants scheduled to support them, would share a meal. During these dinner times, more experienced carers would often tell dramatic stories in which people with cognitive disabilities are the protagonists. During one such supper during my fieldwork, the assistants around the table were talking about Sarah, a resident with severe intellectual and physical impairments that would appear to render her unable to communicate verbally and to support herself with many daily tasks. At a certain point, a long-term assistant named Maria turned to her and said: Sarah, when I first arrived, for a while I didn’t help you have a wash. And, when I first did it, I assumed that you didn’t really know what was happening. I didn’t know what I was doing, and at one point I had to think for ages about what to do next. And you just sat there very patiently and quietly. When I finally worked out what the right thing to do was, you looked at me dead in the eye—and then laughed at me! At another meal, an experienced assistant called Priya narrated an incident involving another disabled resident. Ensy’s communication is quite difficult for me to understand. He’s definitely saying something; there’s no doubt. One time we were on holiday, and he began to speak about something, but I just couldn’t understand it. “Are you talking about this morning when we did this?” “No. No.” I went through everything I could think. He was just saying “No” to everything I said. And then I said, “I am really sorry. I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me.” He seemed very sad and looked at me. Suddenly—I don’t know why—I said, “Is it because you saw that I was sad myself?” Just before we’d sat down something had happened and I’d been sad. And we’d gone through all the things I’d done that day. “Is it because you saw I was sad?” “Yes.” God, that really moved me. People with intellectual disabilities are also placed front and center in more practical ways at all of the dinner times, communal rituals, and 18. McKearney, “Ability to Judge”; McKearney, “Limits of Knowing”; McKearney, “Receiving the Gift.” Patrick McKearney—Disabling Virtue celebrations in L’Arche. At dinner, for instance, more experienced carers would play with Louise until she spoke words I never thought she knew, dance with Dan until he felt inspired to perform one of his comedy routines, or remind Rachel of her tradition of initiating new assistants by not-so-subtly creeping up behind them and pouring a jug of water over their head. It is never the assistants who occupy this dramatic position, but always those with disabilities who are the subject of the attention. They are the people who do something funny in the middle of a solemn moment, or whose tales are told with a sense of wonder and excitement. The outcome of all of this is an atmosphere in which each person with intellectual disabilities becomes famous within the community, more so than any carer, for their distinctive characteristics, abilities, and achievements. These practices are so widespread in the community they are impossible to miss when one first arrives. One can get almost nowhere in this L’Arche community with the assumption intact that people with disabilities are needy and passive recipients. The only way one can interact is by relating to them as particularly potent moral actors. As carers stay on in the community, they learn how to reproduce representations of particular people with disabilities as more capable than their assistants and learn how to challenge others who do not relate to these individuals in that way. Compassion and Charisma When people stay in the community for longer, they learn to talk about people with intellectual disabilities as possessing and transmitting “gifts.”19 This language was widespread in L’Arche, with more senior assistants often commenting casually on someone’s humor, generosity, or assertiveness as a particular “gift.” People with cognitive disabilities were regularly represented—such as in the stories I related above—as possessing particularly keen, and sometimes miraculous, emotional and relational abilities that could affect others in powerful ways. More generally, assistants frequently drew attention to the ways in which people with disabilities care for them, such as when these individuals ask after them, remember their preferences, or offer them affection. People with disabilities are also often praised for having extraordinary emotional perception. For instance, assistants often tell stories about times when they were sad and, while no-one else noticed, a person with disabilities reached out to them. An experienced assistant called Rayna once told me: 19. McKearney, “Receiving the Gift.” 97 98 The Betrayal of Witness You can’t hide your personality from people with learning disabilities. You have to open yourself. They find your weaknesses and strengths very quickly, and that confronts you with your own disabilities and inabilities. New carers learned, in this vein, how to speak about the idiosyncrasies of different individuals as blessings for those who interact with them. So, for instance, one carer described Rachel’s enjoyment of looking at herself in the mirror as a gift because “it challenges those of us who don’t like the way we look,” while another talked about Ruth’s attempts to get people’s attention as a gift for openness and connection. What this amounts to is a reimagining of people with intellectual disabilities not as burdens and problems but as especially virtuous in one respect or another: Rachel was described, for instance, as amazingly emotionally intuitive to the point of perceiving vulnerabilities that cognitively able people were unable to recognize. Maden, for instance, told me that Rachel is: so clever also to see when you are in a good mood or