Articles From New Oxford Review

The following articles have appeared in New Oxford Review concerning the Legion of Christ

For complete dossier, see:
http://www.newoxfordreview.org/dossier.jsp?did=dossier-legionaries

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Why Orthodox Catholics Are Angry With the Legion of Christ

By Michael S. Rose
May 2005

Vows of Silence. By Jason Berry and Gerald Renner – Free Press. 356 pages – $26.

Vows of Silence should be one of the most important books in better than a decade for conservative Catholics in the U.S. and beyond. Alas, it will not be. Jason Berry and Gerald Renner, conscientious and seasoned journalists, undermine their own effort with their openly stated liberal Catholic agenda. Moreover, the subtitle of the book, The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II gives a pretty good indication of the authors’ bias. But John Paul is given scant attention. This is not even a book about the papacy or Vatican politics. The book is about Fr. Thomas Doyle, who for two decades has heroically stood up for the victims of priestly sex abuse, and about Fr. Marcial Maciel, who has been accused numerous times of sex abuse, and about his Legion of Christ and its lay affiliate Regnum Christi. The connection of John Paul to the Legion is just this: The Pope has put his weight behind the Legion in the past, which the Legion is quick to point out, repeatedly.

The Legion and its supporters have exploited the authors’ bias in order to dismiss their thorough research. The people who ought to read Vows of Silence, mainly conservative Catholics who would likely be attracted to the manifest signs of Legion orthodoxy, are given a good reason not to take Berry and Renner’s research seriously. Nonetheless, despite their liberal proclivities, the facts they assemble are very much worth examining.

When some of the book’s material regarding sexual abuse allegations against Fr. Maciel were first published in the Hartford Courant, neoconservative, high-tax-bracket Catholics were quick to defend Maciel. With little or no first-hand knowledge of the situations being written about, prominent Catholics such as Fr. Richard John Neuhaus of First Things, William Donohue of The Catholic League, Harvard professor Mary Ann Glendon, and Deal Hudson of Crisis magazine all denounced the Courant’s series. Yet none of these defenders met with Maciel’s accusers. The Legion and the neocons, both reputed to be interested in money and power, are allies. It’s you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.But these neocons may come to regret their hasty judgments.

Vows of Silence deals with well-substantiated sexual abuse allegations from nine former Legionaries against Fr. Maciel, including significantly men who were high-ranking members of the order before bailing out. Over the past five or so years, the Legion has been denying the allegations, categorizing them as a conspiracy, and publicly assassinating the character of these men without substantial proof -every one a well-respected professional, none of whom is seeking financial compensation.

One of the Legion’s greatest skills seems to be character assassination without substantial evidence. When former Legionary Juan Vaca came forward with sex abuse allegations against Fr. Maciel, the Publisher and Editor in Chief of the Legion-owned National Catholic Register, Fr. Owen Kearns, derided Vaca as a proud, status-conscious man angered and disappointed at his professional failures, a man who wanted greater power in the Legion. Juan Vaca was Director of the Legionaries in the U.S. when he resigned from the Legion. I have spoken with people who personally know Vaca. They say that Fr. Kearn’s characterization of him couldn’t be further from the truth. Berry and Renner paint the same picture: a mild-mannered, humble man.

The defense of Maciel by the Legion is essential because both Regnum Christi and the Legionaries of Christ are built around a cult of personality, that of Fr. Marcial Maciel. He is called Nuestro Padre (Our Father) and is regarded as a living saint. From several accounts, Maciel appears to be a megalomaniac with a penchant for making theatrical appearances with spectacular arrivals, such as flying in on a personal helicopter into a crowd of squealing teens, perhaps in imitation of a rock star.

It is instructive to note here, as an aside, that during the past few years Maciel has canceled his spectacular appearances at the annual family day festivals in the U.S. In 2003 Maciel was scheduled to address the thousands gathered in Chicago. When he failed to arrive and event organizers played a video-taped address from the Legion founder, a reporter speculated in the Chicago Tribune that Fr. Maciel had failed to appear in Chicago because he feared American abuse-victims groups would protest his presence. The Tribune also pointed out that if Maciel were a priest operating in a U.S. diocese, the nine credible allegations of sex abuse would have caused him to be relieved of his priestly duties.

