Legion of Christ Comes to Critical Juncture

By Nicole Winfield
ABC News
January 7, 2014

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/legion-christ-critical-juncture-21449858

The troubled Legion of Christ religious order is electing new leadership for the first time since its founder was revealed to have been a pedophile and fraud. The process starting Wednesday will formally end the Vatican's three-year rehabilitation of the movement, a reform the Legion is touting as a success and critics have dismissed as a sham.

The Legion was once held up as a model by the Vatican, which turned a blind eye to the Rev. Marcial Maciel's misdeeds as the order became one of the fastest-growing congregations in the Catholic Church and brought in millions in donations. After three years of Vatican-imposed reform though, questions still remain as to how the Legion can exist when its founder was a criminal and its core mission remains unclear.

The Legion's hope is that following the monthlong meeting, Pope Francis will approve a new constitution that explains the order's mission, hierarchy and rules and will allow the Legion to move on without any more Vatican oversight. The Legion's top superiors and 42 priests elected as representatives — including many close to Maciel — will finalize the constitution during the meeting and then elect new leadership.

But several former Legion priests have urged the pontiff not to fall for the order's "supposed reform," saying the rehabilitation process ignored its core dysfunction: financial duplicity, lack of an authentic religious identity and continued cover-up of the people who facilitated the founder's crimes.

"In the Legion, nothing is as it seems," they wrote Francis last year.

Francis' predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, took over the Legion in 2010 after Vatican investigators determined that the congregation needed to be "purified" of the influence of Maciel, who sexually abused his seminarians, fathered three children and created a system of power in the Legion that allowed his crimes to go unchecked.

Former members said the code of silence and obedience that Maciel imposed created a toxic, cult-like environment where communications were screened, dissenters marginalized and members deceived and manipulated. Hundreds of priests, seminarians and lay consecrated members have abandoned the movement in recent years; there are now about 950 priests and a few hundred consecrated members who work in the Legion's schools, youth camps and some parishes.

Benedict appointed a retiring cardinal, Velasio De Paolis, to oversee reforms and the rewriting of the order's constitutions, leading up to the General Chapter that begins Wednesday. The Legion says many of the problems flagged by the Vatican have been fixed, but that reforms continue.

"The extraordinary chapter will be an important moment in this communal examination of conscience and an occasion to appreciate the blessings received, ask forgiveness for errors committed in the past and learn lessons for the future," the Rev. Sylvester Heereman, the Legion's current head, wrote in a Christmas letter to former Legion priests.

Some former members have been vocal in their concern about the process, convinced that De Paolis' reforms didn't go deep enough and that priests still devoted to Maciel's old ways had blocked reformers from making the changes necessary to turn the order around.