Legion of crisis

It’s been 50 years since the Legion of Christ, a powerful Catholic congregation, opened its first facility in Ireland. It is not shaping up to be a happy anniversary.

The page devoted to Ireland on the organisation’s well-maintained website outlines the expansions that have taken place since it set up its first house in Bundoran, Co Donegal. Its novitiate has been at the same location, in the affluent Dublin suburb of Foxrock, since 1968.

Among the more recent developments has been the development of the rather grandiosely named Dal Riada Centre for Integral Development of the Family.

The centre, according to the order, ‘‘offers tools for family development in all its dimensions’’.

Whatever the merits of the centre, its staff are likely to have a hard time convincing all but the most ardent believers that the Legion of Christ is the best vehicle through which to pursue family development.

The legionaries were long-noted for the level of veneration - unusual even compared with that of other religious orders - that they paid towards their founder, a Mexican priest named Fr Marcial Maciel.

Allegations about Maciel’s conduct had circulated almost since he began the order.

Until very recently, they had been met with stark denials - and counter-attacks against the accusers - by the Legion of Christ.

Of late, however, even the order has had to accept the truth.

Maciel, who died in 2008,was a colossal, grotesque fraud.

He was a paedophile who is thought to have abused dozens of members of the order.

He fathered children with at least two women. One of his sons, Raul, who went to boarding school in Ireland, says Maciel sexually abused and tried to rape him.

To the women who bore his children, he sometimes hid his identity by claiming to be a CIA agent or a private detective for international oil companies. His financial affairs were almost entirely opaque.

For many years, he got away with it, insulated by the influence bought by the wealthy order and by the culture of secrecy he had fostered within the organisation.

As the truth has emerged, former followers have felt their emotions curdle to disgust.

Genevieve Kineke, a US-based writer who was once a member of the order’s lay counterpart, Regnum Christi, says she remains ‘‘an ardent Catholic’’ but adds: ‘‘I am extremely angry.

This guy was a Class-A huckster."

This is not exactly news to Juan Vaca, a 73-year-old former Legion of Christ priest who has long been at the forefront of the battle to expose Maciel.

Vaca has often detailed the abuse he suffered at the hands of the order’s founder.

It lasted for more than a decade, beginning shortly before Vaca entered his teens.

The first time it occurred was when Vaca was sent to Maciel’s private quarters.

The man who had seemed like a hero to the young boy was now before him, masturbating.

Vaca and others who were abused by Maciel have recalled that the priest would say at such moments that he was suffering from abdominal pains.

He told some of the boys that he had a special dispensation from the pope to have nuns massage his genitals to ease his discomfort.

So committed was he to his vow of chastity, he would add, that he felt the boys should do the duty instead. ‘‘People around him knew," Vaca says.

‘‘They allowed this lie to keep going.

He was an impostor - and they knew he was an impostor."

Who knew what about Maciel, and when, remains a subject of much debate.

When the organisation finally admitted in March that Maciel had been involved in ‘‘reprehensible actions’’, they also argued that their earlier defence of the founder had been sincere, since the allegations ‘‘conflicted with our experience of him personally and his work’’.

Those denials were met with scepticism in some quarters. ‘‘These people were handpicked by him," Paul Lennon, a Dublin born former legionary, tells The Sunday Business Post.

Lennon, who left the order in 1984 and has subsequently become one of its most prominent critics, says: ‘‘There were never any kind of democratic or semi-democratic decisions made when Maciel was around."

Pope Benedict just last month revealed the identity of the man who would lead a de facto Vatican takeover of the order.

Archbishop Velasio De Paolis will be the pontifical delegate for the legionaries.

A 74-year-old Italian, his prowess in financial matters may come in handy as he seeks to get a handle on the extent of the Legion of Christ’s wealth and, perhaps, work out some form of financial redress for its founder’s victims.

Two big questions loom.

One is how Pope Benedict’s complicated role in the saga will ultimately be seen; the other is whether the order itself can stay afloat.

One thing seems certain: Maciel, at one time a favoured friend of the most powerful people in Rome and even a rumoured candidate for sainthood, will forever be consigned to well-deserved ignominy.

Maciel was only 20 years old when he founded the organisation that would become the Legion of Christ in Mexico in 1941.

It was initially known as the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart and Our Lady of Sorrows.

