Hartford Courtant
May 21, 2006
By GERALD RENNER, Special to The Courant
They finally feel vindicated by the Vatican's imposing of sanctions on the high church leader who they say sexually abused them when they were young boys and teenagers.
For years they tried futilely to call to the attention of church authorities the indignities they suffered in seminaries under the man they called "Nuestro Padre," Our Father, the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado.
The former members of Maciel's Legionaries of Christ are now old men who have made a success of their lives after leaving the legion.
But burning in their souls has been a desire to seek justice and a recognition by the Vatican of the wrongs done them in seminaries in Spain and Italy in the 1950s and '60s.
That recognition came Friday when the Vatican announced, after a year's investigation, that Maciel, 86, had been asked to give up appearing in public as a priest and to live "a reserved life of penitence and prayer."