Father Corapi will not obey order to return to community

Father Corapi will not obey order to return to community July 08, 2011 Father John Corapi has announced that he will not obey the order from his superior in the Society of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity (SOLT) to leave his private Montana compound and live with other members of the community.

In a stinging public statement released July 5, Father Gerard Sheehan, SOLT’s regional priest servant, had announced that the popular preacher and television personality is not “fit for ministry” and revealed that an investigation of Corapi’s affairs found a pattern of misconduct, including sexual relations and cohabitation with a woman, abuse of drugs and alcohol, and embrace of a luxurious lifestyle that was “a serious violation of his promise of poverty.” SOLT ordered Father Corapi “under obedience to return home to the Society’s regional office and take up residence there. It has also ordered him, again under obedience, to dismiss the lawsuit he has filed against his accuser.”

In his response, Father Corapi said that “if I were to commit to the suggestion of the Society, then I would essentially crawl under a rock and wait to die.” He added, “I resigned [from priestly ministry] because the process used by the Church is grossly unjust, and, hence, immoral. I resigned because I had no chance from the beginning of a fair and just hearing. As I have indicated from the beginning of all this, I am not extinguished!”

Father Corapi also defended his lifestyle, stating that “the Founder of the Society of Our Lady, Fr. James Flanagan, encouraged me to support myself and the Church as well. He said they could not afford to support my ministry and me personally because of the unique nature of the mission. At every step of the way, through the entire past 20 years, the Society of Our Lady’s leadership knew of my financial independence … I have never relied on the Society for shelter, clothing, transportation, medical care, or legal counsel and instead, using my history of success in business, set up my mission as any savvy business man would, meanwhile continuing to support the Society and many other Catholic Charities.”

Commenting on the allegation of sexual impropriety, Father Corapi said that “this song of greed has been sung many times before. I have never had any promiscuous or even inappropriate relations with her. Never.”

“I never paid anybody off to remain silent,” he continued. “On two occasions there were standard severance agreements executed with former employees and independent contractors. These agreements contained very common non-disclosure provisions. Any attorney who would not include such provisions in such agreements would rightly be guilty of negligent and actionable conduct.”

Father Sam Medley, webmaster of the Society of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity, attributed the scandal to a lack of fidelity to the society’s charism. “This whole Corapi conundrum would have never happened if we would have been faithful to our SOLT Charism of ecclesial teams-communion,” he said.

“I was asked years ago by my superiors if John Corapi could come and work in the community life of the media apostolate I was running at the time,” Father Medley recounted. “YES, I cried! Please bring him back to community life! Canon law tells us that no one from a community should live outside for an extended period of time. This would have also meant the regulation of his bank account and other violations would have been remedied. Sadly this didn't happen.”

Could one of you guys (and gals) explain to me how a member of an order could have a ministry (using a business model) apparently completely independent of their order. From what I know about orders (admittedly in the middle ages mostly) all work and ‘work product’ would belong to the order entirely.

I can't. My understanding of the business of the orders is the same as yours. I have no idea how these idiots structured this enterprise. I think that they were simply enamoured of Fr. Corapi's charisma and violated all of the rules in allowing him to be as independent as he was.

Is this a case of a lax superior who gave Fr Corapi too much leeway, or does the order act more like tertiaries, or something unique to this order?

Probably an allowance done by well meaning idiots.

Also, I thought he left the priesthood, or was it just leaving a function but he is still a member of the order?

Ah, that is a little fuzzy. His apparent resignation may not be be as clear cut as a resignation from a job. I have not seen a definite repudiation of his priestly vows published, for instance.

Also, I thought he left the priesthood, or was it just leaving a function but he is still a member of the order?

More fuzz. I don't know.

Need some help guys, this is above my paygrade.

Same here.

i don’t know for sure, i believe each order sets their own rules for conduct. i was quite suprised to learn of corapi’s “deal”, i always assumed priests lived in community with each other and any earnings were common assets. i think he left the priesthood, that or he is suspended with the intention to dismiss.

if you have read any corapi threads, you know i am not a fan of his and always thought he was a phony. my acid test is: do you lift up Jesus Christ and draw men to faith in him? to me, corapi was all about corapi. yes, he mentioned Jesus every now and then, but the main thrust of his talks were about how wonderful corapi is/was. also, i went to his web site and if he truly was interested in spreading the Gospel, i would have expected to find a lot of free material on the Scriptures, Jesus Christ, the Trinity, the Church, etc. etc. i found nothing on the site for free, everything was sold and hyped at a hefty price, with the profit going right into his pocket to fund his sinful lifestyle. i was also extremely dispointed that many fellow Catholics on this site felt the need to defend this hypocrite and attack the Church because it exposed him. we are all sinners and need the grace and forgivness offered to us by our Lord, Jesus Christ. i pray corapi comes to this belief.

