MADRID (SPAIN)
Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
March 10, 2025
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
Marcelino de Andrés, 58, a member of the Legion of Christ, was the chaplain of the Highlands School in Madrid.
The news about these new cases at the Legion of Christ happen as Pope Francis suppresses a similar, but smaller Argentine predatory order.
Five more victims of clergy sexual abuse to the already monstruous record of the Legion of Christ. The accused of these abuses is a priest, Marcelino de Andrés, a 58-years old Spaniard who was Marcial Maciel’s last private secretary.
Him, as other leaders of the Mexican religious order, appear in the main picture of this story as captured by a photographer who documented how the members of that order paid their respects to the predator behind a multinational religious empire who had, until the end, John Paul II’s support and barely was “punished” by Benedict XVI with a “retierement into a life of prayer”.
Following standard practice, Spanish authorities released De Andrés after a 48-hours arrest. Given the strict restrictions that exist in these cases in Spain there is little or no information actually available.
We only know that De Andrés was briefly under arrest, from the late afternoon of Thursday March 6th, through the late afternoon of Saturday March 8th, because the local province of the Legion of Christ has been publishing reports on the issue, offering little or no information as to who are the victims and what will be the actual consequences for the predator.
The Legion’s statements, available as a PDF in Spanish in the box after this paragraph are not clear as to what were the conditions if any of his release, but it is possible to expect that the Spaniard authority set some restrictions on his ability to leave Spain and perhaps even Madrid.
What is known, however, is that the five victims are underaged females. After his years as Maciel’s secretary, De Andrés took over as Chaplain at the Highlands School in El Encinar (opens a Spanish-speaking website), a suburb of Northern Madrid, Spain, three miles or five kilometers West of the Adolfo Suárez Airport, and seven miles or eleven kilometers North of Downtown Madrid.
In the picture after this paragraph, it is possible to see De Andrés with some of the students of the school, back in 2023. The picture comes from the school’s account at Facebook.
The school has all the luxuries of the Legion’s schools in the Spanish-speaking world with some additions. If in Mexico it is enough to offer an English and Spanish roster of courses, in Spain Maciel’s disciples feel the need to throw French in the academic offer. They also offer a wide variety of elite sports including horse-riding, golf, swimming, among others.
Conflicting accounts
The same superior informing De Andrés’s release confirms that he was the former personal secretary of Marcial Maciel. He also claims that there were no previous reports about his behavior. Oddly enough, Facebook groups where former legionaries, survivors of sexual abuse, and former students of the Mexican branch of the Legion of Christ participate claim otherwise.
People participating in those groups mock, among other attitudes the fact that the Spaniard schools of the Legion of Christ, including the Francisco de Vitoria college there went through an accreditation process under the guidance of the so-called Praesidium Group, a U.S. consultancy firm claiming to be qualified to prevent abuse, sexual or otherwise.
It is unclear at this point how will the Spaniard system of justice, the police, district attorneys, and the courts will deal with these five new cases. Unlike the developments in other European countries, where the police and district attorneys have been able to pursue cases and to put pressure on the judges and the Church to actually address sexual abuse cases, clergy or otherwise, the Spanish system of justice is closer to its Latin American counterparts.
Associates of Pedro Sánchez, the Spaniard Prime Minister have been accused of sexual harassment, allowing for the political use of those and other cases. By the end of 2024, a court in Catalonia knew about a case involving the abuse of deaf kids who were unable to actually articulate the details the judges dealing with the case seem to require so the penalties imposed in that case were little more than symbolic.
Sadly, in that respect is hard to expect a major development coming from this case in Spain beyond the usual flurry of memes, and complaints over social media. More so because the Spaniard conference of Catholic bishops keeps dismissing the victims betting on the chances that the avalanche of news flooding legacy and social media will make people forget about this issue.
This pattern stands in contrast with the way the victims at Our Lady of Bétharram, in France deal with their grief and pain. If the main source of information about what happened at the Highlands School of Madrid, Spain, is the Mexican Legioleaks Facebook group, on the other side of the Pyrenees the story is different.
In France, more than a hundred former students at the Our Lady of Bétharram School are coming forward, talking about their experience, and even if they are going through the hell that is filing a formal report in France or anywhere, there is now a record of what happened there going as far as to the 1960s.
