Magic City Morning Star (Millinocket, Maine)
By J. Grant Swank, Jr.
October 7, 2007 (online)
When pastoring in Massachusetts, I realized it was posh high spirituality to make a pilgrimage to Cape Cod’s Community of Jesus, founded in 1958.
When listening to a close friend’s description of his journeys there, I could not help but conclude what was going on was cultic, overbearingly controlled by female despots and open to all sorts of high church hocus-pocus. I never told him my thoughts. He was enamored by the spell cast over him when at the Orleans compound.
After all, there were airs of Anglicanism everywhere. There were not only Bibles but Prayer Books. There was the sanctuary furniture to imitate an Anglican worship site. There was even the snooty atmosphere hovering over everything. All in all, it was weird.
My wife and I drove to the Community of Jesus, sat in its sanctuary, tried to talk to some of its residents, took in the graciously landscaped environs and then left unimpressed. We did not sense in any resident, a genuine friendliness. There was suspicion to right and left. Such left us cold. That was in the 1980s.
Now we read of the horrific goings-on there. Numbers of elitists were snookered by the Community. Others were psychologically, physically and spiritually twisted out of shape. Yet the image presented was a retreat to spiritual excellence overseen by Mother Cay Andersen and Mother Judy Sorensen, prioresses of the Community of Jesus, the latter two God-provided saints.
Everything was Mother Cay and Mother Judy.
Their names, only spoken were their first names, were inscribed into every devotee’s psyche. Even when their names were verbalized, it was with awesome reverence. After all, these two women had special powers as well as a hot line to deity that no one else could even hope to have. They were masters of biblical interpretation and ethical application to everyday Christian living. They were the founts of divine wisdom. Just to have the privilege of being near their bodies cast a glow upon one’s soul.
All the while, their wealthy husbands, both named Bill, were exceedingly recessive. I thought long and hard when realizing that. Here were two females who were in total control, not only of property but others’ very spirits, thought processes, even family structures and marriages. Yet the two Bills were so far in the shadows that they had fallen off the charts. In realistic terms, they did not count. Except for their money and properties in various global locales, they did not exist as far as God work was concerned.
The two women, overweight and bossy, delighted in conducting group sessions in which those who lived in the Community and visitors enrolled in spiritual-help classes were interrogated, scolded publicly, disciplined harshly with repentant acts to follow, and informed in no uncertain terms how to line up with the will of God.
The numbers who attended these scathing sessions included numerous clergy from numerous denominations. It was particularly popular for charismatic men who were into high-church emotions to make the trek to Orleans in order to come under the spiritual excellence of the two Mothers. One friend of mine actually confided that when he returned to his own pastorate, his emotions were so screwed up that he had to take weeks to recover. Yet he would return time and again for another treatment in the name of Spirit-filled motherly counseling.
Money people were attracted to the Community of Jesus. Those who were into celebrity status and ecclesiastical higher echelon would even move their entire families onto the Community acreage. They would sell their own dwellings in order to move into the Community dwellings. With that, they gave their wills over to the two Mothers.
“A 1985 article in Boston magazine characterized the C of J members as a ‘roll call…from the Social Register and Who’s Who’ – executives or children of executives of major corporations, an ex-chairman of the global accounting firm that is now Ernst & Young and former president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an ex-assistant defense secretary, a former senior editor from Doubleday, family scions of Texas oil and agriculture money, the daughter of a former president of the New York Stock Exchange, a Rockefeller heiress (Isabel Lincoln Elmer, self-styled Cinderella Rockefeller), celebrity Christian such as Jeff and Carrie Buddington, former hippie drug dealers featured in Life magazine, and young clergyman Peter Marshall, son of the U.S. Senate chaplain made famous by his mother Catherine’s bestseller, A Man Called Peter.”
I recall Peter Marshall, Jr., son of renowned Dr. Peter Marshall, Sr., pastor, New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, Washington DC, as well as Chaplain of the US Senate, concluded to move his family into the Community. If anyone was enamored by Mother Cay and Mother Judy it was Peter, Jr. It is assumed that his well-known author mother, Catherine Marshall, also was taken by the two women. As far as I know, Peter Marshall and wife still live in the Community of Jesus.
