Front Burner - A radical disability advocate's fall from grace

Episode Date: February 27, 2020

This week, a shocking report from L’Arche revealed Jean Vanier sexually abused at least six women. Less than a year ago, longtime Globe and Mail reporter Ian Brown wrote the obituary of Vanier. Brown wrote about how the beloved Canadian founder of L’Arche, an international network of communities for people with intellectual disabilities, will be remembered as a radical philosopher of disability. Today on Front Burner, Brown covers how the disturbing revelations have sent shockwaves through the disability and Catholic communities and beyond.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson and this is Frontburner. I'm Jamie Poisson, and this is Frontburner. Less than a year ago, Ian Brown wrote the obituary of Jean Vannier. He wrote about how the beloved Canadian founder of L'Arche, an international network of communities for people with intellectual disabilities,

will be remembered as this radical philosopher of disability, someone who changed an innumerable number of lives for the better. But now a new light has been cast on his legacy as a shocking report reveals a much darker side to Jean Vanier, that he sexually abused at least six women. Ian Brown is a longtime reporter at the Globe and Mail and the author of The Boy in the Moon, A Father's Search for His Disabled Son. He's here with me now. Hi, Ian. Thank you so much for making the time to speak with me today. It was my pleasure. So I know that you wrote John Vanier's obituary when he died last May.

And at that time, when you were sitting down to write this obituary, what was his legacy at the time? I think he was the person who figured out what the contribution to the world was of people with intellectual disabilities. After, you know, the long and very sad history of intellectual disability. I mean, these are people who are not considered people. And I think he recognized their great value to the world. In terms of physical evolution, they are not great specimens. You know, and I have a kid who's disabled, and I've had somebody say, you know, your child is a, you know, an evolutionary

mistake. Well, they didn't mean it, you know, to be cruel. They were scientists and sort of in their own world. But in terms of the ethical evolution of this species, I think it will turn out that people with intellectual disabilities and maybe with physical disabilities as well have something great to offer. They're extremely loyal, extremely good, extremely kind. They love animals. They love nature. And they can teach us the primacy of love.

And if you're the father of a kid like I am, you're always wondering, you know, how do I make sure people want him around after I'm not here? How do I demonstrate his value? Because nobody ever really describes how hard it is to raise somebody with severe intellectual disabilities. But nobody ever really describes how incredibly uplifting it can be, or perhaps uplifting is the wrong word, graceful,

how expanding it can be. And Vanier understood that. He understood, you know, he moved into this little house. Right. Tell me a little bit more about this house. He bought this stone house in the 1960s, right? And he came to France in 1963 because of a guy named Pertoma, who was a Dominican who had started a kind of movement and was kind of a controversial guy. But Vanier had met him when he was 20. And in 1963, Pertoma said to him, come here. I'm the chaplain of a group of intellectually disabled men. And so Vannier went to Tron-les-Breuil, which is a little village outside, 90 kilometers from Paris.

And he went there and he went to all around. He visited institutions and he found institutions with a thousand men living essentially like animals. And so he thought, this is no good. And so he and a bunch of people bought a little house in Trulli. I don't even know if it had working plumbing or running water. And he moved in there with an assistant and three guys and they're middle-aged guys in their 40s. And I don't think any one of them could speak.

One of them took off. They took him out because he was too complicated. Anyway, I once said to Vanier, you know, and I didn't know him that well. I mean, I met him a couple of times, talked to him. Right. And you exchanged letters. Yeah, yeah. And I said to him, what were you thinking, you know, that you would do that? I mean, it's a lot of work. And not just one, but two. And unspeaking, you know. And he said, well, I thought we could have, you know, fun. And I said, yeah, precisely how did you think you were going to have fun?

That's what he said. He thought it would be fun. Well, he said he had a little car and they'd drive around. And then he said, and there was the meals, of course. And out of that, when he got there, I don't think he knew what to expect. And most of the people who know him way better than I did say he didn't know what to expect. But what he found in this house was a kind of grace. He was no better, as he once told me, at organizing things than they were.

He was no better at fixing them than they were. He was, in another way of thinking, as disabled as they were. And their disability or their fragility or their need of each other, however you want to describe it, made them all feel equal, made him feel equal. He's supposed to be the one who's more equal, right? They need him. But it turns out that he needed them.

