UNITED STATES
National Catholic Register
COMMENTARY
by TOM HOOPES 12/19/2013
Is the Legion of Christ reformed? What would reform even look like? A historic meeting in Rome that begins Jan. 8 hopes to provide some of those answers.
They are a long time coming. It has been five years since members of the Legion of Christ, founded in 1941, began privately admitting that their late founder, Father Marcial Maciel, had not been the saintly man they made him out to be: He had fathered children and was “probably” guilty of abusing seminarians.
I was executive editor of the Register (as well as a member of the Legion’s closely associated lay movement Regnum Christi) when the news broke. I stopped attending Regnum Christi meetings immediately and told any Legionary who would listen that I was done with the movement.
Not many would listen.
The culture in the Legion of Christ made it very hard for Legionaries to simply admit that the founder was as bad as the facts showed him to be. Publicly, the Legion was only saying, “We can confirm that there are aspects of his life that weren’t appropriate for a Catholic priest,” and there was an effort to sum up what he had done as “misdeeds.”
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