Priests of disgraced Legion face trial for obstruction claim
Milan — The Vatican effort to reform the disgraced Legion of Christ religious order is coming under new scrutiny, with four Legion priests and a Legion lawyer due to stand trial on charges they tried to obstruct justice and extort the family of a sex abuse victim.
The preliminary hearing is scheduled for March 12 in Milan. The case is significant because it calls into question the effectiveness of the Vatican reform since the alleged crimes occurred at the end of the Holy See’s four-year effort to turn the Legion around.
In addition, evidence obtained during the investigation, including documents seized when police raided the Legion’s Rome headquarters in 2014, showed an elaborate cover-up that stretched from Milan to Mexico, the Vatican to
Venezuela, prosecutors say.
The charges at the heart of the Milan trial center around a settlement proposal offered by the Legion to Yolanda Martinez on Oct. 18, 2013, to compensate for the sexual abuse her son suffered at the hands of a Legion priest at the order’s youth seminary in northern Italy.
According to the terms of the settlement, Martinez’s family would receive about $16,250 from the order. But in return, her son would have to recant the testimony he gave to prosecutors that the priest had repeatedly assaulted him in 2008, when he was 12. He would have to lie.
Lawyers for the five defendants declined to comment, citing the upcoming trial. The Legion has said they profess innocence. A Legion spokesman said that at the time, the Legion didn’t have in place the uniform child protection policies and guidelines that are now mandatory across the order.
Martinez’s son, now 24, had revealed his abuse to his psychologist in 2013, and then repeated his claim to Milan prosecutors after the psychologist reported the case. The complaint sparked a criminal investigation that resulted in the 2019 conviction of the priest, Vladimir Resendiz Gutierrez, 43, which was upheld on appeal last month. His lawyer, Natalia Curro, said an appeal to Italy’s high court was being studied, and added that her client denied having abused Martinez’s son, though he admitted to abusing another boy.
There is no evidence that the pope’s envoy running the Legion, the late Cardinal Velasio De Paolis, knew of or approved the settlement offer to Martinez before it was made. But he didn’t report Resendiz to police when he learned in 2011 that Resendiz had abused another child, and didn’t report the alleged obstruction attempt when he learned about it in 2013.
And when Martinez called the cardinal — one of the Vatican’s most respected church lawyers — to complain about the settlement proposal, he laughed it off and said this is how such things are done in Italy.
According to a wiretapped conversation on Jan. 7, 2014, De Paolis merely told Martinez not to sign the agreement and to negotiate a different deal, without lawyers: “Lawyers complicate things. Even Scripture says that among Christians we should find agreement.”
A few hours after the call, De Paolis opened the Legion’s 2014 assembly where he formally ended the mandate given to him by Pope Benedict
XVI to reform and purify the religious order. The Legion had been “cured and cleaned,” he said.
Benedict had entrusted De Paolis to turn the Legion around in 2010, after revelations that its founder, the late Rev. Marcial Maciel, had molested his seminarians, fathered three children and built a cult-like order to hide his crimes.
Benedict gave De Paolis broad powers to rebuild the Legion from the ground up and said it must undergo a profound process of “purification” and “renewal.”
But De Paolis refused from the start to remove any of Maciel’s old guard, who remain in power today. He refused to investigate the cover-up of Maciel’s crimes. He refused to reopen old allegations of abuse by other priests, even when serial rapists remained in the Legion’s ranks, unpunished.
He did authorize a canonical investigation into Resendiz in 2011 that resulted in him being defrocked in April 2013.