When I spoke to Jay Dunlap, the Legionaries’ Communications Director, the following week about another topic, I asked him if there was any truth to the Tribune’s report. No,responded Dunlap. He dismissed the entire article as the immature work of a summer intern from Stanford University. I was expected to believe that this journalist from Stanford was all wet.

Why then did Fr. Maciel fail to appear in Chicago as scheduled? It’s a long story, explained Dunlap. The official Legion PR line was this: Maciel had been on some important pastoral visit to South America. From there, he was scheduled to fly to Chicago. However, said Dunlap, Maciel was diverted by a sudden request from some unnamed cardinal to return to Rome on some urgent business. When a Vatican cardinal makes a request, said Dunlap, Fr. Maciel can’t exactly ignore it.

Thus, according to the official party line, Fr. Maciel did not appear in Chicago because he was called to Rome by a Vatican cardinal. This explanation would only sound plausible to someone who knows little to nothing about Church hierarchy. Heads of religious orders do not report to or take quotidian orders from Vatican cardinals. What urgent business, I asked Dunlap. Dunno, he said.

Is the public really expected to believe that Maciel’s urgent business in Rome couldn’t wait one day -until after he addressed one of the largest gatherings of his lay movement? Given that Berry and Renner report that Maciel has thrown lavish dinners in Rome for prominent Vatican cardinals, perhaps a better explanation would be that Maciel has to come running, Johnny-on-the-spot, to any and all Vatican cardinals so as to help guarantee that the cardinals in the Curia will protect him from the sexual allegations swilling about him. Don’t be so naive as to think that cardinals don’t do that -remember Cardinal Law (now a Vatican cardinal)?

What about Maciel’s scheduled appearance at the Family Gathering in 2002 in Baltimore; why did Maciel also cancel his appearance there? Dunlap was ready with his response:You’ll remember that was the week before the Pope was scheduled to visit Mexico City.

Yes, I told him, I remember.

Well, Fr. Maciel was called to Mexico City to help the city prepare for the Pope’s arrival.

This explanation was even more far-fetched than the Chicago excuse. Was I supposed to believe that Fr. Maciel was called to Mexico in order to hang tinsel a whole week before the Pope’s arrival? And who called him to Mexico City?

The primary reason I called Dunlap in the first place was that Sophia Institute Press (which published two of my books: Ugly As Sin and Priest) had recently published Christ Is My Life by Fr. Maciel, a 304 – page book that purported to be a candid interview with Jesus Colina, a Catholic journalist with the Rome-based Zenit News Agency, owned by the Legionaries. The book was being criticized as a propaganda tract used for recruiting new prospects into the movement. The fact that the Legion purchased 16,000 copies of the book just prior to the Chicago festival lends some credence to that claim.
I was asked to review the book for a national newspaper -not the NOR. After reading Christ Is My Life -filled mainly with pious platitudes with little spiritual or theological depth -I discovered that former Legion seminarians and priests were denouncing the book, which was ostensibly autobiographical, as a string of fabrications -a concocted self-hagiography.

Given the fact that the interviewer was a Regnum Christi member and Legion employee rather than an independent journalist, and that so many former Legion members disputed the historical facts, I felt like I had little to offer by way of a review. Moreover, I was not encouraged by the fact that the Legion’s website was promoting the book as the fastest-selling Catholic book on the market today. That the Legion of Christ itself bought up 16,000 books upon publication for free distribution was what made Christ Is My Life a so-called bestseller -a marketing technique that smacks of duplicity.

