Pope Must Act Now to Stop Legionaries of Christ Train Wreck Going off the Cliff, Damian Thompson, Telegraph, February 12, 2009

Pope Must Act Now to Stop Legionaries of Christ "Train Wreck" Going off the Cliff

By Damian Thompson
Telegraph
February 12, 2009

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/damian_thompson/blog/2009/02/12/pope_must_act_now_to_stop_legionaries_of_christ_train_wreck_going_off_the_cliff

John Paul II with Maciel, now exposed as a predator

The Legionaries of Christ scandal is like a train wreck heading towards a cliff, according to George Weigel, one of America's leading Catholic intellectuals. This scandal is potentially bigger than the SSPX fiasco. The media have given it little attention - perhaps because it offers little opportunity for Pope-bashing: it was Benedict who sent the Legion's sexually predatory founder, the late Fr Marcial Maciel, into exile in 2006. But now a movement of 800 priests and 70,000 lay followers is collapsing in front of our eyes. It's a terrible crisis and the Pope must act. Can the curia be trusted?

I wrote yesterday about Fr Maciel, a Mexican whom the Legionaries and their lay wing, Regnum Christi, had virtually canonised before he died. Big mistake: not only did he sexually abuse male seminarians, but we've just learned that he fathered a baby girl in his 80s.

Several Legionary priests are disgusted by the way their leaders defended Maciel - it seems like they must have known that he was living a double life. Meanwhile, many Regnum Christi members are behaving like shocked members of a cult, still saying prayers based around the mission and charism of their founder.

Now George Weigel has written a ferocious piece in First Things, arguing that the Legionaries scandal must be investigated immediately by an independent inquiry answerable to the Pope. But keep the Vatican curia out of it, he says - look what an almighty mess it made of the Bishop Williamson affair. He writes:

The Holy See ... must now move without delay to address the accelerating train-wreck-heading-toward-the-cliff that the Legion and Regnum Christi have become over the past ten days, as credible reports appeared in the blogosphere that Fr. Maciel had lived a life of sexual and financial scandal, probably for decades.

The reports have emanated from those who had been advised of the Legion’s own investigation of Maciel, but there is still no formal statement from the leadership of the Legion as to what its internal investigations have uncovered. There has been no full disclosure of what is known about Fr. Maciel’s corruptions. There has been no disclosure as to the nature and extent of the web of deceit he must have spun within the Legion of Christ, and beyond. And there has been no public recognition of what faithful, orthodox, morally upright Legionary priests believe have been grave corruptions of the institutional culture of their community.

The letter from Fr. Alvaro Corcuera [the head of the Legion] to the faithful of Regnum Christi, distributed last week and immediately available online, was completely inadequate in naming these sins for what they were. Public statements by Legion spokesmen in Rome and in America have been just as bad, due largely to failures by Legion leadership and to an institutionalized culture of defensiveness.

Two courageous Legionary priests, Fr. Thomas Berg and Fr. Richard Gill, have issued personal statements that face the facts as we know them, while not shying away from their implications in respect of any assessment of Fr. Maciel. Another Legionary priest, Fr. Thomas Williams, manfully confronted the truth of this wickedness on EWTN this past Friday night. Fathers Berg, Gill, and Williams have also conceded, admirably, their own failures to see through the web of deceit spun by Fr. Maciel. Their words reconfirm what those of us who have benefitted from the friendship of Legionary priests have known for years—there is great good here, as there is among the faithful members of Regnum Christi.

The question now is, how shall that good be saved?

It can only be saved if there is full, public disclosure of Fr. Maciel’s perfidies and if there is a root-and-branch examination of possible complicity in those perfidies within the Legion of Christ. That examination must be combined with a brutally frank analysis of the institutional culture in which those perfidies and that complicity unfolded. Only after that kind of moral and institutional audit has been conducted, and has been seen publicly to be a clean audit, can the Legion of Christ, and the broader Church, face the questions of the Legion’s future—which are, candidly, open questions:

• Can the good that has come from the Legion of Christ and Regnum Christi be disentangled from the person and legacy of Fr. Maciel?

• Can the Legion be reformed from within, after those complicit in the Maciel web of deceit have been dismissed?

• Must the Legion be dissolved, with perhaps a core group of incontestably honest former Legionaries re-forming a religious congregation dedicated to the ideals that have been fouled by Fr. Maciel’s sins and by a manifestly wounded institutional culture?

None of these questions can be thoughtfully or prayerfully answered until there is a full audit.

But don't look to the curia, says Weigel:

... The last several weeks of curial chaos, confusion, and incompetence in the wake of the lifting of the excommunications of four Lefebvrist bishops have made clear just how dysfunctional the curia remains in terms of both crisis analysis and crisis management. A curia in which no one in authority had the sense to Google "Richard Williamson", and no subordinate had the nerve or capacity to compel the superiors to pay attention to a potential landmine, is not a curia capable of getting to the roots of the Maciel betrayal. Nor, candidly, is it a curia capable of conducting an investigation that can command public credibility

The Pope does not have time to reform the Roman curia, which was neglected under John Paul II and is now stuffed with placemen who are too stupid, reactionary and cowardly to implement the Pope's grassroots reform of the liturgy. For years, they have relied on the "New Movements" to inject vitality into the Church; but some of those movements indulge in the creepy founder-worship one associates with cults, the Legionaries being a classic example.

Everyone says Benedict XVI is isolated in the Vatican. It's true, but I wonder if that's such a bad thing, because the people he is isolated from are such deadbeats. In the case of the SSPX, he was unlucky and perhaps rash: he was so fed up with the Vatican's useless professional ecumenists that he rushed things and relied on the wrong people. In the case of the Legionaries, his instincts proved sound at a time when "John Paul the Great" and his advisers were defending Maciel to the hilt against credible charges.

The Pope must bang heads together, investigate the scandal quickly, and then act firmly but compassionately to dismantle or reinvent the Legionaries and Regnum Christi. I feel sure he is up to the task.