Here
I believe you, Father Connor, New Director General, but Help Thou my Unbelief![ii]:
Your ongoing efforts to outreach -at this late hour- the seven living “classical victims” of Fr. Maciel’s pedophilia[iii] might be considered right and just. Maciel, the Imposter Founder, whose favorite entertainment was to initiate the pubescent seminarians into their budding sexuality, for his pleasure and control. He got off scot free, thanks to his accomplices, in the Legion of Christ and in the Vatican.
And what are you up to, my good man? – I hesitate to call you “Father”, because God only knows how you, the Director General, became a Reverend, traveling fast along the conveyer belt of the Legion of Christ, bereft of real discernment, and blest only by the adulterated Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola currently usurped by your Federation.
Being an “American” -as the inhabitants of that country call themselves -appropriating the name of the Continent- you will know what is meant by damage control, or image control.
Image control for those outside: The Vatican cardinals, bishops, and Monsignors who you win over with adulation and money; the public, the parents, the benefactors, the unsuspecting generous and naïve youth you groom to join the ranks.
Damage control for those inside: Legionaries and members of Regnum Christi, men and women, new recruits, troops young and old in varying stages of allegiance, and those who should have left but hesitated, and now have one foot in the grave.
The reader can benefit from one recent example of the organization’s damage control, otherwise called Information Control, in the words of cult expert, ex-Moonie, Steven Hassan. This could also be called Indoctrination. The Federation, or Legion of Christ members, are conducting secret classes on the History of the Legion of Christ/Regnum Christi Federation in many of the houses of the “consecrated women” of the Regnum Christi Lay Movement: code name, 3gf. This history, naturally, will be “The Official Story.” Before being privy to this special (rewritten) history, the members are made to sign a letter vowing they will not divulge to “outsiders” the content of the instructions.
All this while Fr. Connor is outreaching the seven remaining original victims of Founder, Marcial Maciel, sending them friendship gifts of five to eight thousand dollars. (In order to mollify them and make them more amenable to compensation under the Legion of Christ/Regnum Christi Federation’s terms).
The number of Maciel’s sexual abuse victims are more than these seven or ten. Victim Juan José Vaca had already named twenty victims he knew about in 1979[iv]. So what about the other twelve? and The Legion has recently admitted Maciel abused sixty -anonymous- boys[v] What about the other forty?
Why go to all the trouble for these seven? Because these were the ones who spoke out. These are the native Spanish-speakers that Jason Berry and Gerald Renner gave an English-language voice to on that fateful 23rd February 1997. These are the ones who threw mud at the Rev. Marcial Maciel, the immaculate founder. These are the ones who brought their case to Rome, jumping through all the painful and complex canonical procedures. And were heard. Finally in 2005, Pope Benedict XVI acted against the untouchable Maciel, stymying thus his cause for sainthood. These are the ones who went public and cast doubt on the Legion of Christ, and kept hanging like a dead albatross around the newly named Regnum Christi Federation’s neck.
I know, John, that you need to get them to shut up, once and for all. Pay them off from your billion dollar budget.
But think again: that dastardly debasement of the innocent Mexican and Spanish boys constitutes a stain that will not go away. Queen-Macbeth-Legion cannot wash it from her hands[vi]. But she will try, beginning with perfumed Easter Soaps of five to eight thousand dollars. Could have been thirty pieces of silver…seventy years later…
[i] https://www.amazon.com/Twenty-Fifth-Hour-C-Virgil-Gheorghiu/dp/B0006ASHFO
[ii] Mk 9,24
[iii] https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-marcial-maciel-02-1997-story.html First there were ten: one died in strange circumstances while hospitalized in Mexico City (Juan Manuel Fernández Amenábar), one was bribed by Maciel just before the Hartford Courant Article appeared (Miguel Díaz); then there were eight; one of these already reached a settlement with the then Director General, Fr. Álvaro Corcuera, R.I.P.
[iv] https://todomaciel.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/un-testimonio-definitivo/
[v]The Legion has recently admitted that there were scores:
[vi] She says: Out, damned spot! out, I say! – One: two: why, then, ’tis time to do’t. – Hell is murky! – Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? – Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? (Macbeth by William Shakespeare, Act V, Scene 1)