Kiko's "way" is not a cult, it is more than a movement, but it is far more than an "itinerary of formation" as it self-describes in its Statutes. It is an alternate model of the Church, a novel-radical-revolutionary brand of Catholicism. It is far more profound, intense and demanding than anything known in our Catholic lay world, past or present. It entertains a powerful ambivalence toward the actual Catholic Church: on the one hand it is an intensification, to an unprecedented depth, of elements of Catholicism. On the other hand, it is in practice largely detached from the broader Church. This balance of attachment/detachment...to its own program and to the Church...is the question posed in this essay. In morality and dogma it is Catholicism on steroids, but in liturgy and culture it is a separate track, a challenge to the Church as One.
Terminology: Way, Neocatechumenate, Movement, Itinerary
Internally participants speak of "walking in The Way." This language is offensive to non-participant Catholics who see "The Way" as Jesus himself and his Church, the broader Church as bride-body-mother, rather than any specific expression therein. The word "Neocatechumenate" is awkward, esoteric, but also not entirely accurate. This process is not intended to introduce the initiate into the current, actual Church, but leads into the formation of an alternative network of communities and relationships which are distinct from and yet interactive with the ordinary parish/diocesan system. Carmen infamously corrected Pope John Paul II when he referred to it as a movement. "It is a Way" she exclaimed. But she was right: it is far more than a movement. We know the ecumenical, charismatic, Communion and Liberation, Focolare, and other movements which renew the Church with a distinctive gestalt of values and practices but leave the institution in tact. Kiko's program is a spiritual movement but at the same time is a drastic institutional revolution that creates a new community of communities within the parish and diocese. It is breathtakingly revolutionary, in an institutional way, but that purpose is not articulated.
My Perspective
From youth, I have myself entertained an ambivalence about the Church. On the one hand, I have benefited from a habitual, indeliberate, serene and confident sense of my Catholic identity. Have never questioned that for a second. It is one of my certainties: I am a human, a male, a creature, and a Catholic. But I was never satisfied with the spiritual provision of the ordinary parish so I searched for something deeper, more intense. I have journeyed: political activism of the 60s (especially the radical Catholic anarchism of Day and Illich), Cursillo, Charismatic Renewal, Marriage Encounter, the theology of Balthasar-John Paul-Benedict, Communion and Liberation, the 12 steps, Kiko's Way, Our Lady's Missionaries of the Eucharist, and our Magnificat Home mission. I was longing for a deeper community. I never found it. I always return to the prosaic, generic Catholic parish. And so I have come to see that as the norm: the renewal movements come and go in my life and in the Church. At their best they refresh, broaden and deepen our ecclesial life. Then they disappear. There is not now much of the biblical or ecumenical movements that flourished before the Council and inspired it; but their charisms are now part of Catholic life. The agenda of Kiko is more drastic.
Mine is a particularly privileged perspective on this new way. My best friend John Rapinich and his wife Mary walked with the very first community in this country. He shared transparently with me his love for this new blessing. For example, early on he invited me to St. Columba's in Manhattan to hear Kiko, in person, deliver a Lenten Announcement. We were cIearly out of place: everyone sat with their community. I was mesmerized by Kiko. Like nothing I had ever seen! A real living Prophet! John was corrected for inviting an outsider.
I myself walked with two different communities: one in NYC and another in NJ for a number of years. I greatly benefited but left as my wife was disinterested and my own life was already full of commitments. My son and his wife are deeply involved. I admire and support them. If anything I am a little jealous: this way is unequalled in the intensity and depth of its Catholicism.
Uniqueness of Kiko and His Project
Kiko's proposal is in a different league from all other movements. I view him as Catholic mystic and spiritual genius in the league of a handful of giants: Benedict, Francis, Dominic, Ignatius, the Carmelite mystics, and maybe a few others. His charism has been to take specific Catholic elements and then deepen/intensify them to a new dimension and in a concrete program: Jesus' triumph over fear of death, love of the enemy, renunciation of material wealth, engagement with the Word of God, and above all the hidden life (humility, simplicity, praise) of Nazareth (a la St. Charles de Focault.)
The presence of this way is particularly strong in our Archdiocese of Newark. Then-Archbishop McCarrick welcomed them, no doubt to endear himself to Pope John Paul who loved them. Their numbers are steadily increasing within our clergy. Within a few decades, they could be a majority of our priests. And they will be strong in leadership as they are theologically sound and immersed in a program that directly confronts their moral/emotional failings.
This way is the face of the Church of the future for many reasons: l. They are missionizing as they create new communities. 2. They are providing many priests for the Church. 3. They have tons of children, many or most of whom continue on this path. 4. They offer the strongest antidote to the prevailing toxicity of our society.