A booklet on the life and times of Fr. Maciel written by Fr. J. Alberto Villasana, a Legion priest, paints Nuestro Padre as a veritable hero of the Cristero Revolt in Mexico. As a teenager, for example, he is said to have calmed the crowds in a near-riot, to have tended to wounded Cristeros, to have led anti-government protests, and to have miraculously escaped the bullets of a Communist assassin, all the while as a pious seminarian he chose to sleep on newspapers instead of a mattress and use a towel instead of a blanket. (For at least the past decade he’s been chauffeured around in a Mercedes, has paid $9,000 a ticket to fly the supersonic Concorde across the Atlantic, and rents helicopters to keep certain of his appointments in Mexico, Colombia, and the U.S.). Those who knew him at the time, however, including Fr. Rogelio Orozco (one of the original group of boys to form the Legion in 1941) paint a portrait of a self-absorbed, spoiled, and sissified man, who was kicked out of seminary after seminary, and who literally made his teachers recoil. Berry and Renner write that Maciel has crafted his own persona: a heroic, saintly mask to cover his worldly genius at pulling money from the rich while hiding sex with boys in the closet. The Legion counters by claiming that expulsion after expulsion -at one seminary he was given only half an hour to vacate -was caused by misunderstandings.

Berry and Renner are in top form when debunking the string of alleged fabrications put forth in Maciel’s autobiography. They have done their homework, digging into the source material and often finding dead ends: sources that don’t exist, sources that turn out to be nothing more than verbal recountings of incidents from the mouth of Nuestro Padre to some Legion priest-chronicler. Sometimes the authors are even able to identify fault lines in Maciel’s self-hagiography, especially when exact dates are given. For example, Fr. Maciel claimed that in June of 1946 he circumnavigated curial gatekeepers to gain access to Pope Pius XII. According to one of his hagiographic booklets, Nuestro Padre waited while the Holy Father celebrated a solemn Mass of beatification and when the ceremony was finished he got into the greeting line and allegedly said: Holy Father, I am a Mexican priest and I have something important to tell you, but I don’t have anyone to recommend me to you. First, Maciel had two uncles who were bishops. Second, Berry and Renner discovered that Pius XII never beatified anyone in June of 1946.

Maciel’s exaggerations apparently weren’t limited to his autobiography. According to Federico Dominguez (not one of the accusers), a former Legionary and the secretary to whom Nuestro Padre dictated his letters for years, Fr. Maciel also liked to exaggerate in his correspondence with his rich patrons in Mexico: He would say we had three hundred students but there were only one hundred! I began to have my doubts about him.

But exaggeration, invention, and lying weren’t Fr. Maciel’s only problems, attested Dominguez. One evening he went to Fr. Maciel’s bedroom and found him there already in bed -in the dark with an adolescent boy, Juan Vaca.

Chapter after chapter of Vows of Silence is filled with horror stories from former Legion priests, seminarians, and Regnum Christi members. The pages are crammed with charges of brainwashing, manipulation, pederast seduction rituals, character assassination, bribes, drug abuse, gulag-type threats -you name it. The most interesting aspect of this expos? is that even though the authors are avowedly liberal, a good number of the sources quoted are those who are self-defined orthodox Catholics. After all, the Legion consciously cultivates conservative Catholics, using a facade of pious traditionalism to draw them in. It should come as no surprise then that the harshest critics of the Legion are not liberal Catholics, but those who are staunchly conservative in their views of the Church. They are typically family-oriented, faithful Catholics who look to the Holy Father for direction, and embrace the teachings of the Catholic Church without reserve, and often attend Mass daily. Something is making these people very, very angry, and it’s not the Legion’s alleged fidelity to the Pope. Rather, it is the Legion’s manipulative techniques used to lure them and their money into the movement. In short, their problem is with the Legion’s use oforthodoxy to manipulate faithful Catholics in order to build an empire, a parallel church (as one bishop expressed it).

According to the well-documented and well-researched material presented in Vows of Silence -and my own research over the past five years on Maciel and his order that confirms the facts in the book -the Legion has broken up families, destroyed schools, and pulled the wool over the eyes of many orthodox Catholics. That’s part of the reason the order and its lay affiliate have been banned from certain dioceses, and are unwelcome on many Catholic campuses, including some notable conservative Catholic campuses (though only in an unwritten and informal way, I am told, so they won’t risk losing any big donors).

One of the main problems is that there’s been a rigorously observed media blackout among neoconservative Catholic publications on the serious problems posed by the Legion of Christ, Regnum Christi, and Nuestro Padre. This is perhaps a story in itself.

The Legion’s tentacles are far-reaching, as many staunchly conservative Catholics who have been burned by the Legion or Regnum Christi are afraid to speak out, for fear of retribution.