not, when you’re really sad. I mean sometimes when I have been so tired, or so sad, then she just comes up to me and gives me a hug. I have no clue how she can see that, but she does somehow. This way of describing people with disabilities as gifted often draws attention to their difference from the nondisabled. It rarely implies that these individuals are reaching ethical standards that nondisabled people easily meet. Instead, it typically suggests that these individuals have gifts for things that nondisabled people are much worse at. The stories often imply that it is precisely because they cannot do the kind of intellectual work that others are so engaged in, that people with intellectual disabilities are so good at the face-to-face aspect of morality. This model does not challenge the basic distinction between those with an intellectual disability and those without. It is not, for instance, an argument to abandon the category of intellectual disability. L’Arche’s training does not work toward smoothing out differences between the carers and the cared for in order to claim that people with cognitive disabilities are really, underneath it all, typical cognitively able subjects. Instead, it systematically deepens the sense that people with cognitive disabilities are unusual. What this produces is a similar set of hierarchical differences, a compassionate movement from those higher up the hierarchy to those lower. But in this case the disabled are placed at the top of that hierarchy. It is they who embody the virtues of compassion, and they who generously impart their gifts to the needy (and even at times in these stories foolish) nondisabled. Patrick McKearney—Disabling Virtue This overturning transforms people with disabilities from recipients of compassion from the cognitively able into the people embodying this virtue and thus into the givers of this gift. The hierarchical reversal is also a transformation from passive to active. Each person with disabilities comes across as not simply a bundle of caring needs or as someone who has things done to them. Rather, the stories endow them with a public persona in which they are someone with a distinct story, a history of acts done to others.20 At times, this focus on their agency becomes elaborated in a way that departs even further from the compassionate framing of L’Arche’s project— and even from the moral frame of “virtue” altogether. That is, people with intellectual disabilities are represented as powerful agents to be deferred to precisely for the ways in which they depart from all expectations: including those of what it means to be nice and kind. Common to all the stories—whether they praise preeminently moral virtues like generosity and empathy, or less obviously altruistic actions like laughing at others or admiring one’s own reflection in the mirror—is the surprise and wonder that the revelation of this quality generates in those who witness it. When Maria describes her surprise at Sarah laughing at her quite unexpectedly, she depicts Sarah as someone who will interrupt you, who will disrupt and disturb any way that you have of evaluating her. All the stories make a similar point. Maden was not expecting that Rachel would pick up on her sadness; and Priya is astounded by Ensy’s sensitivity. In this way, carers train to regard people with cognitive disabilities not simply as exemplifying a set of moral standards better than the nondisabled, but also as exceeding our attempts to comprehend them through any routinized moral framework.21 The attitude cultivated is as much praise for how well they are doing, as it is wonder at who these unusual agents are. The nondisabled defer to them for their transgression of norms, for how unpredictable they are. This representation disrupts the hierarchical movement of higher to lower by nondisabled to disabled, not exclusively by claiming that those with disabilities are more compassionate, but more broadly by demonstrating their charisma. Indeed, one could articulate even those stories that do center compassion as actually more fundamentally about this kind of subversion. For even those stories undermine the position from which the nondisabled try to establish judgments about moral virtue in the first place. The end result, across all of these practices and representations, is that the initial 20. McKearney, “L’Arche”; Arendt, Human Condition; McKearney, “Limits of Knowing.” 21. Spink, Miracle, 1. 99 100 The Betrayal of Witness moral hierarchy between the disabled and the nondisabled (here centered around compassion) always gets overturned.22 Conclusion It is quite right for us to tear down the image of Vanier as an exemplar of compassion. It is quite clear that this is not who he was. And it is quite clear, also, that the ways we bought into this image sustained the possibilities of the abuse he perpetuated. We owed his victims better, and we now owe them, at the very least, a clear-sighted attention to the damage he caused them. And we are now accountable to them, as well to all those who are affected by L’Arche, in how we pursue this moral project going forward. Those who admired and praised Vanier as an exemplar of nondisabled compassionate descent take it as their responsibility now to reject Vanier precisely for his failure to live up to that ideal. His call for them to change their lives by giving up power was not something he himself ultimately did. But, not only that, he also sought a kind of non-conformist, charismatic, and erotic power that is particularly illicit in many of the social circles in which he was praised. He did work that was, from this perspective, salutary while secretly breaking many of the moral codes he professed—as well as those of the groups he appealed to. But many within L’Arche never centered