UNITED STATES
Open Salon
Steve Klingaman
March is Rick Santorum’s moment to strut the stage like a minor Shakespearean buffoon, who mortifies but entertains the crowd before he is yanked behind the curtain. Much of his message is old news, but he also represents a movement to insert the most conservative brand of Catholic theology into secular political discourse. But Catholic voters reject this guy. Why? Despite the church’s rightward drift under Pope Benedict, the church has had an at times uneasy relationship with Opus Dei and Regnum Christi, two branches of Catholic lay practice that Santorum endorses and that have been highly suspect to many within the church.
Of the two groups, Regnum Christi is the more virulent. It is the lay branch of the Legion of Christ order founded by child rapist and bigamist Father Marcial Maciel. According to the New York Times, Santorum has long been a supporter of the group and in 2003 was the keynote speaker at a Regnum Christi event in Chicago. Though this occurred a decade ago, Maciel, who had been under investigation since the 70s, was already well on his way to repudiation by the church.
According to a 1997 Hartford Courant article, Maciel was accused of serial sexual abuse including young children. Maciel’s accusers included “a priest, a guidance counselor, a professor, an engineer, a lawyer, and a former priest who became a university professor,” according to a Wikipedia summary of the article. Maciel was investigated by no less that by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVIl, who presumably spurred Maciel’s removal from his leadership position of the Legion. By 2010, the church referred to Maciel thusly:
•an “immoral” double life “devoid of scruples and authentic religious sentiment.”
•“the very serious and objectively immoral acts”
•”true crimes and manifest a life without scruples or authentic religious sentiment”
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