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Re: Drug Rehab Cult Comunita Cenacolo
Posted by: Jay ()
Date: January 16, 2025 08:47AM

Time to take this board down, moderators. Not that I am complaining, it's just, how long is it going to be up? I'm not going to look at the first page and lose my spot here, but how old is it, maybe 15 years?

Well, in case that doesn't happen, I wanted to say I looked back at it again the other night, specifically at Michael's comments, and they had far less of a sting than they did so many years ago. Now they are just like a historical record. Mike, I don't even know if you are still alive. I hope you are. At least three others you and I knew aren't, as they went back into drugs.

But on the wild shot that some day, by some miracle, you come back on here, I want to say you were partially right about one thing. Yes, I did not deserve to be on that soccer field with the guys in France. But here is the kicker--neither did anybody else. That's because being in Cenacolo is a privilege, not a right, and a grace from God, if one is willing to accept it that way. No, not a grace without struggle, not a grace without the sins of others, but a grace, nonetheless.

I am finally ready to open up about my own struggle on this forum. I wrote to you in a private email all those years ago as a response to what you wrote that I was an addict. Everybody believed that, because I was on experience and looking to the religious life, that I must not know what addiction is like. Wrong. I just don't know what DRUG addiction is like. Your response even assumed I was a drug addict. There are other addictions besides drugs.

Mine was sexual addiction, of which I had already been 20 years in recovery. It was enough that, by that time, I had long lived a chaste life, though I did still battle at times with lust for women in my head.

The second day I was there I informed the leadership of this, as I wanted to be on the up and up. I was told not to mention it to anyone, and, given the fact that I took obedience seriously, I struggled with the strange, unusual, and Herculean task of being an addict in a community of addicts, posing due to what I felt was an almost religious obedience as a non-addict.

Today, and for the past 10 or 12 years or so, I have ceased to call myself an addict. I am, and have been for a long time, at least as far as sexual addiction is concerned, a non-addict, both in my actions and in my head. I came to realize this when I began to rethink the whole "once an addict, always an addict" idea, when I came to look back at the previous 25-30 years or so of recovery that I had, which, while not perfect, was about 90% so. How I had lived for decades more in control of this aspect of my being than the average person. Since 1989 I have actually been more in control of this aspect of my being than the average person, by the grace of God. That won't change at this point. I'm 54, and with such a record, and with the strength God gives me, I'm long beyond going back.

And my time in Cenacolo is 17 years into the past for me, so I won't get any flak for it here or anywhere, not any that matters.

No, I wasn't being dishonest, an accusation I remember you giving in your email response to me. I was following the direction the leadership, who told me not to mention it. They did that for my benefit, that I wouldn't the subject of jokes. They didn't realize how much pain the silence would give me.

I still remember, as if it were yesterday, when I was on house cleaning at Our Lady of Hope, and decided in the evening to organize the cabinet under a sink, so that I wouldn't have to do it in the morning. That was when they were remodeling the kitchen and had a work crew of guys working at night and sleeping in the day. A broken kitchen tile had been placed in a corner of the cupboard. I removed it, and saw something underneath it. It turned out it was a semi-pornographic magazine belonging, ironically, to one of the Community's local supporters (it had his name and address). As I flipped through the pages, nothing but anger welled in me as I wondered what idiot was leading a double life. There was no lust in me looking at the images; only anger at whoever was stupid enough to be delving into the sins that I had long ago foresworn.

I did not want to disturb the responsible as it was late at night and he was with the kitchen crew. I resolved to address the matter with him the next morning. However, someone had seen me with the thing, and seen me put it under some other books also taken out that belong on the mini-library book shelf. That person approached me, but did not reveal what they had seen. They reported it, and the fix was in.

I tried several times the next morning to approach the responsible, but he was always with somebody. Finally, in the shoe room I had my chance. But literally two seconds before I was to open my mouth, he opened his, and thus began a few days of what can only be described as immense suffering. I was ordered not to talk about the incident to anyone, while everyone else in the Community, in both houses, was talked to. Everyone came to know I had been "caught" with pornography. I was accused of stealing it from the man's house, since I had been there a few months before doing work, along with others. I was interrogated by both responsibles, and yelled at by one of them. Both did not believe me. Finally, I had a discussion with Albino about it, where I told him everything in minute detail, and telling him I would say everything while looking at him every moment, because liars turn their gaze away. I did that, and I was exonerated. Later it came out that the guilty party by then had moved to a house in Europe, to Lourdes. When visiting the house in Lourdes the next year, upon leaving, he came to the door, and I was pretty certain what he had to say. But he couldn't say it, and after a moment of silence, he simply said goodbye. I don't think he knew that I knew.

When that incident was still going on, I was in the chapel in private Adoration, flooding tears and asking God, "Why have you allowed this?? I know I have done this sin many times before, but this time I am innocent!!"

Do I wish that incident didn't happen? NO! If I could go back in time, would I stop or change it? Absolutely not! Why? Because if that and the other things didn't happen, the miraculous healing I experienced in Lourdes would have been that much less. God had me go through that purgatory to receive an ever greater blessing and grace in the waters at Lourdes. Without this experience, it would have been all the less powerful.

