The Aging Founder of an Influential Order Was the Subject of Sexual Abuse Allegations for Decades but Had the Backing of Pope John Paul II
By Tracy Wilkinson
Los Angeles Times
May 20, 2006
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-abuse20
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ROME — The Vatican announced Friday that it was disciplining the Mexican founder of an influential Roman Catholic order after an investigation into decades of allegations that the now elderly priest sexually abused seminarians and boys in his care.
Father Marcial Maciel appears to be the highest-ranking priest to be sanctioned in an abuse case. Maciel enjoyed protective support from the late Pope John Paul II for many years, but Pope Benedict XVI, in his first major decision in the church's sex abuse scandal, put aside his predecessor's wishes.
Maciel has denied the allegations, and his organization, the Legion of Christ, repeated that position Friday.
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PAPAL SUPPORTER: Father Marcial Maciel is blessed by Pope John Paul II at the Vatican in 2004. The late pontiff admired the Legion of Christ, a conservative order Maciel founded 65 years ago. Photo by Plinio Lperi/AP |
The Vatican said in a statement that Maciel, 86, had been instructed to refrain from all public ministries and to adopt a "life of prayer and penitence." The statement did not specify whether the charges were true, but experts said the Vatican's decision indicated that church investigators believed at least some of the accusations.
Given his age and frail health, the statement added, Maciel will not be prosecuted under canonical law.
The Vatican said Benedict, who has vowed to rid the church of the "filth" that sexual abuse represents, personally approved the sanctions that were determined by Cardinal William J. Levada, his successor as head of the body that led the inquiry. Levada is the former archbishop of San Francisco.
Despite rumors about Maciel's behavior for decades, including alleged drug abuse as far back as the mid-1950s, the case against him took years to advance in the labyrinthine legal bureaucracy of the Vatican. Originally, eight men accused Maciel of sodomizing them when they were students under the priest's supervision from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s. Most of the accusers were Mexican, some as young as 10 when their alleged ordeals began.
An investigation was suspended by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict, in 1999. But Ratzinger reopened the inquiry after church investigators received testimony in late 2004 and early 2005 from at least 20 new accusers, who asserted that they were abused by Maciel well into the 1980s, according to the National Catholic Reporter news agency, which first reported the Vatican's decision about Maciel on Thursday.
Advocates for victims of pedophile priests praised the decision but said they had hoped Maciel would be banished from the clergy.
"It would have been easy to let this case quietly go unresolved, as so many similar cases have," David Clohessy, national director of the U.S.-based Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said in a statement. "One positive move, however significant, doesn't constitute or guarantee a trend. While it may be tempting to assume this is a sign of progress yet to come, our painful history has taught us to be cautious and to err on the side of prudence."
Some of the original whistle-blowers were less pleased, saying the punishment was inadequate considering the harm done and was woefully overdue.
"This was a minimal punishment … meager and mediocre … that does not respond to the magnitude of the denunciations," Alejandro Espinosa, an alleged victim now in his 60s, told La Jornada newspaper in Mexico City.
Saul Barrales, another of Maciel's former students, added that at least "this shows we are not crazy or unhinged."
The Legion of Christ is a conservative order founded by Maciel 65 years ago. It is one of the fastest-growing in the world, with about 600 priests and 2,500 seminarians in 20 countries. Its lay branch, the Regnum Christi Movement, claims tens of thousands of members. Legionaries say they have established or run more than 100 schools.
The group's traditionalist bent and fierce loyalty to the papacy earned it steadfast admiration from John Paul and other senior church officials. Maciel was at the pope's side during four of John Paul's trips to Mexico, and the pontiff lavished praise on a priest he called an "efficacious guide to youth."
Maciel also had a life story, complete with a turbulent childhood in Mexico, that made him an appealing figure to the conservative church hierarchy. He was a descendant of the so-called Cristeros, Catholic rebels who fought Mexico's revolutionary and anti-clerical government in the early 1900s. His uncle, Jesus Degollado Guizar, was the last commander in chief of the Cristeros army.
"I sometimes saw my mother with a rifle in her hands to defend us in case of an attack on the house," Maciel told the Catholic news agency Zenith in an interview three years ago. "I saw many dead Cristeros hanging from the lampposts, strung up by government troops…. We saw our friends and neighbors hanged or shot in the town square. In my simple logic of a child I would tell myself that they had given their lives for Christ and were now with him in heaven. I too wanted to give my life for him."
Maciel told the interviewer that he received the call from God to become a priest when he was 14.
Another alleged victim, a former priest named Juan Vaca, director of the Legion of Christ's U.S. headquarters from 1971 to 1976, accused Maciel of sexual abuse in a letter to the pope in 1978, according to Jason Berry and Gerald Renner, authors of a book on Maciel and pedophilia among priests. Vaca's letter never drew a response, the authors say.
It is unclear what effect the sanctions against Maciel will have on the Legion of Christ. Defenders of Maciel argued that he was the target of calumny because of his conservative theology.
The Legionaries said Friday that Maciel accepted the Vatican's decision with the "spirit of obedience to the Church."
"Facing the accusations made against him, he declared his innocence and, following the example of Jesus Christ, decided not to defend himself in any way."
Times staff writer Hector Tobar in Mexico City contributed to this report.
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