But thankfully, many talked on the record with Jason Berry and Gerald Renner. My advice is: Read the book and then make up your own mind.

Michael S. Rose is author of several books including the New York Times bestseller Goodbye, Good Men. He is Web Editor of the NOR.

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It Pays to Be Friends With the Legionaries of Christ & Commonweal
March 2005

The Legionaries of Christ have rallied several prominent neoconservative Catholics to their cause, particularly in defending its Founder and Superior General, Fr. Marcial Maciel, against well-substantiated charges by eight former Legionaries (when they were boys) that Maciel pressured them into having sex with him. Given the credibility of the accusers and the seriousness of the allegations, if Maciel were a priest in the U.S. today (he resides outside the U.S.), he would, under the U.S. Bishops’ Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, be relieved of his ministerial duties.
Both the Legionaries and the neoconservative Catholics have reputations for being preoccupied with money and power. (The Legionaries, still a small order, are one of the richest organizations in the Church.) So it’s a match made in Heaven -well, maybe not Heaven. Anyhow, it’s quite certain that the neocon Catholics who defend Maciel have never met with the eight accusers of Maciel (who are not seeking any money), so the testimonies of the neocons hinge only on their status and fame. (In early January it became known that the Holy See was reopening its investigation into the multiple sexual charges against Maciel. A few weeks later, Maciel resigned as head of the Legionaries -citing his age, if you can believe that. The Legionaries’ paper, the National Catholic Register, reported that Maciel was stepping down because of age, but, as of this writing, has never said anything about the Holy See’s new investigation of Maciel.)

Among the neocons defending Maciel is -wouldn’t you just know it! -Deal Hudson, a sho ’nuff sexual predator.

Later, when the story broke about Hudson’s sexual predation on a vulnerable young girl, Cara Poppas (for an overview, see the New Oxford Note, The Crisis at Crisis Magazine (Part II), Nov. 2004), the Register (Sept. 5-11, 2004), was quick to defend Hudson with a slanted news story titled A Bad Deal for Deal Hudson. The story claimed that the sexual misconduct charges against Hudson were merely allegations -when they were absolutely true -and goes on to suggest that Joe Feuerherd, the author of the story on Hudson, was guilty of committing the sin of detraction. The Register quotes from the Catechism (#2477): Respect for the reputation of persons forbids every attitude and word likely to cause them unjust injury. But the Register omits what No. 2477 says specifically about detraction: He is guilty of detraction who, without objectively valid reason, discloses another’s faults and failings to persons who did not know them. Aha!

Hudson has been a highly public figure in the Washington, D.C., crowd and in Catholic circles. There was indeed a valid reason to warn young girls about Hudson. There are girls and women working at Crisis. And Hudson goes on speaking tours; he’s a charismatic personality and young women need to beware. When the story quickly broke on the Internet about Hudson’s sexual predation, parents were saying that they didn’t want their daughters to go anywhere near Deal Hudson. Parents and young women certainly had a right to know. What was revealed was certainly not detraction. (Curiously, the Legionaries have branded the sexual predation charges against Maciel as detraction. Not reassuring.)

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HOPE FOR THE CHURCH?
The Legion of Chris

By Cecilia H. Martin
May 2005

In the unsettled atmosphere of a Church rocked to the core by clerical sexual abuse scandals, and facing a dearth of priestly vocations, Catholics anxiously cast about for signs of hope. One of those signs has been the Legion of Christ. Spurred on by Pope John Paul II’s approval of Fr. Marcial Maciel, the Legion’s founder, the Rome-based religious order has made inroads in U.S. Catholic circles. Founded in Mexico in 1941 by Maciel when he was a seminarian, the Legion now claims 500 priests, another 2,500 seminarians, 11 universities, and over 150 prep schools worldwide. Legionary priests serve in the U.S., operating a seminary and novitiate in Connecticut. The lay movement associated with the Legion is called Regnum Christi.
But today the luster surrounding the Legion is tarnishing. There are bitter skirmishes between Legionaries and laity over schools. Three U.S. dioceses have forbidden the Legion to operate within their environs: the Dioceses of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Columbus (Ohio), and Baton Rouge. The Legion and Regnum Christi are coming under fire from former members, who accuse the order of manipulation, mind-control, deceptive tactics, and cult-like practices. Former Legionaries and Regnum Christi members have formed a network called ReGAIN. Through ReGAIN’s website, which features news articles and personal testimonies, members say they seek to inform the public of the nature of the Legion’s policies and practices as well as provide healing for those psychologically damaged by the order. The most explosive situation for the Legion of Christ, however, involves the charges made by a number of former Legionary priests that Fr. Maciel sexually abused them for years, beginning when they were children in the Legion’s minor seminaries.