Now Michael Valpy of the Glove and Mail exposes the facts about this religiously neurotic collection of mortals. For starters, Mother Cay and Mother Judy were obese lesbians who had no formal training in Christian doctrine or Bible.
While demanding of their followers an abhorrence for homosexuality, drinking alcohol and loose living, they embraced all three. For instance, when their husbands were not around, they shared the same bed. They had liquor smuggled in blankets into their private quarters where they drank heavily. They oven (often) screamed at one another. When caught by housekeepers, they explained away their ruckus by saying they were engaging in spiritual warfare to defeat the demons.
“A 1985 Boston Herald article, quoting a community defector who had been close to the Mothers, described their apartment as ‘equipped with every amenity – sauna, hot tub, luxurious carpets and furnishings and modern electronic equipment that allows them to hear, and in some places see, everything that goes on in the 10-acre compound.’ The bedroom contained a single, large bed.”
The two Mothers divided family members, moving children from their parents. They scolded spouses and administered harsh discipline when felt spiritually necessary. All the more, they made certain their own husbands remained as non-existent except for the cash flow the men could provide.
These two women used their motherly charm to dupe Episcopalian clergy in particular. They stroked the high-church yearnings of both American and Canadian Anglicans. They could smite a person with a gracious smile as quickly as a scowl.
When they first met, Cay was 45; Judy was 31. Judy’s son informs media that the two women were immediately drawn to one another, especially sexually.
Valpy describes Cay and Judy as “two overweight boozing housewives who hid their drinking, their harridan brawling and their lesbian affair from all but a few obeisant servants. They lived like royalty with a private plane at their command, a Jaguar, a Bermuda estate and a flat in England.
“In private, they read cheap magazines, consumed vast amounts of food, fought physically and shrieked at each other for hours on end. Publicly, they consorted with important figures in American politics and society, and met Pope John Paul II for a chummy chat.
“Cay Andersen was an abusive, foul-tempered, hard-drinker plagued with childhood illnesses and later afflictions that marked her adult life – hepatitis A, chorea (an abnormal involuntary movement disorder also known as St. Vitus Dance) and petit mal seizures.
“Having founded an ultra-authoritarian Christian community that attracted the wealthy, the successful and often the mind-bruised to their compound on Massachusetts’s Cape Cod peninsula, they reached across the border to embrace Grenville Christian College, the private Ontario school now the subject of great controversy, and a naïve hierarchy of the Anglican Church of Canada.”
When the two Mothers moved into Canadian turf, they scolded school authorities by informing them that the Canadians had strayed far from the mind of God. In other words, it was time for the college to move into Community of Jesus mode by which to redeem itself. School officialdom complied to the letter. Grenville, in other words, became the ditto of the Orleans compound.
Uncovered now, the Canadian campus, becoming part of the Anglican Church, harbored “psychological, physical and sexual abuse of students for 20 years.” Grenville finally was closed but is presently being investigated by Ontario Provincial Police regarding criminal charges surfacing from allegations much delayed in appearing.
Those who are in the know tell of such psychological, physical and sexual abuse happening at the Community of Jesus as well, the two Mothers seeing that all was well covered with a genteel image facial.
“As a close relative of one of the founding Mothers, speaking on condition of anonymity, put it: ‘Everything at Grenville was right out of the Cay and Judy playbook.’
“For at least two decades, the regimes of autocratic leadership purporting to represent the will of God, absolute submissiveness from members, apocalyptic sin-drenched theology, bizarre abhorrence of sex and reported degradation and maltreatment of adults and children at each venue were identical, hidden behind a veneer of genteel respectability and high-society schmoozing abetted by Anglican priests and prelates as well as, in the U.S., clergy from other supposedly liberal mainline Protestant denominations.
“How a faith of love – as Christianity generally is thought to be – could be construed as a license for physical beatings, for removing children from their families to avoid having them ‘idolatrized’ by their parents in violation of the Second Commandment, and for ritualistic psychological humiliation and other ‘disciplines’ to avoid and eradicate sin” were warp and woof of the Community of Jesus.
“Mother Cay died 19 years ago and Mother Judy has largely moved offstage, replaced by the equally authoritarian, more intelligent but less charismatic Mother Betty Pugsley.”
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