10 years after Vatican takeover, Legion in new abuse crisis

Mexico City, Jan 20 (AP) The administrator of the elite Catholic school in Cancun, Mexico, used to take the girls out of class and send them to the chapel, where the priest from the Legion of Christ religious order would sexually abuse them. "As some were reading the Bible, he would rape the others in front of them, little girls aged 6 to 8 or 9," said one of his victims, Ana Lucia Salazar, now a 36-year-old Mexican television host and mother of three.

"Afterward, nothing was the same, nothing went back to the way it was," she said through tears at her home in Mexico City. Salazar's horrific story, which has been corroborated by other victims and the Legion itself, has sparked a new credibility crisis for the once-influential order, 10 years after the Holy See took it over after determining that its founder was a pedophile.

The case has confirmed that the Legion's abuse problem is far worse than the founder's pathology alone. And it has called into question the Vatican reform: The papal envoy who ran the order learned about the case nearly a decade ago and declined to punish the priest or the superiors who knew of his crimes, many of whom are still in power and ministry.

The scandal is not the story the Legion was hoping for as it opens its general chapter Monday in Rome, a weeks-long gathering to choose new leaders and approve policy decisions going forward. The assembly was supposed to have shown off the Legion embarking fully on its own after 10 years of Vatican-mandated reform. The Holy See imposed structural changes after revelations that the Legion's late founder, the Rev Marcial Maciel, sexually abused at least 60 seminarians, fathered at least three children and built a secretive, cult-like order to cater to his whims and hide his double life.

The Cancun scandal, though, has exposed that the Vatican failed to address one key area: to punish known historic abusers and the people who covered for them, and change the culture of cover-up that enabled the crimes. From the outset, the late papal envoy who ran the Legion, Cardinal Velasio De Paolis, refused to hold complicit Legion superiors accountable.

"De Paolis said there would be no witch hunt, explicitly, and the consequence is that abuse and its cover-up have remained unpunished," said the Rev Christian Borgogno, a former Legion priest who co-founded the "Legioleaks" Facebook group where Salazar first went public in May. Borgogno said De Paolis' decision to leave in place Legion superiors, many of whom were close to Maciel, "made reform impossible".

"The only way out was to foster charismatic leaders, and they were even repressed," he told AP. "That's the main reason why many of us left." Salazar, whose story has made headlines in Mexico, goes further: "What I want is for the pope to get radicalized," she said. "There's only one position, to be on the side of the violated children," not a religious order that has among its priests "villains, delinquents, rapists, accomplices and victimisers."

"The Legion of Christ has no reason to exist," she said, echoing calls from even within the church that the Vatican should have suppressed the order 10 years ago. Legion spokesman the Rev Aaron Smith argued that the Legion's leadership had indeed changed over the past decade, noting that 11 priests are participating in the 2020 general chapter for the first time, and that most of the 66 participants are new to the assembly since the Vatican reform began. More than a dozen others, however, belong to Maciel's old guard.

Smith said the power structure of the Maciel era had been dismantled, with more decentralized authority and systems of checks and balances put in place. The scandal has struck the Legion at its core — Mexico — and cast a discrediting light where it hurts most: the Legion's prestigious private schools, which cater to Mexico's elite and are the order's main source of income.

Former Legion priests say the scandal is a devastating blow that they long warned about, since a loss of credibility among wealthy Mexicans would deprive the Legion of its key base. Already, the Mexican bishops conference has ended its silence about the Legion to denounce the newly revealed abuse and the Legion's failure to provide "a specific act of justice or reparation for the victims" even after it acknowledged the crimes, vowed more transparency and pointed to its child protection policies in place now.

The archbishop of Monterrey — a Legion stronghold — denounced the group's "criminal silence" and treatment of victims, and led recent calls from Mexican bishops for an end to the statute of limitations for child sex abuse cases. It was a remarkable turnabout, given that Mexico's Catholic hierarchy long supported the Legion and benefited from the once-wealthy order's largesse. Even the Vatican's ambassador to Mexico, Monsignor Franco Coppola, broke the Holy See's tradition of diplomatic discretion to publicly criticize the Legion's handling of the case and call for the Vatican to investigate the "web of cover-up" behind it. That too was remarkable, given that the Vatican itself has been implicated in the Maciel cover-up.

However, victims see such promises as nothing more than lip service, and dismissed the letters they received from the leadership after the scandal broke promising reparations and change. The Legion hasn't yet settled all requests for financial compensation from eight of Maciel's original victims, who made formal requests in 2018. (AP) SCY

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)