And I think out of that, he got this notion for these communities where the disabled and the able could live together as equals and they could help each other. And that was a pretty radical idea. Right, and the idea is that there is this reciprocal relationship that people who are not intellectually disabled get so much or even more from people who are intellectually disabled. This was a radical idea at the time. Very radical.

And I have discovered, like many others, that they're wonderful people and we have fun together and all the rest. So I feel very privileged to be living with people with disabilities and helping them to discover their incredible beauty. And they're helping me to discover what it really means to be human. And it's still a radical idea. I mean, you know, if you go around to the places where people like my son Walker live now, I mean, they're great places, you know, group homes, you know, they're great places. And care is great. But it's mostly all care.

It's all about care. So it would be like living your life, you know, according to your latest blood pressure readings, you know, at the hospital, I mean, or, or according to your, you know, whatever physical problem you have, that's what defines you. And it's not like that at a, at a large community. They sort of run the community. They, they create the ethos, the feeling of the community. And it's mostly through things like, you know, having lunch. I mean, you go and have lunch. Everybody sits down at the table.

Even if you can't eat. I mean, the first time I ever did it, when I was trying to write about my son, trying to find a model of a place where I could possibly leave him, where he could live when I'm no longer here. I remember I sat down next to this guy. And I said to the leader of the house, I don't know, you know, all these people who don't speak, what am I going to do? And he says, don't worry, it works itself out. And then he took off. So anyway, I'm sitting at lunch. It's fantastic lunch. It's France, right? I mean, you know,

the meal is cassoulet, and there's a bottle of wine. And I'm sitting next to this guy called Jean-Claude, who's about 55 at the time, in a wheelchair, strapped to the arm of his wheelchair. He's a stuffed raccoon. Anyway, as we're sitting there, I noticed that Jean-Claude kept looking at this bottle of wine on the table. He obviously wants a glass of wine, and I said to Gary, who was the guy who was running the thing, can Jean-Claude have a glass of wine? And Gary said, of course he can. He's 55 years old. He's a connoisseur.

And I thought, well, there you go. Right off the bat, me, father of a child with disabilities, I'm thinking, why would a disabled person have a glass of wine? I'm making this distinction between him and me. So I didn't even say, okay, great. I'll pour him a glass of wine. And I went to help him pour the glass of wine. I'm making this distinction between him and me. So I didn't even say, okay, great, I'll pour him a glass of wine. And I went to help him pour the glass of wine because he had a slightly paralyzed right arm. But when I poured his wine, I poured mine,

and then I went to help him lift his glass because of his right arm. But then because I was helping him, he wanted to help me with his other arm. So we got into this incredible gordian nod you know pre-drinking and i i didn't know what to do and i was literally you know panicked as i am every time i go into a room full of disabled people still because i i think i've got to fix them cure them i don't know the answer will i do the wrong will i be off you know such a stupid thing to worry about we got into this gordian night and i finally said finally said, okay, Jean-Claude, santé, you know. We banged back the wine, and the wine, you know, of course, some of it went in our mouths,

and some of it went everywhere else. That does sound good. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Sound fun. Yeah, yeah.

Jean-Claude said, you know, like this, like some Frenchman. And, you know, I don't know what it meant, but I remember it to this day. And I still can picture Jean-Claude in my mind. And I still think of him as somebody together. We were equal together. And that turned out to be very profound. Well, what we wanted to do was to create small family homes for these men who are wonderful people. And we're having these houses in the village. We have already one house. And then we'd like to have a number of these houses.

There's another house being lent to us. And I think eventually what we want is to create a whole village, say five, six, seven, eight of these houses with between five and eight mentally deficient per house. Workshops where they can create. They're extraordinarily good workers. Oh, it's extraordinary. They're wicker baskets.

I've seen villages in England where they make wicker baskets. For people who might not know, can you give me a sense of what Jean Vanier was able to accomplish with these L'Arche communities, their scope? Well, from that little house, I think today the community, I think there are 155 communities around the world offering 10,000 people, 5,000 disabled, 5,000 people who help them, shelter and community. A whole other part of it that does respite work and helps people in a less community-oriented setting. There are 29 or 30 communities in Canada. I mean, that's a gigantic empire. But I think by the mid-'70s, he'd started to move away and was concentrating on writing and on sort of expanding this.