The more militaristic name that it would adopt soon afterwards seems, in ways, more in keeping with Maciel’s view of its purpose.

According to authors Jason Berry and the late Gerald Renner, whose work played a pivotal role in Maciel’s eventual exposure, Maciel would tell his new recruits about the exploits of an uncle, who had fought as a general committed to defending the Church during the Mexican Civil War.

He was also an admirer of Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco.

When Lennon was first beginning to have doubts about the Legion, he recalls thinking that Maciel’s domineering, brook-no-impertinence manner made it seem ‘‘like he was a general in an army’’.

Over the years, the organisation would grow to the point where it claimed to have 800 priests, 2,600 seminarians and a presence in more than 20 countries.

The extent of its wealth is much more keenly debated.

One Italian newsmagazine has estimated its assets at €25 billion.

Legion of Christ officials have said that its worth is a small fraction of that sum.

One way or another, the order has benefited from the largesse of many wealthy people, especially in its Mexican homebase.

Carlos Slim, the world’s richest man, is a long-time supporter. Earlier this year, the industrialist’s son-in-law and spokesman told the New York Times - in which, incidentally, Slim is also a significant investor - that he had contributed a ‘‘good amount’’ of money to the group’s schools and colleges, and that he would continue to do so.

An heiress to a fortune in Mexico has claimed that her mother gave $50 million to the Legion. (The figure has not been substantiated - though, by all accounts, a large sum of money was donated.) A member of another prominent Mexican family is reputed to have given the order $3 million; another apparently donated a house.

Former insiders have offered troubling accounts of Maciel’s approach to financial matters.

Rev Stephen Fichter, a New Jersey priest, was a member of the order for 14 years, ascending the ranks to become chief financial officer.

He told the New York Times last year that, each time Maciel departed on a trip, ‘‘I always had to give him $10,000 in cash - $5,000 in American dollars and $5,000 in the currency of wherever he was going’’.

Fichter found this behaviour especially incongruous, he told the newspaper, because ‘‘as legionaries, we were taught a very strict poverty.

If I went out of town and bought a Bic pen and a chocolate bar, I would have to turn in the receipts.

And yet for Fr Maciel, there was never any accounting. It was always cash, never any paper trail."

(Fichter, reached by telephone by this newspaper, declined to comment further, stating that he could not see any purpose in adding to what he had already said publicly about the Legion.)

The question of how the Legion’s money was used has intrigued several investigative journalists.

Berry has reported that, in the mid-1990s, a person newly promoted in the Vatican hierarchy was allegedly given ‘‘an envelope thick with cash’’ by a Legion of Christ priest under the direction of Maciel.

‘‘When you lay on money like that, it buys support," Berry told this newspaper, referring to the general practice, rather than this specific incident. ‘‘Maciel spent his whole life ingratiating himself with the Vatican."

If money helped Maciel to buy influence outside the order, the ethos he himself had created helped to keep awkward questions at bay within its ranks.

The order’s regimen included what were termed ‘private vows’ or ‘vows of charity’ - noble-sounding expressions that critics say, in reality, required members never to speak negatively of their superiors and to report those who did.

This, coupled with the extreme veneration of Maciel himself, has led to accusations that the order has cult-like tendencies.

‘‘Maciel was very shrewd in creating this kind of world around him," Vaca says. ‘‘As long as you kept your mouth shut, you were okay.

But if anyone said anything, you knew someone else was going to report back to the Legion."

Lennon says that, while many religious orders impose some kind of limitation on their members’ contact with their families, the Legion seeks to ‘‘wean them away from their families in a too-radical way’’.

Lennon is sceptical of any claims that the order has truly loosened up in this respect, though the official line is adamant on this point.

The Legion’s website, for instance, states that legionaries can keep in touch with their families ‘‘by e-mail, telephone or ordinary mail’’, and that ‘‘there are many opportunities for families to visit their sons at the seminary or community centre’’.

In any event, Lennon knows first-hand the degree of loyalty that was expected towards Maciel.

He began becoming disaffected, he says, after Maciel ‘‘chided’’ him for daring to ask a question in front of other brothers.

Later, he began hearing about brothers who had been banished to distant, forbidding locations after falling out of favour. By 1984, Lennon says he was ‘‘a bit riled up’’ about all of this when Maciel came to speak at an event in Mexico.

Lennon was serving in the area as a Legion of Christ missionary at the time.