If one only follows the Spaniard media, it is impossible to even get the full name of Marcelino de Andrés. Some are willing to print his picture, but some are more worried about the potential risk of a lawsuit coming from the offices of the Spaniard province of the Legion of Christ, so if they publish something, and it is a huge if, they will play it as safely as possible, ultimately avoiding running the risk of doing journalism.
Another suppression
This happens as Pope Francis, a few days before his 12th anniversary as global leader of the Roman Catholic Church, suppresses a rather small Argentine order, the so-called Miles Christi or Christ’s Militia, a name so similar to Maciel’s order that are almost interchangeable.
As the Legion of Christ, the so-called Christ’s Militia, despite their claim to sanctity, gained notoriety because of their excesses, their abuses, fueled around the pretense, shared with the Mexican Legion of Christ, the Peruvian Sodalitium, and the Argentine Institute of the Incarnate Word, that they were able to achieve the ideal of the “half monk, half warrior.”
Despite having their origins and being based, for the most part, in the archdiocese of La Plata, Argentina, the Militia had at least three communities officially acknowledged as such by dioceses in the United States. One in San Diego, California, the other two in Michigan and in Colorado. Putting San Diego aside, the other two locations, South Lyon, 30 miles or 50 kilometers West of Detroit, and the Denver metro area in Colorado, are friendly to the secretive, sect-like behavior of the Militia.
As it is now almost a template in the most radical brands of Catholicism, the Militia endorses a radical rejection of abortion, rendered as a concern for the unborn and the weakest, the meek, despite the consequences that such approach has for females with little or no access to health care.
In their English-speaking website for the communities in the United States they have a translation of a conference originally offered by the now emeritus archbishop of La Plata, Héctor Rubén Aguer about a “Crusade for life,” as to articulate their rejection of any kind of abortion.
In Mexico they tried to build at least one community in the country’s Catholic heartland, the state of Jalisco, where the largest Catholic seminary worldwide, that of the archdiocese of Guadalajara sits. Besides Guadalajara, they had scheduled activities for this year in the cities of Acapulco, Monterrey, and San José del Cabo.
Their interest in having a seat at the table in the archdiocese of Guadalajara is easy to understand when one goes over the archdiocese’s yearly massive ceremonies of ordination of deacons and priests.
Also, because even if the archdiocese of Monterrey is the new cradle of the Mexican episcopate, Guadalajara still plays a decisive role in the Mexican conference of Catholic bishops. Having a friend in Guadalajara means having friends in the Mexican conference of Catholic bishops.
In any case, after the suppression those dreams of getting access to the spring of Mexican priestly vocations is over for the Christ’s Militia, as for the next year the auxiliary bishop of Mercedes-Luján, Argentina, Mauricio Alberto Landra will be in charge of a process to suppress that organization.
Overall, the Militia had a minor role when compared with other global Catholic orders. Canonically it existed since 1994 under the auspices of the archdiocese of La Plata. The probe leading first to the expulsion of Roberto Juan Yanuzzi, the order’s founder and ultimately to their suppression begun in 2016.
However, in Argentine there are other cases pending of resolution and, as with other Catholic predatory orders, there is the risk that some of the priests abusing in one of the orders’ houses went from Argentina to Mexico or the United States.
Sadly, despite the monumental damage done to the Catholic Church their leaders are still unwilling to be accountable for decisions such as where and when a priest goes from one location to the other.
But also, the faithful. They would rather channel their anger against journalists reporting on the effects of the clergy sexual abuse crisis and advocates of the victims of said crisis, than demanding from their leaders an attitude at least as punctilious on abuse as the one they have on abortion.
Although the order was willing to acknowledge Pope Francis’s decision to suppress them, so there are notes regarding the suppression, the orders’ sites in Mexico and the United States say nothing about Yanuzzi’s case. One needs to go to the Argentine website to find the bare minimum they provide as information of that case.
There is no public data as to whether Yanuzzi did “tours of duty” in Mexico, the United States or in Italy, where there is also at least one community. Although there are plenty of pictures displaying the activities of the order, there is no information as to who the priests of the order are and when and where they have performed as such.
It is still up to the victims or their advocates and the journalists reporting on the clergy sexual abuse crisis to figure out whether or not the Militia, as many other religious orders in the Catholic Church have used the so-called “geographic solution” to the crisis. The reluctance to provide transparency, and the continued movement of abusive priests, makes it impossible to know the true scope of the problem, as the stories linked above and below from previous installments of this series prove.
In Argentina their flagship school was the Colegio de Santa Cruz (opens a site in Spanish), located in the province of San Luis, closer to Santiago, the capital of Chile, than to Buenos Aires, the Argentine capital.