Vanier’s compassion in the first place. The alternative narration of L’Arche that I have articulated here has always been skeptical of a focus on nondisabled virtue: both because it is about the nondisabled and because it is about virtue. There is no reason to suppose that this narrative’s lack of interest in religious and moral conformity means it has no way to condemn Vanier’s actions as manipulative and abusive. Its advocates in L’Arche are just as critical of Vanier’s behavior as anyone else. But this alternative story focuses our attention going forward in a different direction: on people with intellectual disabilities as charismatic actors who disrupt existing moral schemas, touch the nondisabled in unexpected ways, and inaugurate a new kind of relationality beyond stable frames. This narrative has never sat easily with those who center the routinization of nondisabled compassion. And in this moment I suspect it will sound, to their ears, downright dangerous to focus on these themes. The report, for instance, describes Vanier as having gone so wrong precisely because there was far too much charisma, liminality, and intimacy in his theology 22. McKearney, “Ability to Judge.” Patrick McKearney—Disabling Virtue and practice.23 The report judges his departures from theological orthodoxy as “corrupt,”24 “twisted,”25 “deluded,”26 and “distorting”27—and links these charismatic and mystical departures from church teaching and discipline to the sexual abuse.28 From this perspective, more emphasis on unorthodox interaction that goes beyond existing moral structures sounds very worrying indeed—and a risk to vulnerable people with disabilities. But it is not at all clear to me that this is as obviously correct an answer to the question “where did Vanier go wrong?” as the report presents itself to be. It relies on a certain way of reading Vanier’s theology, as well as a highly specific understanding of morality, of the relationship between authority and moral discipline, of the relationship between unorthodox thought and immoral practice, and of the moral agency of people with intellectual disabilities. And it demonstrates a curious lack of reflection on whether the ideals of nondisabled compassionate virtue and Catholic discipline might themselves have played a problematic role in this story—as if the main source of Vanier’s wrongdoing was that he did not adhere to the moral codes of the culture and institutions he was part of. The alternative moral framing of L’Arche, which I have articulated in this chapter, raises questions about all of these assumptions as part of an explanation of Vanier’s faults, and as a fitting moral response to communities that have distinctively recognized the agency of people with intellectual disabilities and their capacities for intimacy. It also raises the question as to whether our answers to the query “where did Vanier go wrong?” has a significant bearing on the future of L’Arche at all. The alternative narrative might suggest, instead, that L’Arche has developed into something quite different from what Vanier intended, from what his own private practice involved, and from what anyone conforming or not conforming to the religious circles from which it sprung anticipated or desired. We might wonder, in line with this alternative story, whether its development into something so remarkable despite Vanier’s evident secrecy, manipulation, and abuse was not due to the ways in which people with intellectual disabilities disrupted and overtook its story. Certainly, the unique development of L’Arche has been in part sustained by a 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. Study Commission, Control and Abuse. Study Commission, Control and Abuse, 18. Study Commission, Control and Abuse, 11. Study Commission, Control and Abuse, 20. Study Commission, Control and Abuse, 20. Study Commission, Control and Abuse, e.g., 643, 762, 823. 101 102 The Betrayal of Witness narrative that decenters both the nondisabled and their virtues, and facilitates instead attention, recognition, and openness to the charisma of those with disabilities. The dominant response to the revelations currently focuses our attention on the importance of nondisabled moral conformity and virtue—and on purifying L’Arche of the charismatic, the strange, and the disruptive. But this response proceeds from a set of assumptions that are not shared by many in L’Arche who instead see the project as good for quite different reasons. The alternative story I have articulated here has long nurtured L’Arche in its distinctive direction. What might it offer to L’Arche in this moment? How might decentering nondisabled virtue, more broadly, help L’Arche continue to develop in its own direction despite the now evident failings of its founder? What does it offer to thinking through the role of safety, touch, and intimacy in the communities—for disabled and nondisabled alike? How might attention to the charismatic, disruptive, and surprising agency of people with intellectual disabilities recenter their capacities and their needs in this story? It was always remiss to reduce L’Arche to the virtues of its founder. It would be even more so to limit it to his sins. Bibliography Angrosino, Michael V. “L’Arche: The Phenomenology of Christian Counterculturalism.” Qualitative Inquiry 9.6 (January 12, 2003) 934–54. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Banner, Michael. The Ethics of Everyday Life: Moral Theology, Social Anthropology, and the Imagination of the Human. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Burghardt, Madeline. “Brokenness/Transformation: Reflections on Academic Critiques of L’Arche.” Disability Studies Quarterly 36.1 (2016). Douglas, Mary. Natural Symbols. 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