May 2020
Some Concerns About
Fr Edgardo Arellano
and the Alliance of the Holy Family
I recently took part in a retreat or pious conference organised by the ‘Alliance of the Holy Family International’ (AHFI). This group was formerly known as the ‘Alliance of the Two Hearts’, and since it promotes that devotion, it is still sometimes given that name. Their founder and spiritual director is a Filipino priest called Fr Edgardo Arellano, who spoke several times at the conference. Probably over a hundred priests participated, from various countries, as well as a good number of lay people, including a distinct group called ‘youth’.
I knew little about the Alliance before going, though I had heard that they stressed the place of reparation in the spiritual life, and I had not seen anything of Fr Arellano, nor read any of his writings. The conference or retreat lasted almost a week, and by the end I was concerned about this movement and its founder.
Veil of obscurity
I’ll start with what may or may not be a matter for legitimate concern, namely, the difficulty of discovering what the Alliance of the Holy Family is. By this I mean, ‘what is its canonical status?’
Before taking part in the week’s events, I did not know whether it was a religious order, a society of apostolic life, a public association of the faithful, a merely informal grouping of like-minded people, or something else. I still do not know. I have been unable to find an official web-site for the Alliance. On their Facebook page, they describe themselves simply as a “global Catholic family movement”. I have sent a message to this page, to ask more precisely what they are, but have received no reply.
One can find videos produced by AHFI on YouTube, but they shed no more light on the question: they are devotional videos, and contain testimonies from people saying how their lives have been improved by their contact with AHFI and with Fr Arellano. One of these videos put forward an e-mail address for enquiries, but my e-mail to them asking for information received no reply.
At the conference itself, there were a number of young women, said to form the ‘Secretariat’ of AHFI, and referred to with the title ‘sister’, but they wore no veil. There were also a couple of young men who were said to be ‘novices’ at the monastery of Christ the King in Alabama.
This monastery has a web-site which states that the monastery of Christ the King is “now under the care of the priests and missionaries of the Alliance of the Two Hearts International”, but, again, it does not say what this Alliance is. It simply offers a link to a devotional video featuring Fr Arellano, in which he warns of the earth being destroyed by fire from heaven if men do not repent.
I heard no suggestion at the conference that the two young men who were described as novices at this monastery were monks, and in fact they wore the cassock and not a religious habit. It would be strange for novices in a religious order to be organising a conference, as these men were doing, in a continent different from that in which they were novices. I wrote to the diocese of Birmingham, Alabama, in which this monastery is situated, asking for a clarification, but received no reply.
Since Fr Arellano has appeared on EWTN, I wrote to that network to ask for information, trying to discover whether he is a diocesan priest, or is incardinated into AHFI. They replied by saying that they understood that he belonged to the diocese of San Pablo in the Philippines. Since Fr Arellano was described at the conference as an exorcist, I wrote to the chancellor of that diocese to ask whether he was incardinated in San Pablo, and if so whether he had faculties from the bishop to act as an exorcist, but I received no reply.
There may be an innocent explanation for the veil of obscurity which rests over the status of the Alliance of the Holy Family. But before they recruit young men and women, they need
to make it clear what they are. Certainly they need to do this before they give them the title of ‘brother’ and ‘sister’, or before they give the cassock to young men; and most emphatically they need to do this before they have such young men and women take vows of celibacy.
Fr Arellano’s claims
I also have concerns about their founder, Fr Edgardo Arellano. He is generally referred to, and refers to himself, as ‘Fr Bing’. I do not know why. The only explanation which I heard is that his surname is difficult for native English-speakers to pronounce! This may seem like a trivial point, but it is incongruous when a preacher of spiritual warfare and an exorcist goes by a pseudonym.
Far more important, however, were his talks themselves, as manifesting his personality and his doctrine. I must admit that I was favourably impressed by his first talk. He warned against liberation theology in the Philippines, and against Modernist clergy in general. Only later did I reflect that he seemed to have been rather boasting of his own achievements: he mentioned a Catholic school from which the headmaster had resigned in despair, but which he himself had taken over and been able to make a spiritual power-house, despite his previous lack of experience.
The same tendency to boast showed itself in later talks. For example, he related how some people had spoken rudely to him, and how after he had prayed for them, they had come to apologise to him. He spoke of how the rector of a Catholic university — whom he called more than once by his ceremonial title of Rector Magnificus, apparently to impress the importance of the person on his audience — had asked him to help teach the Catechism of the Catholic Church. He said that it had been a very difficult assignment, but declared that they had managed to do it together, adding ‘we are a team’. It was not clear why it should be particularly difficult to teach the Catechism, and the anecdote itself had nothing to do with the subject of the talk. It was hard to avoid concluding that it was mentioned so that the audience might conclude that Fr Arellano must be a person of importance, being able to form a team with a Rector Magnificus. He added that he had read the Compendium to the Catechism one thousand times.
He also related that in his work as an exorcist he had sometimes expelled demons with a single prayer and that he had dealt with many infested priests, who would crawl like snakes on the ground before him. Again, while I certainly do not deny the reality of diabolic activity, this came across like boasting.