Formally, the main reason for the suppression is the case of now former priest Yanuzzi. Rome dismissed him from the clerical state back in 2020 after a series of accusations of abuse, sexual and otherwise, against adults.
Sadly, similar the Argentine bishops and Rome have not acknowledged accusations against other priests and even bishops in Argentina, some of them already serving prison terms there, as in the case of Julio Grassi (see the story linked after).
Grassi and bishop Gustavo Zanchetta, remain priests, and their superiors in Argentina and Rome allow them to perform as such, creating the kind of cognitive dissonance at the heart of the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church.
The suppression of the Argentine Militia will be far easier than that of the Sodalitium that even if required to extirpate a tumor devouring the Catholic Church’s entrails, seems like a rather difficult, uphill battle of that Church against its many factions.
The Legioleaks group over at Facebook allows for a partial reconstruction of Marcelino de Andrés career as priest in Mexico, Spain, and other locations where the Legion of Christ operates. But depending on those sources fosters the deep resentment against the Church, its bishops, and other leaders, and it also fosters overall distrust in institutions.
Instead of victims scrambling with their pain and anger to reconstruct where De Andrés or Yanuzzi or any other predator priest have been, those records should be publicly available, as to foster trust in the Church and the decisions made regarding the careers of priests.
Accountability
That is a process that already happens with bishops. There are websites such as www.catholic-hierarchy.org or www.gcaholic.org frequently cited in this series that allow to better understand what happens when the Pope appoints a bishop to a diocese. Why is that information only available at the level of bishops? Why survivors, their families, their friends and advocates and journalist must go through the painful process of collecting partial information from unreliable sources to know when a religious authority moves a priest from any given position?
This is more relevant as it is clear that even if Pope Francis seems to have been able to defeat the disease that forced him into the Gemelli Hospital in Rome, the chances of him having a much longer pontificate are increasingly smaller.
He is already the second oldest reigning Pope in the last two centuries. The eldest reigning Pope in that period was Leo XIII, who died at 93, back in 1903. All his other predecessors in Rome died younger than Francis is now.
Benedict XVI, who died at 95, spent almost ten years as Pope emeritus (2013-2022) so he was able to avoid the kind of pressures Jorge Mario Bergoglio faces even at the hospital room where he has been since February 14th.
Yesterday, the Holy See press services informed of the visit of Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Secretary of State, and his second at that office, Venezuelan archbishop, Edgar Peña Parra, who went to the Gemelli hospital to brief Bergoglio on the state of the Church and the world.
It is impossible to deny that the Catholic Church is about to enter an era of a weakened Pope. Even the more enthusiastic supporters of Pope Francis appear these days affected by sorrow, while his critics and foes, hurry the arrangements for what they expect to be a soon-to-happen Conclave allowing for a “return to normal,” meaning a turn to a Papacy willing to please Donald Trump.
One only needs to pay attention to what happens in some Catholic dioceses in the United States, as in the case of New York, whose bosses, are too eager to jump into the first available flight to Rome to elect Francis’s successor, as the PDF file after this paragraph shows. (Please see original article for more information)
The PDF provides instructions for the pastors of parishes in New York City as to how to deal with the end of Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s life. Cardinal Timothy Dolan does this as he is anything but shy about his role in the Make America Great Again movement.
He offered one of the prayers/blessings at the Capitol to mark the inauguration of the second Trump administration, while him and Robert Barron, the bishop of Winona-Rochester praise J.D. Vance’s take on the Ordo Amoris, a staple of Catholic doctrine that prompted Pope Francis to issue an out-of-the-ordinary public letter addressing the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that was the subject of the story linked below.
This also happens in Rome. Italian sources talk about how in Rome there is a chance that the new U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, Brian Burch, current head of the fundamentalist organization Catholic Vote-USA, has an interest in taking with him to Rome as his underling at the embassy one of the former members of the Sodalitium, Alejandro Bermúdez.
Bermúdez is the former editor of ACI Prensa, a Spanish-speaking media outlet now integrated to EWTN’s empire, which acted for many years as the Sodalitium’s “news agency.” When the first news of abuse, sexual and otherwise in that Peruvian religious organization emerged, EWTN took it over, as they did with their English-speaking counterpart, the so-called Catholic News Agency. Bermúdez and other members of the Sodalitium appear prominently in the installments of this series dealing with that order. The most recent installment dealing with that order appears after this paragraph.
https://losangelespress.org/english-edition/2025/feb/02/sodalitium-a-suppression-of-sorts-10966.html
If Burch actually appoints Bermúdez to a position at the U.S. embassy at the Holy See it would be the confirmation of how deep the confrontation at the Catholic Church is, a schism in all but name, and a challenge to the Pope’s authority coming from the most radical and fundamentalist quarters of that church.