‘‘When he came to give his introduction, I questioned him about some of the things about the Legion.

He told me to sit down and shut up. I didn’t, and we started raising our voices with each other."

This behaviour seems to have startled Lennon’s fellow members.

At one point, he recalls, another brother intervened to say: ‘‘We’re not here to listen to a discussion. We’re here to listen to what Nuestro Padre [Our Father, a title members often gave Maciel] has to say."

Lennon was so disgusted he left the room, ‘‘threw my things in a suitcase and made for the bus stop’’.

He eventually left the priesthood entirely.

Now 66, he lives in Virginia and works as a mental health therapist. In 2008, he wrote a book about Maciel, entitled Our Father Who Art in Bed.

As a member of Regnum Christi, Kineke was not under such overt domination.

But the psychological pressures she describes sound just as severe. She recalls the requirement for secrecy was buttressed by the claim that, ‘‘if you were ever to repeat anything negative, it would wound Jesus a second time’’.

Kineke twice remembers receiving phone calls in which people told her disturbing information about the movement.

‘‘I remember thinking, ‘I’m not supposed to know this’.

You always ignored your gut, saying, ‘I don’t like this, but the Pope loves them’."

Kineke struggled - ultimately successfully - to maintain her faith after she recognised what she now considers to be the movement’s true nature.

Nevertheless, she says it took her some time to come to terms with its conduct.

‘‘What I have tried to express - and it took me five or six years - is the realisation that this group was a cult.

There is a horror at that word, as if only the dregs of society or very dim-witted people get drawn into cults.

‘‘But we were smart people, well-educated. We fell into a group that dismantled those elements of our personalities.

And it was easy for them to do, because they had the trump card of the Church."

Not only does the hierarchy of the Legion of Christ fervently deny this suggestion of cultishness; existing rank-and-file members of the Legion and Regnum Christi also protest. In an online discussion in 2009, hosted by the Catholic Exchange website, a Regnum Christi member going by the name ‘mscowartkc’ said: ‘‘We are not a cult.

Everything we do is in line with what Christ asks of all baptised Christians." The same person also defended the controversial vow of charity, on the basis that ‘‘complaining about something to someone who cannot do anything about it is unproductive and leads to unrest’’.

Nevertheless, those who have worked with victims of abuse contend that such an ethos can be deeply toxic.

David Clohessy, the national director of US organisation Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (Snap), calls the Legion ‘‘cult-like’’ and adds: ‘‘It is troubling on so many levels.

There is the abuse by the founder and longtime head. But there is also the culture that seems to permeate the order, requiring loyalty to a hierarchy even after wrongdoing has been widely documented."

Maciel was first subject to investigation in the mid-1950s, when allegations of drug abuse were raised against him by his personal secretary.

The accusation was that he was prone to injecting himself with morphine, but he was later cleared.

The Vatican has been aware of allegations of sexual misconduct against Maciel since at least 1978.Two years before that, Vaca had left the Legion, giving Maciel a letter naming 20 people the founder had abused, and charging that ‘‘everything you did contradicts the beliefs of the Church and the order’’.

In 1978, he gave a copy of the same letter to the bishop of Long Island, New York, who had accepted him to be a parish priest there.

The bishop then forwarded Vaca’s letter to Rome, together with supporting testimony from another former member of the order alleging that he, too, had been abused. Nothing happened.

Vaca wrote a letter to Pope John Paul II in 1989.Again, nothing happened.

Then, in 1994, the Pope praised Maciel as ‘‘an efficacious guide to youth’’.

‘‘I was really insulted. I felt like I was in shock," recalls Vaca, who had by then left the priesthood.

The Pope’s praise for Maciel - along with that of his secretary at the time, Stanislaw Dziwisz - had one unexpected but ultimately enormous consequence.

It galvanised several former members of the Legion of Christ to go public with their stories.

In 1997, nine such members, including Vaca, told their stories to Berry and Renner.

The two reporters wove the testimonies into a landmark article for the Hartford Courant newspaper. Later, Berry and Renner would write the definitive book on the scandal, Vows of Silence.

It was around this time that the story of the Legion got entwined with that of the present Pope, the then cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

In 1998, eight former legionaries made a formal complaint about Maciel’s conduct to the Vatican.

The complaint wended its way to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, whose head at the time was Ratzinger.

The inquiry was shut down the next year.