One day, at Mary Immaculate, I was in the old chapel, and one of the guys, in a compassionate way, said I should go home, that I didn't belong there. Not in the way that you said it, but in a compassionate way. I broke down and told him the truth, violating in private the instruction to silence I had been given months before. I said to that member something like "So, you see? I DO belong here. I am one of you. I know everything of what you have all been through." Addiction is addiction. Be it from a substance or a human body or something else, it is all the same. I was one of you, Mike, and you, for all of your intelligence, couldn't even see that.

I was there also to show my drug addict brother it was possible to go through Community. People who know me know that story. I don't need to reiterate it here. Unfortunately, he never went beyond his work days.

I had seen online 12 or 13 years ago, from whatever little information could be gleaned, some of the troubles you had gone through back then. I hope you have come out of them and are at peace.

God bless.

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Re: Drug Rehab Cult Comunita Cenacolo
Posted by: Jay ()
Date: January 17, 2025 12:16PM

My goodness, I saw the first page of this now, and this thread has reached 20 years old.

Well, just to reiterate a point I made a while back, as I don't want it to slip off the radar. What people might consider cult-like tactics--not allowing anyone to be off the Cenacolo property alone, opening mail, the regimented work schedule, etc.--these are NORMAL and HISTORICAL ways that Catholic monastic communities have operated. For centuries. Yes, in some religious orders, like that of St. Faustina, nuns had their mail opened by a superior and read. Nothing new under the Sun with stuff like that. If you are a parent and you are considering your son or daughter to go into Community, don't be freaked out by things like that. People on here are posting about it being cult-like because they have no experience being in a Traditional Catholic monastery (yes, I capitalized "traditional", for reasons not quite relevant here. I've become a "Trad Cat", as they say, since my time in Cenacolo, meaning Latin Mass and all. But, for whatever reason of God's will, I'm in a Modernist community now. I became a Trad Cat while here).

Being in a Modernist community, one in which I stay out of the hope that I might be in a position to turn it towards Tradition in the near future, I can tell you flat out that the Cenacolo community gives greater chances for spiritual growth. As I have written before, my present community has great formation houses in places like India, which I have seen. This is another thing that detractors of Cenacolo, even those who have been through Community, do not get. Cenacolo has essentially the same program as a monastic novitiate, a training ground for religious. I saw nearly identical conditions at our house in Bengaluru, India. The only major differences were the guys in India did more academic study and they didn't have commitments--goals committed to every day that are given by Community for members to fulfill that they may grow in spirit and in unity with the house. But the rest of the stuff--the work, the sports, the prayer life, the public presentations, and the camaraderie at the table--all the same. All the same because both programs are derived from a common European monastic tradition. You bet those guys in India get "help" sometimes from superiors, even if they don't call it that. I saw it myself. You bet they aren't allowed to go off the grounds alone, either. You bet they don't have access to the Internet. You bet they don't have phones. All those "cult-like" conditions, at an ORDINARY Catholic religious novitiate.

Unfortunately, here in the U.S. my community's novitiate has collapsed. It has fallen to the Modernism that has decimated religious orders since the 1970's. I never had a novitiate period. I don't know what you would call it, but it was not a novitiate. It was a free for all. Thank goodness I was in Cenacolo for a time, and I count that as my novitiate. It was because of Cenacolo that I came to know what living a novitiate period is like.

We had one guy here for a time as a postulant (pre-novice) and novice. But our novice master was not given a proper novitiate himself, and so he does not know what it entails. The result was our postulant/novice was allowed to live in plush accommodations, allowed to do the work he wanted to do, and allowed to have five or six cups of coffee a day, complete with his own personal refrigerator and coffee machine. He was allowed to come and go as he pleased, alone, and was allowed to wear sunglasses around the property, and wear t-shirts, even to prayers (yes, I know in Cenacolo this may happen, but the standard here for everyone else is a collared shirt).

Of course, he ended up not lasting. He wanted the freedom and materialism, but in the end it did not make him happy.

Why I bring this up is because, if you are thinking of sending a son or daughter into Community, they will be deprived of these things not out of trying to control them, but out of taking them away from the material life to concentrate on the spiritual life. As someone who has been down the road of addiction, I can testify to how critical it is to restore the spiritual life. When I first broke from my addictions in 1989, I sure wish I had had a place like Cenacolo to go to. NO, that is not some free ad for Cenacolo. I remember thinking that back then, in Community. In spite of the sometimes severe hardships, I felt if I had been in some kind of community at the time, my life in the years after 1989, which were terrible as I had to deal with the psychological repercussions of my sins, which further impacted my life and career...that things might have turned out a lot better. In fact, what caused my initial success was a summer camp, where for a short time I had no freedom to act out. That's critical. A person needs to be put for a time in a place where they have no freedom to act out their addictions.

But, one needs to focus on what is, not what could have been. That's what I have needed to do.

Cenacolo is not easy. Not by a long shot. But it sure is better than a free for all.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/17/2025 12:25PM by Jay.

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