Miles Christi Interviews and Documents

This volume brings together three complementary works—interview, testimony, and documentary critique—concerning the Miles Christi Institute, originally founded in Argentina and now suppressed by pontifical authority. It is the initial outline of a broader sketch. We aim to shed light on what has been deliberately kept in shadow: the way certain religious experiences close in upon themselves, harden, and leave behind a wake of concealment, suffering, and spiritual masquerade. The first interview, with a member who requested anonymity, is harrowing in its blunt depiction of what enforced or voluntary forgetting tends to bury. The second interview, a continuation of the first, outlines dimensions that had only been hinted at: personalities warped by a brand of spiritual triumphalism that devolved into formal cruelty; daily practices marked by an austere aesthetic and rigid discipline that thwarted any chance of authentic education. References to Roberto, a dominant figure in the Institute's formative structure, recall Nietzsche's reflection: "Of all that is written, I love only what one writes with blood." And here, there is blood, abnegation, and pain—not only written, but lived. Though Roberto has been secularized, close sources claim he still celebrates Mass, raising uncomfortable questions about oversight and silence within certain ecclesial frameworks. This volume also includes a selection of internal documents provided by former members: directories, regulations, outlines for spiritual formation. From the full corpus received, we have selected only what allows for a partial reconstruction of the Institute's modus operandi and modus vivendi prior to its suppression by the late Pope Francis. The intent is neither demolition nor ideological revisionism, but the creation of a critical memory of lived experience. In the aftermath of Vatican II, where fervent progressive reforms gave way to reactionary upheavals, Miles Christi stands as a paradigmatic case of damage wrought by structures not explicitly aligned with modernism, yet reproducing its distortions under different guises. After reviewing the testimonies and documents presented here, one cannot help but acknowledge what was repeatedly affirmed by those who lived within the Institute: a labyrinthine spirituality born of heightened Jesuit rigor, an outer discipline that stifled the soul's energies, and a formative style averse to intellectual engagement with sources, where scholarly erudition was frowned upon under the slogan "student religious, religious first"—peculiar in an institute working with university students. To all this must be added the founder's instability and moral disorder, which in many ways serve as the thread connecting an experience that—rather than formative—proved disfiguring. This volume, then, has no greater ambition than to trace a set of lines. Yet in an age of digital acceleration, where institutional amnesia is constantly reinforced, even a preliminary trace has the weight of testimony and the gravity of denunciation.