In the U.S., the Legion has led an almost subterranean existence in Connecticut since the mid-1960s. Very little was known about the order until the early 1990s, when a Hartford Courant journalist, Gerald Renner, attempted to interview Fr. Anthony Bannon, the Legion’s National Director, for a story on the Legionary seminary. Bannon’s unexpected refusal to talk piqued Renner’s interest, and he began to look more closely at the order. When Renner wrote an article about the Legion in a March 25, 1996, issue of the Courant, he began receiving phone calls about the secretive seminary in Connecticut. After meeting with several former seminarians, all of whom complained of being ensnared in a closed system and subjected to fierce control and brainwashing, Renner wrote more extensively about the Legion’s practices.

In 2002, when the Boston Globe blew the lid off the policy of sexual abuse cover-ups by many Catholic bishops nationwide, hundreds of victims came forward with charges of sexual abuse by clerics. The majority involved homosexual priests assaulting teenage boys. Similar cases appeared in Ireland, Canada, and Australia, where an identical policy of hierarchical cover-up and ongoing transfer of offending clerics also prevailed. In Italy, however, few if any such reports came to light. Journalists claim that non-English-speaking countries, such as Mexico, Spain, and Italy -where the Legion is based -operate under different legal codes, making facts about abuse cases difficult to obtain.

The charges against Fr. Maciel involve nine men (one now dead), all former Legionaries. For some, the alleged abuse began when they were barely 12 years of age, and continued until the men were in their mid-20s. Much of the abuse took place in Mexico, Spain, and Italy. Two of the men, Mexican Fr. Juan Vaca and Spanish Fr. Felix Alarcon, served the Legion in America. Fr. Alarcon opened the Legion of Christ center in Connecticut in 1965 and Fr. Vaca served for five years as the U.S. Legion Director before leaving the order. Three of the nine filed a canonical suit against Maciel and have been waiting years for it to be heard. (The Legion, of course, denies all charges against Maciel. See legionaryfacts.org.)

Just after this past Thanksgiving, the Pope publicly honored Fr. Maciel at ceremonies in Rome. But in the first week of January 2005, it was reported that Msgr. Charles J. Scicluna, a canon lawyer working as Promoter of Justice for the Vatican’s Congregation for the Defense of the Faith, stated that the long-standing case of former Legionaries, who have accused Fr. Maciel of molesting them when they were in the Legion’s minor seminary, could be reopened. Few Catholics know that the National Catholic Register, a weekly newspaper, is owned by the Legion. To date, the Register has refused to report on the Holy See’s new investigation of Maciel.

Determining the guilt or innocence of Father Maciel and investigating the practices of his order, an order that that enjoys enormous power and influence in the Church is crucial. Failing to make an investigation of the credible charges by former Legionary priests would tear at the very integrity of the Church whose duty it is to justice and protect her most vulnerable members.

In 2004, Catholic journalist Gerald Renner and Jason Berry published Vows of Silence

The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II. The book is a two-part account of the lives of two very different priests, American Dominican Father Thomas Doyle, and Mexican Legion of Christ founder, Father Marciel Maciel. Doyle was the priest who, in the mid-eighties, warned the U. S. Bishops of the explosive nature of the on-going cover-up of abuser priests. Having given up a Vatican diplomatic career, Father Doyle has embraced the cause of justice for the victims while Father Maciel has carefully built an enormously wealthy empire in the heart of the Roman Catholic Church despite serious accusations leveled against him.