My friend, I find myself in complete agreement.

He did, but only at the urging of his then wife, Tammy Faye. So perhaps Corapi is worse or just the same. Who knows if Jim would have admitted anything if he wasn’t pushed into it.

Tammy Faye got a lot of flack for her outrageous style, but in real life she was one of the sweetest most Christian acting women I have ever known (she lived in the area, went to a local church, and frequented a shop I worked at).

She was very open about how she got away from the Lord and the mission of PTL, and her repentance. She was also a bit of a hero with the gays, but she never condoned the behavior. She used her icon status with them to tell them that they were sinning and that God could heal them and that God loved them, but they needed to change. I knew her in the early to mid 1990’s and by then even she had really changed, and in a good way.

Thanks for the response, Mark. This whole thing is just odd, like he was using the priesthood for credibility but wasn’t really committed.

Good to know I wasn’t too far off on my view of the business of orders, sometimes I think that everything I know about orders is 700 years out of date when I hear of arrangements like this one.

I doubt we will ever know the whole truth, but I have a hard time considering Father Corapi to be a priest in any real sense, but that is just my opinion.

I had no idea that a repudiation of his priestly vows were ever or had to be published. That is interesting. Looks like I’m gonna have to do some research into SOLT.

AFA, not originally having a vow of poverty, that shocked me. Poverty, Chastity and Obedience are the trinity of vows, to not require poverty, can only lead to problems and isn’t different than not requiring chastity or obedience.

Well, diocesan priests don't take vows of poverty. OTOH, they have a full-time job (usually more of an "all of your time" job) which doesn't pay very much. And if they tried to do a second job on the side that interfered with their pastoral work, the bishop would probably hear about it. But they can keep money they inherit, for example.

A person can have a lot of money and still live the evangelical counsel of poverty. We had a priest in our diocese who inherited a lot of money. AFAIK, he lived a lifestyle just as humble as any other priest. After his death, the diocesan high school suddenly had some nice new facilities with his name on them.

Corapi could have lived evangelical poverty too, without a formal vow. But he didn't.

People who know a good deal more than I about how orders work have responded on that point but IMHO, the order betrayed him by leaving him to his own devices whether it was his own idea or not. They knew his background and they should have known how seldom a dog running its own pack avoids returning to its own vomit. He's no less guilty, and as street smart as he claims to be he personally should have been wise enough to know he couldn't handle the independence. Still, without what I see as the betrayal of having cut him loose, he'd wouldn't be in this mess. He might be in some other sort of mess, but not this mess and probably not something of this magnitude.

Someone at SOLT needs to clean house and get them focused on actually being brothers to one another rather than each one, or even the occasional one, being some sort of associate with an independent fiefdom.

JMHO

Regards

1. SOLT is not a religious order, but rather an association of the faithful tied to a diocese. Many people don’t quite understand how all this works in canon law. There are many complicated classifications involved in describing religious groups in canon law. It takes a very long time and a lot of conditions met for a group to become a “religious order.”
2. A person can always leave an association of the faithful of their own free will by informing the association in writing. Associations like this generally have a rule and a set of constitutions which are statements to explain the rule in detail. Those constitutions will have the provisions to join and leave laid out in them.
3. Fr Corapi seems to have joined the religious group in its formative days, before the current constitutions were written, and may not wish to comply with all the changes that have occurred since the initial rule was formulated by the founder, and he has every right to do so under church law. This is not at all an unusual situation, and happens every time a rule or constitutions are changed, even in real religious orders. [For example when the SFO rule was last changed, for instance.]

I don’t know if Fr. Corapi did any of the things he is accused of, but I do know that the religious order thing is readily explainable.

I also know that many naive Catholics have ideas about religious organizations that bear very little resemblance to reality, and that a person can sell just about anything to the gullible based upon affiliation (even pseudo-affiliation) with a Catholic group, even if it can only be loosely presented as a “religious order.”

I can think of at least 3 examples of such right now, and some of them are carrying it off pretty well. Think $$$$$.

Not that I’m saying that Fr. Corapi did this. But I’m saying that some people do, and some of them do it in a far more egregious way than evidence leads me to expect Fr. Corapi probably ever even conceived of in his mind, whether he did it or not.

Actually, members of religious orders can have ministries that are completely independent of their orders.
(Regrettable) Example: Fr. Richard Rohr and his Center for Action & Contemplation which is: a) outside the purview of the OFMs, and b) according to some (including me) outside the theology of the Catholic Church.
Happens all the time.