He saw it as a movement. Right, the philosophy. A philosophy. People talk about Jean Vanier's philosophy and how that has influenced the way they think about people with intellectual disabilities. Is it fair for me to say that he was considered almost like a saintly character? I think a lot of people thought of him as a saint. You know, there was a movement. But I never really thought of him as this.

As I say, you know, I spoke to him maybe six hours in total. But I never thought of him as a saint. And he never described himself as a saint. He was constantly talking and writing about his own fragility, his own brokenness. And it's interesting, in light of the revelations. It's a shock. That's the word that has been going on again and again, a shock, and it's true. These revelations that you're talking about, tell me about what we learned this week about Jean Vanier.

L'Arche itself, the L'Arche Federation, headquartered in France, they decided to launch an independent investigation of Vanier and also of the founding of L'Arche. And what they found was that, I mean, he's dead and, you know, cannot answer. But on the balance of probabilities, and I think it's a pretty high standard of proof, he sexually abused or sexually coerced six women, and they were not disabled women. They were women who worked within the L'Arche context. And earlier on, before the foundation of L'Arche,

he practiced a kind of what they call a mysterious religious sexual practice, a kind of Marianism, that he would take people who needed spiritual guidance and he would become close to them and then it would mutate into sexual stuff. And the women were with a man who was widely revered, who was their boss in many ways. So it's classic and terrible sexual abuse of at least six women. And now that this report is out, there may be more. These stories have a way of convincing other women that it's okay to tell their stories, and those may come out as well. He initiated a sexual relationship with these women, and usually in the context of spiritual guidance.

When you talk about this mysticism, is the idea here that he was essentially telling these women that he embodied Jesus? Well, in this little summary report that has been released, there are examples of what he would talk about. For instance, one of the women who he had a sexual relationship with was a nun. And the nun said, you know, look, how can I have sex with you when I'm already consecrated to Christ? I mean, I'm the bride of Jesus. You know, that's the way it works. And he would say, no, no, no, this is not you and me, you know, having sex or touching or whatever it was they were doing. This is Jesus and Mary. And, you know, it's fairly bizarre stuff

because I thought when he said they were, he surely means Mary Magdalene, you know, who has a slightly bad reputation in the Bible. But no, they were referring to the Virgin Mary. That's Jesus' virgin mother having sex. I mean, the whole thing is so incomprehensible to somebody, to a, you know, godless fool like me. But I was talking to Stefan Posner, who's the chair, you know, the head of L'Arche internationally. And he said, you know, it's incredible.

I mean, if somebody said they wanted to make a TV show about this, I'd say, no, no, no, come on. That sounds like bullshit. I mean, that can't possibly be the case. But he said, but, you know, there were lots of people who thought it was perfectly OK. And this all began with Pertomah. And you mentioned Pertomah earlier. This was Jean Vanier's mentor. Yeah, he's 25 years older than Jean.

He'd started this thing called L'Ouvi, you know, living water. Jean met him when he was 20. He joined L'Ouvi. He was searching, you know, for what to do with his life. He thought he might want to become a priest. Early on, his parents, who knew Pope John at the time, they went. They had an audience. And Jean said, I think I might want a priest.

And the Pope said, well, if you do that, you've got to cut ties with Pertomah. Because he was known to be this kind of radical, these wild ideas about how to get closer to God, or as it turns out, closer to Pertomah. And his brother also, Pertomah's brother, started his own movement. And he, too, was found guilty of sexual abuse. Such a bizarre tale. What's even more bizarre, though, is that Jean, he never becomes a priest. Right, we should make that clarification.

Yeah, he's not a priest. And eventually, in 1963, where we started this conversation, he gets this call. I guess by then what had happened is that the Pertoma had been brought back into the system. And this is a kind of damning towards the Catholic Church because he had been made the chaplain of this place where these intellectually disabled men lived. Right, even after all of these allegations against him.

