Religious order faces crisis decade after Vatican reform
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.
But more importantly, it has called into question the Vatican reform itself: The papal envoy who ran the Legion starting in 2010 learned about the case nearly a decade ago and refused to punish or even investigate the priest or the superiors who covered up his crimes, many of whom are still in power and ministry today.
The scandal is not the story line the Legion was hoping for as it opened 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 reform 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.
Salazar wants more: “What I want is for the pope to get radicalized,” she said.
“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. “It’s like taking apart a cartel; you have to remove the ringleaders and dismantle it.”
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.
“It would be practically impossible today to have actions like the ones which occurred during Maciel’s tenure to go undetected,” he said in emailed responses to questions, after declining an on-camera interview.
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 its main source of income.