Fr Arellano’s claims about himself became more extreme and less credible as the week progressed. I had heard that he was accustomed to rise in the middle of the night and pray for a long time. In the course of a talk that touched on Eucharistic adoration, he spoke of himself as sometimes spending from 3 to 6 hours in adoration in a day. He then said that when he had nothing else to do, he would expose the Blessed Sacrament, and that he would then have the capacity to go for twenty days without sleep. He added: “If we only believe this, it is everything.” God can certainly give such extraordinary graces to people if He desires: but I am quite sure that anyone who has received them will not be in the habit of talking about them on stage before a large audience. Fr Arellano also implicitly compared himself to St Francis Xavier, saying that this saint had drawn such strength from adoration that he did not need sleep.
I found his language to be sometimes rather crude. Speaking of St Augustine before his conversion, he said, “He did sex, he sold himself to the devil”. Talking of priests who fail to preserve continence from lack of prayer, he said, “If you don’t adore Christ, you adore Christina.” Speaking of his own movement, he said at one point, “We need solid cash.” Incongruously, he would sometimes giggle.
Junk theology
I turn now to his doctrine. I was prepared to be in sympathy with it, since I perfectly agree with his premise that the Church has been devastated by heresy, in particular by Modernism. But I found his statements to be often strangely inaccurate, though having a veneer of scholarship. He told us, for example, that all Protestants are in a state of mortal sin. The Church does not in fact teach this. He said that the Council of Elvira had ruled out women priests. This Spanish council of the early 4th century said nothing about this subject, though it did talk about clerical continence. One would not be surprised if, say, a secular journalist confused the maleness and the celibacy of the priesthood, but it is strange for a priest of Fr Arellano’s apparent stature to do so.
He said that Protestants and Orthodox want to kill us. This was perhaps a joke, though it did not seem like one. He said that we must have a firm belief that all who are not baptised are damned. This ignores the doctrine of baptism of desire, which though it has been greatly misused in modern times is nonetheless the doctrine of great saints.
Fr Arellano confused the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith with the non-magisterial group of scholars called the International Theological Commission, attributing a 2014 document produced by the latter to the former. Quoting something said to be from St Thomas Aquinas, he gave the reference as ‘Scriptum, chapter 3’; anyone even slightly familiar with St Thomas’s Scriptum super Sententiis will know that this is an impossible reference. A reference to the Scriptum takes the form: book-question-article-‘quaestiuncula’. ‘Scriptum chapter 3’ is meaningless.
He claimed that one could not be attacked by the devil if one was in a state of grace. This is certainly false: to be in a state of grace is the most important defence against the devil, but it does not prevent one from being attacked, especially by temptation, but also in more extraordinary ways, as the example of St John Vianney proves.
Fr Arellano warned against Amoris laetitia, and the practice of giving Holy Communion to people in invalid marriages: in this he was quite correct. But explaining why this practice was wrong, he invoked canon 18, saying that it teaches that Scripture must be interpreted in a strict sense. In fact, canon 18 says something entirely different, namely that laws which involve a penalty, or restrict the free exercise of rights, or establish an exception to another law, must be interpreted strictly, i.e. they must not be made to cover more cases than the letter of the law demands. It has nothing to do with the question of Holy Communion and invalid marriages, or with Holy Scripture. The word ‘strictly’ in this canon likewise has nothing to do with the need to follow the ten commandments strictly; the canon, rather, limits the power of ecclesiastical authorities in order to preserve the freedom of the faithful. It is hard to understand how any priest educated enough to be an exorcist can have honestly made such a mistake. It seemed, frankly, like an allusion designed to dazzle the lay man with science.
More than once, there came into my mind during Fr Arellano’s talks the phrase ‘junk theology’.
Paranoia and manipulation
The overall purpose of the conference seemed to me inducing a sense of fear about the state of the Church in order to present AHFI as the solution to it. I suspect that the more particular aim was to induce the members of the group called ‘youth’ to give some kind of adhesion to the Movement. Apparently to this end, short films were shown before each talk. Half of them were light-hearted, showing young members of AHFI taking a statue of our Lady of Fatima to various locations across the world. These films were at first pleasant enough, though soon became repetitious. The other half were sombre and apocalyptic, with music to match, encouraging people to fight to the point of exhaustion. In connexion with this, Fr Arellano encouraged his hearers to follow what he stated was his own practice, already mentioned, of foregoing sleep. He encouraged people to pray before the Blessed Sacrament from 1.30 am to 3.00 am, saying, “God will put your eyes back in if they pop out through tiredness.”
While the situation in the Church is bad enough in all conscience, Fr Arellano went beyond reasonable bounds in describing it. He stated that a forthcoming synod in the Australian church would let people “of all religions” receive Holy Communion, and that it would ordain women as bishops. Neither of these things is plausible.