One of the people who made the complaint says that a now-deceased bishop had told him that Ratzinger had said it would not be ‘‘prudent’’ to pursue the case.

Nothing much happened for several more years, during which time Ratzinger rebuffed all inquiries about Maciel.

A video clip, widely available on the internet, shows him becoming irritated and slapping the hand of an ABC reporter who waited outside his residence in 2002 to ask him about the order’s founder.

In 2004, as Pope John Paul II was entering the last phase of his life, Ratzinger reversed course, for reasons that have never been clearly explained, and ordered a reopening of the inquiry.

A relatively kind explanation is that Ratzinger was himself coming to realise the seriousness of the sexual abuse crisis gripping the church.

In 2006,Macielwas removed from public priestly duties by the Vatican, and instructed to lead a life of ‘‘prayer and penance’’.

Although most people surmised that this was related to the abuse allegations, the Vatican’s explanation was vague in the extreme.

Its statement also said that Maciel would not have to face any canonical trial because of his age and infirmity.

He was never defrocked. With astonishing chutzpah, Maciel and the Legion of Christ sought to present this finding as an injustice which the founder would stoically accept.

A press release from the order noted that ‘‘our beloved father founder’’ had ‘‘following the example of Jesus Christ, decided not to defend himself in any way’’.

The requirement to retire from public ministry was ‘‘a new cross that God, the Father of Mercy, has allowed him to suffer’’.

It was only this year that the Vatican, following an investigation, declared that there was ‘‘incontrovertible evidence’’ that Maciel had been involved in ‘‘very serious and objectively immoral behaviour’’; that this ‘‘sometimes resulted in actual crimes’’; and that this was proof of ‘‘a life devoid of scruples and of genuine religious sentiment’’.

Even the Vatican - hardly known for its openness and transparency - added that the tendency of the Legion’s defenders to try to discredit its critics ‘‘created around [Maciel] a defence mechanism that made him untouchable for a long time, making it very difficult to know his real life’’.

Clarity is still lacking on several important points.

One is why the then Cardinal Ratzinger shut down the first investigation of Maciel, resisted calls for it to be reopened and then abruptly reversed this policy in 2004.

Another is what the Vatican knew by 2006 that was sufficient to order Maciel banished from public ministry, but apparently not grave enough to require him to face a trial or to be defrocked.

Yet another is why there have been no details given of the specific number and nature of the crimes the Vatican now acknowledges Maciel committed.

Nonetheless, even critics of the Legion of Christ are split on how the current Pope’s role should be appraised.

‘‘I don’t come down on Pope Benedict as hard as some of the other fellows do, especially those who have suffered through sexual abuse," Paul Lennon says. ‘‘He did order the first investigation of the life of Fr Maciel, and I’m sure he had to overcome resistance to do it."

Vaca, on the other hand, contends that ‘‘the Vatican is trying to save face because, from John Paul II to Ratzinger, they have been covering up for Maciel for a long time. They want to save the Legion as an institution because they don’t want to expose themselves."

Whether the order can be saved remains an open question.

The Vatican statement in May announced a need to ‘‘redefine the charism’’ of the order which, in layman’s terms, means changing its sense of mission.

But, as Kineke notes, the idea of somehow altering this by committee, or by Vatican fiat, is ‘‘an interesting proposition, because charisms are supposed to come from the Holy Spirit’’.

The Legion, for its part, proclaimed in March that ‘‘we face the future with hope, knowing that our one support is God’’. It also added that ‘‘the past months have helped us to reflect on our identity and mission, and they have also moved us to review various aspects of our institutional life’’.

But did the Legion sow the seeds of its own destruction by its exalted veneration of Maciel?

The pictures of the paedophile founder that used to adorn the order’s facilities have been taken down but, without him, critics ask, what does the order amount to?

‘‘Other orders’ founders are admired, but not venerated so extremely," says Clohessy, of Snap. ‘‘The Legion is completely tied up with the personality of Maciel."

Kineke says she wants the movement to reform itself and survive.

But she adds: ‘‘I don’t have the highest hopes because of the lack of critical thinking skills and self-assessment within the order.

There is no guarantee that the group will even exist two years from now."

If the Legion’s fate is disbandment, its followers will no doubt mourn.

Others may see it as a fitting conclusion to the life’s work of a man whom Berry terms ‘‘a sociopath, basically - and one of the great con-artists of modern history’’.

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