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	Confronting the Legionaries of Christ in Mexico By Hugh O'Shaughnessy Guardian (United Kingdom) July 22, 2009 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jul/22/legion-christ-mexico-catholic The Holy See has finally decided to investigate controversial Catholic group the Legionaries of Christ. Not before time Not before time The Holy See, with scapel in hand, is turning to Mexico and Central America where it needs to carry out urgent and comprehensive surgery. Last week Rome announced the membership of the five-man committee charged with a worldwide investigation of the the congregation of the Legionaires of Christ, a group founded by the Mexican cleric Marcial Maciel Degollado who died last year at the age of 88 in an odour of something short of sanctity. As far as Maciel was concerned a new form of Legionaires' Disease consisted of a crushing diet of authoritarianism imposed by a priest who had a daughter of 20 from a long-term relationship with a lover and who was protected by some of the most senior people in the Vatican. Founded in 1941, the congregation has grown rapidly, becoming a source of scandal and embarrassment. In 1970 it had 68 priests in its ranks. Today it has more than eleven times that number, not to speak of 2,500 men studying to be priests and 65,000 lay members in its offshoot Regnum Christi, the Kingdom of Christ. Members include two Dubliners called Farrell who have risen high. Kevin is now in the US as bishop of Dallas and the other, Brian, incredible as it might appear, is in the Vatican as secretary of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. Long ago the council had been distinguished by the presence of such theological giants such as the Jesuit Cardinal Bea, the Dominican Cardinal Hamer and the Archbishop of Utrecht Cardinal Willibrands, none of whom, happily, was accused of any connection to the Legionaires. Maciel's followers enjoy their greatest influence in Central America. One of the investigative committee, Bishop Ricardo Watti of the scruffy Mexican town of Tepic, has the biggest job, that of sorting out 44 of the Legionaries' houses and more than 115 priests and seminarians studying for the priesthood in Mexico and neighbouring countries to the south. The four others are charged with the task in the US and Canada; in Italy and Asia (from Israel to South Korea); in South America and in the rest of Europe. Thomas Berg, a US priest who recently quit the organisation, aired his views this month on the excellent chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it website. "Legionary seminarians" he said, "are essentially trained to suspend reason in their obedience and to seek a total internal conformity with all the norms, and to withstand any internal impulse to examine or critique the norms or the indications of superiors." The result, he reported, was "the shallowness of their emotional expression, the lack of empathy and inability to relate normally to others in so many contexts, the general sense of their being 'out of touch' etc." For a long time, tensions within the Vatican prevented Maciel and his regime being disciplined. His supporters ranged from George Weigel, a rightwing US catholic, to Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican's secretary of state, a conservative who as papal nuncio in Chile for a decade from 1977, when he did an efficient job in bringing the Holy See closer to the Pinochet dictatorship. In the end, after the real situation in the organisation became public, the pope approved an order in 2006 telling Maciel to retreat into "penitence and prayer, relinquishing any form of public ministry". He was lucky that his age was taken as a reason for him not being tried in an ecclesiastical court. Now the five bishops have the job of trying to clean up after Maciel. While Central America catches Rome's attention thought should be given to some fitting recognition for Archbishop Oscar Romero, slaughtered in 1980, and to the six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter who were murdered in November 1989. All nine were butchered by US-trained assassins in San Salvador. And, though it's not strictly part of his Central American brief, Bishop Watti should find time to ask the Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, how he came to side with a foreign engineered coup against Manuel Zelaya, the elected and legitimate president of Honduras, after he initially seemed to support him. The cardinal asked him not to return from the exile into which some local and US businessmen had flung him. The cleric aligned himself with the impostor Roberto Micheletti and his overseas backers. Micheletti's choice as "foreign minister" an aged banker Enrique Ortez Colindres had the novel diplomatic idea of addressing President Barack Obama with a racial slur and saying he "knows nothing about anything" on television. The cardinal once had high hopes of being elected. His gaffe over Micheletti will have shrivelled them.
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