Totalizing Immersion
Involvement requires a degree of commitment unprecedented for Catholic laity. We have varieties of pious associations, renewal movements, third orders, secular institutes and such. But none, to my knowledge, require the same commitment of time and resources. The closest might the charismatic covenant communities that developed in the 80s. Those involved, at times, an extreme degree of obedience and authority. But they left the parish and its liturgy in tact and required less time.
Two nights weekly are a minimum: the Saturday evening Eucharist and a weeknight sharing of the Word. But there is more: preparation for the Word or the Eucharist, monthly Sunday afternoon convivences, periodic weekend retreats, and occasional pilgrimages. If one becomes a catechist of a new community that is another three nights out preparing and presenting. We are up to about six involvements weekly. If your children are teenagers, they join their own community so your are driving them 2-3 nights a week.
An active participant may be giving above 20 hours weekly, in addition to a day job and raising perhaps 10 children. This level of commitment takes on a cult-like appearance, surely, to the ordinary, middle class bourgeois mind.
It adds up to the type of total commitment we Catholics expect from our our consecrated, the non-laity: monks, mendicants, missionaries, hermits, cloistered and active religious. This degree of lay immersion in prayer and apostolate is unknown to the Catholic world. Our norm...not always explicit...is that the laity focuses on family, work, and a balanced life of prayer and civil/cultural engagement. All the other renewal movements respect that model. This way is different.
It in effect creates an alternative culture: like a hippy commune, the Israeli Kibbutz, the Catholic Worker, the Bruderhof or the Amish. This is an inner-directed, centripetal world with distinctive synergies and economies: lots of children, mutual childcare among families, a candor and transparency that rivals 12-step meetings and the encounter culture of the 70s, a paucity of resources with a generosity in a loaves-and-fishes sense of providential abundance, a schedule that is spontaneous and tardy and informal. It is as if Kiko lived with the Gypsies and brought back an exotic, disruptive lifestyle. It is: anti-careerist, non-bourgeois, unbureaucratic, oral rather than literate, low-technological, spontaneous and primitive in a romantic fashion. It is not a preference for the poor in a social-activist, patronizing, do-gooder, ideological sense. It actually is a life of poverty that is immensely rich in spiritual-cultural-social-psychological capital.
The problem is: this degree of immersion inevitably effects a disconnect...with extended families, friends, the Church and civil life.
Kiko's Worldview: Anti-Constantinian Church in a Dystopian World
In a marvelous essay published with their Statues, Giuseppe Gennerini highlights the agreement of Kiko and John Paul II that we live in apocalyptic times: that the structures of society have collapsed and a fierce spiritual battle is being waged between the forces of heaven and hell. This way is extremely negative in its view of the broader world. It might be seen as the opposite of the positivity of the Vatican II documents, so eager to embrace the best things in modernity.
It is a Benedict-option-on-steroids as it concentrates all focus and energy interiorly on its own program and detaches from all ecclesial, political, cultural or civil engagement. There is no political agenda: it is strongly anti-abortion, of course, but otherwise non-committal. There seems to be little interest in politics. My friend John showed a compatibility with a hard right position. John loved rightwing talk radio; had he lived he would have little difficulty, I suspect, with Trump.
Many (not all) participants have renounced a prior life of moral depravity and are therefore "twice-born" in the William James sense of reborn from evil. There prevails a strong "against the world" sense: that their way is an ark in an ocean of evil. It is not unusual that those who "stop walking" fall into dysfunctional patterns.
What results is a suspicion of the broader world, a detachment, a failure to engage that resembles the reputation (deserved?) of Orthodox Jews: they create their own world with an indifference to others.
This distrust extends as well to the broader Catholic Church as Kiko clearly holds a "primitivist, anti-Constantinian" view of the Church. Like the Reformers and others, he attempts to return to the Church before it was embraced by the Roman Empire. This is blatant in their liturgy which emulates the Passover Seder but renounces the development of the mass as a sacrificial, temple-like ritual. It embraces the common reformist view of the corruption of the Church by its embrace by political power. It tries to recreate the small communities we imagine in the immediate post-apostolic time.
Discontinuous with Christendom, it has little affection for the late-Tridentine Church many of us recall. Kiko is an ascetic, mystic, artist, bohemian, iconoclast...and brazenly anti-bourgeois! He reminds me of another eccentric, maverick, spiritual genius: Ivan Illich. When Illich came to NYC in the 1950s he fell in love with the Puerto Ricans, the "lower echelon" of the American Catholic Church. He also had contempt for the now-prospering Irish-American mainstream Church and its clergy/hierarchy. It is understandable: such strong spirits are prone to an aversion to the mediocrity and banality of ordinary piety. But this can be a temptation to arrogance and detachment.
