The New Yorker has a long piece on the complicated world of art forgeries, “The Mark of a Masterpiece.” In it the author, David Grann observes,
When a forgery is exposed, people in the art world generally have the same reaction: how could anyone have been fooled by something so obviously phony, so artless? Few connoisseurs still think that Han van Meegeren’s paintings look at all like Vermeers, or even have any artistic value. Gorgers usually succeed not because they are so talented but, rather, because they provide, at a moment in time, exactly what others desperately want to see. Conjurers as much as copyists, they fulfill a wish or a fantasy. And so the inconsistencies – crooked signatures, uncharacteristic brushstrokes – are ignored or explained away.
The art world parallels the religious world. What were people, including the pope, so desperate to see that they were taken in by such a transparent phony at Maciel?
Leon, a lot of these people whom Maciel deceived feel besieged by secular values and look for support from any quarter. That’s why Pope John Paul II tried to forge an alliance with Islam; to fight secularism. Essentially, it was the same kind of alliance that FDR and Churchill forged with Stalin to defeat Hitler. You ignore the prospective ally’s apparent bad qualities for a “greater good.” It’s a sort of cognitive dissonance of the most deliberate kind.
Exactly what he showed them. The broader problem is that they still do want to see anything else and they are ripe for the next con man who comes along.
They only want to have their beliefs mirrored.
Everyone who holds those beliefs need look no further to ensure it isn’t just elaborate costuming.
They have and will continue to actively reject the little terrier’s attempts to pull away the green curtain at the side of the chamber.
“The devil also believes.”
Fr. Richard John Neuhaus said in First Things that he had “read all the documents” pertinent to the Maciel case. These documents were massive. He firmly believed that Maciel was unjustly attacked. Where do “the rest of us” stand? Most of us would accept the advice of a person more intelligent than ourselves, if we could find one.
(When I sent my last comment, I didn’t expect it to make everyone shut up.) Now that recent news is dealing with the iconoclasm imposed on the Legion, what kind of an icon will be left in our mind? How will the Legion survive? No matter how much they “fix” it, history will never forget that a religious congregation was founded by a false prophet. This has a negative and a positive fruit. 1) The Legion will have to live with a scar till the end of time; 2) We will realize that any religious movement is essentially a work of God, and not of any human being. Even the devil is a saintmaker.