When the scandals erupted in 2002, it came as no surprise to Gerald Renner, whose articles about the Legion of Christ began appearing in the Hartford Courant in 1996. One day a priest notified Renner with a tip about Father Maciel’s aberration. He asked Renner to contact Jason Berry. Berry, a New Orleans journalist, covered the 1984 case of the Rev. Gilbert Gauthe, who was criminally charged with sexually molesting eleven boys in the Lafayette diocese. Berry wrote about the case in a 1992 book, Lead us Not into Temptation.

Following the publication of his book, Berry was contacted by former Legionary Arturo Jurado, who in a disturbing interview told him of terrible things Father Maciel had done to him and others. Renner and Berry teamed up to begin what turned out to be an in-depth look at the United States Bishops’ policies, and the charges against the Mexican order. Their six-year investigation of Fr. Maciel and the Legion took them from Mexico City across the Atlantic to the Vatican offices in Rome with multiple points stops in between. The result was Vows of Silence.

Carl Cannon, White House correspondent for the National Journal says in his review,Vows of Silence is a must read investigative journalism at its best, tracking abuses that were decades in the making and go far beyond the American clergy, with responsibility at the highest levels of the Vatican. The book is painstakingly researched, beautifully written and gives sweeping historical context on issues of specific, current relevance. If this were fiction, it would be a chilling narrative. Alas, it is contemporary human history, brought to you by the two American authors who know more about this subject than anyone else writing about it.

For Catholics longing for orthodoxy, reverent liturgies, a renewed emphasis on devotion, and disciplined Catholic schools, the Legion has seemed an answer to their prayers. The sight of handsome, young men with impeccable manners striding about in black cassocks and imbued with the vision of John Paul II is irresistible. When the Legion of Christ seminarians and priests began courting prosperous, conservative American Catholics — a practice begun in Mexico that has earned them there the dubious title of the millionaires of Christ — formerly disillusioned Catholics poured money into the order, hoping that sanity was returning to the Church.

Supporters and members of the Legion point to the large number of vocations as positive fruit. But critics charge seminary students are denied any true discernment of their vocations. Instead, through mind-control tactics, the young boys are skillfully recruited and become totally owned by the order — body, mind and soul. The stories coming out of Georgia, Connecticut, Minnesota, Texas and other states are multiplying and becoming harder to ignore. At the least, the testimonies of devout lay parents who have lost their sons and daughters to a tightly closed system that replaces their familial role with that of the order are heartbreaking accounts deserving of attention. Is the Legion truly the hope of the Church, or a Machiavellian deception that threatens it? The question begs for an answer.

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Multiple-Choice Question
February 2000

On October 30, 1999, a prominent Catholic exhorted a gathering of approximately 8,000 people to remember that woman is the greatest creature God has made. Duh, we don’t remember that. So we checked around and found that no one else remembers either. Not even the Pope remembers. As recently as his November 24, 1999, General Audience he reiterated a favorite theme of his: man and woman. both are equally God’s masterpiece (L’Osservatore Romano, Dec. 1, 1999). Anyhow, here’s the multiple-choice question:

Who made that woman-is-the-greatest statement? Fr. Richard McBrien, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Fr. Andrew Greeley, Fr. Hans Kung, Frances Kissling, Archbishop Rembert Weakland, Sr. Joan Chittister, or Fr. Marcial Maciel?

The correct answer is Fr. Maciel, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ and its lay arm Regnum Christi, both widely regarded as orthodox Catholic organizations. Where did he say it? In his keynote address at Regnum Christi’s International Youth and Family Encounter at the World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia.

How do we know this? It was unblushingly reported in the National Catholic Register (Nov. 28-Dec. 4), a paper controlled by the Legionaries of Christ, in an article by the Register’s own correspondent, Jay Dunlap.

The rest of Fr. Maciel’s address, at least going by the report in the Register, did not raise our eyebrows -indeed, it was quite good. So why did Fr. Maciel say that woman is the greatest creature God has made? Was it just empty flattery for the girls and womenfolk? Or was he thoughtlessly pandering to the Zeitgeist?

Or did he really mean it? Was he somehow trying to propose a new doctrine? If so -yikes!