Temptation to Detachment
So we see: the intensity of their spirituality, the dystopian worldview, the critique of the actual Church, the centripetal direction and all-consuming nature of their program...all conspire to a deep detachment from other communities. There is a resemblance here to the Legionnaires of Christ: certainly not in the mendacity of the founder, but in an intensified Catholicity combined with the impulse to separation.
Their evangelical generosity, which is abundant, is structurally directed inward, to their communities, and the replication of the same. But in regard to other communities, there is a separation, a coldness, a distance, not intended but systematically inevitable. Surely a lack of ecumenism in the sense of engagement with and openness to other communities.
A good example: the practice of Saturday night Eucharist. It is not that this is an option, but that it is the high point of the week. It is unthinkable for a serious participant to miss Saturday liturgy. There are preparations throughout the week: a group studies the mass readings for exhortations, another bakes the bread, others bring wine and flowers. This is a far more than ordinarily Catholic Eucharist-centrism.
But it is also pointedly countercultural: Saturday night is, of course, the recreational high point of American life: date night, movie night, dinner our night, party night, family reunion night. And so this practice is a brilliant, liberating gesture for those who fall into sin on Saturday night. But what about the wholesome, ordinary family and friend reunions that are frequently planned. A participant in this way is permanently absent from any such gatherings on Saturday, the night of preference as the next day is normally one of rest. This can only be received by the extended family and friends as a kind of rejection...albeit not intended.
Questions
1. St. Ignatius of Loyola, toward the end of his life, said that were it God's will to disband the Society of Jesus, it would take him 10 minutes to accept it. Imagine that this way were to be suppressed by the Vatican. This is currently not probable but easily conceivable. The Latin mass, which is far more consonant with the Tridentine and Novus Ordo masses, is now being repressed. How would that effect your attachment to the Church? Would you move into ordinary Catholic life, perhaps bringing the best of what you received in Kiko's way? Or would you intensify your allegiance to this program and separate from the established, now persecuting, Church?\
2. How about spiritual direction, especially for leaders and catechists, by a Catholic priest outside of the way? A classic challenge in Catholic religious life is the tension between the inner and outer forums. The inner forum is the absolute privacy of the confessional and the profound confidentiality of spiritual direction. The outer forum is the inevitable exercise of authority in community. The two need to be separate. Your superior, in community, cannot be your spiritual director as that poses a conflict of interest. So, for example, a Franciscan Friar might have a Jesuit as spiritual director. The Legionnaires got into lots of trouble precisely here. This became a huge issue, some years ago, in charismatic covenant communities, in which community leaders were also exercising direct, intimate and authoritative spiritual direction. The catechists in this way exercise authority in the communities but also a form of intimate, powerful, private direction in their scrutinies. My observation is these bear very good fruit and come from the Holy Spirit. But it is nevertheless inherently problematic as the structure of authority is not divided and balanced. The availability of spiritual direction from outside the communities would protect against cult-like abuse and overall enrich the way.
3. About 15 years ago Pope Benedict directed that the communities arrange to celebrate Sunday Eucharist at least once monthly with the broader parish. From what I can tell, this has been entirely ignored. A rationalization is that the liturgies are open to the parish and so there is no need to obey the regulation. This is nonsense: the very dynamic of their Eucharist is that it is personal and communal. For an outsider to attend would be like a stranger crashing a wedding reception: quite outrageous. And so the suggestion here is for the leadership to reconsider and obey. Failing that, I would urge individual participants to exercise their own freedom, conscience and Catholic obedience and go, at least once monthly, to the parish mass and thus free up one Saturday night for friends and family.
4. Does this way benefit from pastoral and theological guidance from a qualified Vatican or diocesan priest? This makes sense. There is a danger of being too inbred in such an intense, totalizing program.
5. How about the idea of a sabbatical, especially for responsibles and catechists. They could take time away from these burdensome responsibilities to rest and enjoy other ecclesial blessings: retreats, quiet time, pilgrimages, study and rest.
This suggestion is offered in friendship, admiration and candor: That this way relax the intensity of its attachment and immersion in order to connect in a wholesome, balanced way with friends, family, society and Church. I understand that leadership is protective of this precious, powerful charism. And they should be! I trust that this rebalancing can be done in a way that preserves, and even purifies and enriches, this way. Each must, of course, find his/her own balance of attachment/detachment.
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