The real problem is that lay Catholics have a rather poor understanding of what religious orders are (as opposed to associations of the faithful for instance), and what they do (and can do).

And besides all of that, SOLT isn’t a religious order ANYWAY. It’s a rather new association of the faithful affiliated ONLY with the diocese it happens to be in. Fr. Corapi became a member of that organization before its current rules and constitutions were formulated because he knew the founder in the early days, which weren’t so long ago. Since then, they have adopted some much more stringent requirements in hopes of slowly climbing up the ladder of canon law towards recognition as a secular institute, etc etc. They are VERY FAR from being a religious order in canon law—and I expect after this latest mess, even farther than before....

RE Fr. John Fiala:
http://www.bishopaccountability.org/assign/Fiala_John_M.htm

Big differences though, sockmonkey.
1. Fr. Corapi has a lot more money than this other guy, which I’m sure the association, and ultimately the diocese by citing the poverty rule, would like to get their hands on,
2. Fr. Corpi has been quite famous with all the prestige for SOLT that comes with his being a member. They’d probably be nothing without that publicity when it comes to getting members, recognition, etc. They want recognition because it allows them to grow and climb the canon law ladder, remember.
3. Fr. Corapi isn’t guilty of something that can be swept conveniently under the rug like child abuse by a relatively unknown priest who can feign innocence as he gets moved around.

SOLT is a little scary, if you want my opinion. But then a lot of a these new associations are, if you want my opinion. Most of them die out in a few years with only a few going on to become secular institutes, etc. Some of them get moderate to high profile investigations along the way.

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/_INDEX.HTM

See canons 298-329.

A useful article:
http://www.catholiccanonlaw.com/Associations.pdf

SOLT is an association of the faithful, and by the nature of its association with the diocese, in my own capacity, I would say it’s probably a public association of the faithful. I believe that by all the descriptions I’ve seen so far that when Fr. Corapi joined it was probably only a “de facto” organization of the faithful. He knew the founder and it was more of a personal agreement as those things are at that stage of the game.

When you say Franciscans, Cistercians & Benedictines, you’re dealing with the very old and respectable orders proper, who obtained their pontifical right centuries ago. They are an entirely different sort of a thing, both in canon law and in practice, than a recently founded association of the faithful in some diocese.

Here’s one list of “religious orders” which are classified as Societies of Apostolic Life and Institutes of Consecrated Life, according to the Code of Canon Law of 1985.
http://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/country/xrel.html
Benedictines, Cistercians, Franciscans etc, will be in the Consecrated Life list.

Here is a list on the Vatican website of International Associations of the Faithful. Note that SOLT isn’t listed. It will be listed on its diocesan webpage, most likely.
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/laity/documents/rc_pc_laity_doc_20051114_associazioni_en.html

On SOLT’s website:

“At the present, the International Headquarters of Our Lady’s Society is located in the United States, in the city of Robstown, Texas under the Diocesan jurisdiction of the Diocese of Corpus Christi, Texas. In looking forward to when The Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity achieves Pontifical Status within the Church, the International Offices will be transferred at that time to Rome, Italy.”

Well, that’s putting the nicest face on it, isn’t it??

And you have to really look to find this. It’s a peculiarity, and not a nice one, that most often when looking around the resources of Catholic organizations, it’s hard to find out exactly what the official canon-law classification is without knowing specifically what you’re looking for. It’s a bit of harmless (?) deception. No one wants to pledge their life to something that might disappear or stay piddling small forever. But...recruiting is recruiting. It’s a reality of Catholic religious life, I suppose. Not so nice, but true.

My advice? You don’t want to belong to something that’s not completely up-front about their classification. But that’s just my take on it......

ALSO, SOLT operates by sending out “ecclesial teams” all over. Many working members of SOLT don’t live in the Corpus Christi diocese, it appears. Lots of them are living independently of the main house, which may only be a formation house, so to speak.

So much for how wrong it is to live in Montana, or pretty much anywhere else. It doesn’t appear to be a problem at all to belong to SOLT and live offsite, according to their own literature.

Sockmonkey,

There are a lot of them, some of them serious and good and some of them not so hot. Virtually all of them start out meaning well but some aren’t so well put together......It is what it is. The survival rate of these groups is kinda low, and this is nothing new, actually.

When they serve the purposes of God, He keeps them, and when they don’t, He doesn’t. And that’s about all you can say about that.

[PS: The ones you have to watch out for are the ones that use religion as a front for something else. It doesn’t happen often but it does happen. There are currently several out there, and they are SCARY. I’m really pretty sure that SOLT is NOT one of them, BTW. It doesn’t have that look to it.]

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