It is characteristic of a cult leader to tell his followers that they cannot be safe except within the group which he leads. I was struck, therefore, by the fact that in a theological reflection on the hearts of Jesus and Mary, Fr Arellano stated: “There is no salvation outside the alliance of the two Hearts”. No doubt if challenged to explain his meaning, he could have said that there is no salvation without the grace which our Lord has merited for us by His charity, and which comes to us through the maternal intercession of the Blessed Virgin. But he did not give any such clarification. He simply left his phrase to make what impression it might on the minds and memories of the young people present. What influence might it make, I wonder, on an impressionable young person who was ‘discerning a vocation’ with the Alliance of the Two Hearts?
The young people at the conference were kept partly separate from the rest of us. At the end, as one of them related to me, they were told that they had been very privileged to have attended, and that they had to do something in return for so great a gift. When I described this later to a priest-friend, he remarked that it reminded him of a vocational retreat with the Legionaries of Christ which he had once attended. When someone had asked what the sign of a vocation to the Legion might be, the retreat-giver had told him that the decision to attend the retreat was a sufficient one!
On a coach-journey during the conference I sat next to a young person who told me that he was in the process of ‘discerning a vocation’ with the Alliance, and that he was about to go for an extended stay to the monastery in Alabama, mentioned above. He did not seem terribly happy about the prospect, and told me that until recently he had had a girlfriend. Suspecting that he was being put under pressure to join, I told him that while I think that it is an excellent thing to join a religious order, the decision needs to come freely from within, and that it is a bad thing to join one because someone has said we should or because we are afraid of what might happen if we don’t. He looked relieved and grateful.
I later spoke to a friend who had spent some time living in a community run by the Alliance: I hesitate to say ‘as a novice’, since I cannot tell whether they have the right to receive novices. He confirmed that he and his fellows had been put under considerable pressure, being warned of the serious spiritual consequences to them should they leave.
At the end of the conference there was a grave act of manipulation. All the participants were invited to stand and recite the Profession of Faith, as is done by those who assume any kind of office in the Church. At the end of the regular text, some other lines were added by which people were to promise to live in accordance with the principles of reparation to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary set forth in a certain allocution of Pope Pius XII, and in some way support the work of the Alliance.
I have a good knowledge of 20th century papal documents, but while I do not doubt the existence of the one named, I had never heard of it or read it, and I am quite sure that most of the other participants were in the same position as me. We were thus being asked to make what was, in effect, a vow to live in accordance with a document that we had not read. The exact nature of the support of the Alliance which we were being asked, again, to vow, I cannot remember, as the text was put onto the screen only briefly. Perhaps that was the point; those who had recited the words would thus leave the conference with the uneasy sense that they had solemnly promised to give some kind of support to the Alliance, and not being able to remember exactly what sort, they would feel obliged to give the Alliance a good deal of support, lest they break a solemn promise.
False notes
One or two other things about the event struck a false note to my ear. There was much talk about the message of Fatima, and once again, I fully agree with the importance of this message. I was disappointed that the main speaker on this topic, a lay-man named Carlos Evaristo, took the position that the consecration to Russia has been fully executed. This speaker, warmly endorsed by Fr Arellano, also made a very serious charge against the late Fr Nicholas Gruner’s Fatima Center. Mr Evaristo, whose name will be known to some readers of Christian Order for a controversial interview with Sr Lucia of Fatima which he is said to have been granted in the early 1990’s, told us that the Fatima Center had offered him one million dollars plus a Cadillac car if he would change his account of what Sr Lucia had said to him on that occasion. Readers must judge for themselves the plausibility of this claim.
Another disappointing aspect of the presentations on Fatima was that while a great deal was said about the importance of reparation, no clear account of the first Five Saturdays was given. Nothing was said, for example, about the fifteen minutes of prayerful reflection about some or all of the mysteries of the rosary, which is an essential part of the five Saturdays. Instead of a description of what precisely we have been asked to do, there was a frequent repetition of the slogan, ‘Live a COR-CARE lifestyle’. COR here stands for communion of reparation, and CARE for Confession, Adoration, Reparation, Eucharist. Not a bad slogan as slogans go, but why not describe the message correctly?
Again, Fr Arellano claimed on several occasions to have a great devotion to the Latin Mass, speaking of its superiority to the Novus Ordo. Yet, curiously, all the public Masses during the conference were large-scale concelebrations of the Mass of Paul VI. I cannot help wondering whether the Latin Mass, like orthodoxy in general, appears to him a promising bandwagon from which to attract devout young Catholics, but whether he considers discretion to be the better part of valour as far as its actual celebration goes.
Latin was however used for the communal morning devotions. Yet the booklets which we were offered were embarrassingly full of Latin mistakes, to the point of being at times simple gibberish. These mistakes were not corrected, but were painfully repeated each morning. In this regard too the Alliance of the Holy Family International does not appear to me a group to which a young man should go in search of the priesthood or the religious life.
Conclusion
In fairness to the Alliance I should say that I write this account anonymously not because I think they would attempt some retribution against me, but for other, personal reasons. I am sure that the priests and lay-people who are in various ways part of this ‘global movement’ are well-intentioned and devout. But for the reasons I have given, I do not have confidence in it or in its founder.
The author is a scholar known to the editor.