And the challenges to the Pope’s understanding of Catholic doctrine and practice come even from his closest collaborators. Back in December 2024, observers of the ever-changing relation between the Holy See and the Italian government were surprised by the publication of an electronic book, authored by Cardinal Parolin and Italian Catholic priest Stefano Peretti.
The book would not be relevant if it were not by its preface, signed by the current president of the Lower House of the Italian Parliament, Lorenzo Fontana, a leader in the so-called Lega or League, an identitarian, far-right political party in Italy, member of the ruling coalition behind Giorgia Meloni’s government.
Even that would not be noteworthy if it were not by Fontana’s take on Roman Catholicism. He is a devout Catholic, but not the kind of Catholic loyal to the reigning Pope. He regularly attends services in Latin, in the old rite, and sees himself as a follower of Vilmar Pavesi, a member of an “order”, the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter, whose member reconciled, up to a certain extent with Rome. Up to a certain extent since most of their priests come from the Society of Saint Pius X, the “order” founded by schismatic French bishop Marcel Lefebvre.
Fontana is known for his “anti-woke,” anti-immigrant, anti-LGTBQ positions, going as far as to deny parental rights to those falling into the LGTBQ categories. He still criticizes the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as Meloni does, but it is almost impossible to bet on the firmness of his take on that or any issue affecting the possible role of the European Union on the invasion of Ukraine or the potential invasion of any other country sharing a border with Russia.
Putin as model
After all, back in 2018, Fontana praised Putin as a “model” for Europe when it comes to nationalism and the anti-woke, anti-immigrant, and anti-LGTBQ policies so popular these days among parties such as Fontana’s Lega or Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy).
It is possible that Parolin is only reaching out for those in the Catholic extremes, but there are those who see his decision to accept having Fontana as the author of the preface to his book as part of a pre-conclave campaign, a way to curry favor with the U.S. far-right.
The first pages of Parolin’s book with the preface by Fontana are available, in Italian, here.
In a context of a major reshuffling or the existing military alliances, there will be those who adhere to the idea that religious issues are irrelevant. It is clear that there is no interest now in having an Avignon Papacy, that is to say, a Pope or series of Popes hostage to political interest, but despite all his alleged and real failures, especially on the issue of clergy sexual abuse, Pope Francis is still one of the few voices willing to criticize Israel’s brutal policies in Palestine, and more specifically in Gaza, as it has been willing to criticize Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, while deploying whatever symbolic resources him and some of his Cardinals have been able to deploy in Ukraine, as in the case of Canadian Cardinal Michael Czerny back in 2022.
For many victims and relatives of victims of clergy sexual abuse, what Francis says about genocide in Gaza or about the indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine comes as cheap talk, gibberish from the leader of a self-serving institution willing to attack and destroy victims of clergy sexual abuse, but there is a clear interest of the most radical quarters of the Catholic Church to even avoid that kind of criticism and to force the Catholic Church to embrace Trump, Putin, and the kind of ideologies they support and defend.
Despite all his mistakes on the issue of clergy sexual abuse, Francis has been able to acknowledge some of challenges that the world confronts in ways the most traditional, identitarian, and racist factions of the Catholic Church, are unable to understand.
Despite his mistakes in cases such as the so-called “bishops of Karadima,” he was willing to backpedal on that issue and face the fact that Juan de la Cruz Barros Madrid had no future as bishop of Osorno, Chile, and despite all the mistakes made in other cases he is trying to suppress the Sodalitium. That is not a minor undertaking in the current global context.
As the Church faces a potential shift in leadership, the need for transparency and accountability is more critical than ever. The stories of abuse and institutional cover-ups reminds of the ongoing struggle for justice for many new and old victims.
The Catholic Church’s global reach, as evidenced by the cases in Spain, France, Argentina, and Mexico, reminds us that survivors deserve a measure of justice. Their fight is not merely a matter of internal Church reform; it is a global moral imperative, and yet the Church must be aware that its own future, its relevance, hinges on its ability to confront its past and embrace a culture of transparency and accountability.