John Paul’s secretary says it was mistake to meet Legionary founder

VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter

Cindy Wooden Catholic News Service | Nov. 5, 2013

VATICAN CITY Blessed John Paul II’s 2004 meeting with and praise of the founder of the Legionaries of Christ — who later was banished to a life of penance because of sexual abuse — was a mistake, said the late pope’s longtime secretary.

“The Holy Father should not have received that individual,” said Polish Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz of Krakow, who served as personal secretary to the pope for 39 years.

In a new book, Ho Vissuto con un Santo, (“I Lived with a Saint”), released in early November, Dziwisz said the meeting was just one example of a serious lack of communication in the Roman Curia, which Pope John Paul tried, largely without success, to reform.

Although rumors had been circulating for years that the Legionaries’ founder, Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, had sexually abused seminarians, Dziwisz said, “When the Holy Father met him, he knew nothing, absolutely nothing. For him, he was still the founder of a great religious order and that’s it. No one had told him anything, not even about the rumors going around.”

“Unfortunately,” the cardinal said, “it was the consequence of a still extremely bureaucratic structure” where important information was not always shared.

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