Following the international cult conference held in Barcelona, cult expert Steve Hassan interviewed our own Paul Lennon regarding his experience with the Legionaries of Christ.
Steve Hassan, M.Ed., LMHC, one of the presenters at the ICSA Conference has been educating people about mind control and destructive cult groups since 1976. He is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and a Nationally Certified Counselor (NCC).
He has written two excellent and highly acclaimed books on these topics, including «Combatting Cult Mind Control: The #1 Best-selling Guide to Protection, Rescue, and Recovery from Destructive Cults» (1988) and «Releasing the Bonds: Empowering People to Think for Themselves» (2000).
One of many interesting topics in Steve’s books includes an explanation of the «BITE» model, i.e. control of Behaviour, Information, Thoughts and Emotions. He has an informative website at http://freedomofmind.com/stevehassan/ and he has included some information regarding the Legionaries of Christ on his site.
Paul Lennon, MDiv, LPC, a licensed professional counselor, also one of the presenters at the ICSA Conference in Barcelona in 2011 and one of the original founders of ReGAIN, has been an outspoken critic of the cult like structure of the Legion and Regnum Christi based on his long term personal experience as a Legionary priest. While he was with the Legion, his feisty Irish temperament and his strong desire to know and make known the truth were unsurprisingly at odds with the narcissistic powerful leader of the Legion, Father Marcial Maciel. Fr. Maciel decided upon a quick and easy solution to deal with the upstart Irishman and sent him on a special assignment to a remote mission in Quintana Roo to silence him. Feisty Irishmen are sometimes difficult to silence even in such extreme circumstances as Paul found himself.
Although he enjoyed his assignment in the remote Legionary mission territory, Paul eventually left the Legion and continued his search for exposing the truth. Most people avoid situations such as battling with a multi billion dollar organization that is embedded deep into the Roman Catholic Church. But Paul is not easily deterred and he shares some of his story in his 40 minute interview with Steve Hassan.
The interview may be seen http://vimeo.com/26457285
ReGAIN 