Right, which just goes to show you what kind of attitudes there were towards the intellectually disabled at the time, certainly in the Catholic Church. So in a way, Vanier was fighting against that attitude. And anyway, he had been secretly in touch with Pertomah, and he had secretly been having meetings and sexual relationships with women who were involved with the two of them. And those are separate women. And those women have not come forward or complained. They apparently did not feel abused. Okay. These are the women around the Marianism scandal that has enveloped now both Pertoman and Jean Vanier. And then we have these six other women that say that in later years, they felt coerced.

Yeah, between 1970 and 2005, I think. In the same way, using religion or in other ways? It seems like there were many similarities, that the techniques or these practices that Pertthoma introduced Vanier to that he used again and again. And one of the problems, of course, is that, you know, the Catholic Church tried to push Perthoma, but because of Vanier's letters,

he enabled him to carry on abusing women. And later on, when some women came forward in 2014, I think, and complained about this, at that point, it was demonstrated that Pertoma had been this terrible guy. And even then, Jean was interviewed. He was publicly on the record at least once and twice that I know of, where he denied it. He said, I knew nothing about this that I know of, where he denied it.

He said, I knew nothing about this. I can't understand how he could hurt anybody. But he was still my spiritual father. But you mentioned there were letters between Père Thomas and Jean Venier that this L'Arche investigation looked at, which do illustrate, I believe, that there was knowledge there of what was happening. The study, the investigation that L'Arche commissioned involved testimony from the six women. It involved a historian, a theological historian who went to the Vatican and found the Dominican papers of Pertama. And they also looked at Vanier's letters, which had not been seen until he died.

It was part of his estate. And what kind of stuff is in these letters? Well, it's not clear from the study, but apparently Stefan Posner, the head of L'Arche, described them as almost like love letters. And most of them are between Père Thomas and Jean, Jean arranging things, setting up meetings, but they're also to the women as well. So he's very clearly implicated. He took part in the sexual coercion. He enabled the sexual coercion of Pertama. He denied that it was taking place. He hid things. I mean, there is no doubt that he did these things and that he caused a great deal of pain and harm to these women.

And the women themselves say this as well. They say it. They do say in the study that the women are not angry and they're not vindictive, that they came forward because they wanted to help L'Arche do things better. I know it's only been a few days since the story broke. But, you know, as we talked about at the beginning of this conversation, this was a man with an incredibly vaunted reputation. And he has objectively done a tremendous amount for the cause that he championed.

Many schools in Canada are named after him. Yeah. Which is a bit of a problem, of course, now, because people are starting to... Question this. Yes, I mean... There are school boards now that are saying that they're going to have conversations about whether or not they should rename the schools.

How do you reconcile all of this? Well, you know, when I first heard the news, like a lot of people, I thought, oh, you know, that's terrible. And I felt it's terrible for the women and terrible for L'Arche, you know, because they do have this really the gold standard of community life for people who need and want to live that way. And I felt like a bit of an idiot, you know, because I had admired him very much. And that's a problem. You know, you...

Why do you feel like an idiot? There are people who have sort of echoed this statement online. Well, you think you should have spotted it. You think you should have spotted it. And it's ridiculous to feel like an idiot. And it's completely ridiculous. I mean, A, you don't know. To say that it should have been obvious is to say that, you know, people can only be one thing.

And they are not. Whatever the reason is, it doesn't deny the fact that he created this incredible thing. And even though he created this incredible thing, it doesn't deny the fact that he abused these women. Look, I'm just an observer. I mean, the people in L'Arche, I mean, they are hammered by this. I imagine this is incredibly disappointing. A statement from L'Arche says that they're shocked by these discoveries, that they unreservedly condemn them, that it's incompatible with the basic rules of respect and dignity of persons and contrary to the fundamental principles upon which this organization is based. Yeah, betrayed, I would imagine.

Okay. Ian Brown, thank you so much for this conversation. It's been so fascinating to listen to you reckon with this. I'm sorry I rambled on there. No, it was wonderful. I know you talked a lot today about what you've learned from John Vanier. I should also mention that you've written a beautiful book about your son,

The Boy and the Moon, which has played a very important role in my family as well. Walker will be gratified for that, I hope. Thank you very much. Pleasure. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.