Hurting in the Church. Fr. Thomas Berg
new and more effective methods, to provoke and spearhead a renewal of the Catholic priesthood, to forge new inroads in apostolic efficacy—in a word, the Legionaries were going to play a decisive role in ushering in an era of vitality, youth, energy, action, and “results” in the Church.
I was twenty-one. I had discerned a vocation to the priesthood. I wanted to fully abandon myself to Jesus Christ and his Church. And in my mind, I could not be better positioned to do just that, and to make a lasting contribution to this great project—the New Evangelization—than as a member of the Legionaries.
Those convictions about my religious community, and about my life within that community, began to be challenged eleven years later. In February 1997, nine former Legionaries of Christ went public with allegations of sexual abuse against the Legion’s founder, Marcial Maciel Degollado.
I was studying in Rome at the time, not yet ordained a priest. To most of us within the congregation, this news was a bombshell. Yet we were somewhat shielded from the impact since we were not allowed, under obedience, to read the story itself (which had been published in the Hartford Courant). We were forbidden to seek out information from anyone outside of the congregation and discouraged from speaking about the matter even with our own superiors. And we were certainly not to discuss it among ourselves.
I, along with a few others, had access at the time to the newly emerging internet, but our access was controlled by a gatekeeping mechanism that required users to obtain permission for every site they wanted to visit. Under obedience, our superiors required us to forgo reading such articles and information that might otherwise come into our hands—a limited possibility anyway since our mail was screened and newspapers were edited before being left in the reading rooms. Anything deemed inappropriate (on any matter, not just news of Maciel) was clipped out by the superior.
Like any and all negative things that were ever publicly expressed about the Legion and could get to our ears, this bombshell, too, was quickly diffused and channeled into a void of internal congregational silence.
We knew the drill. If you considered yourself a faithful member of the congregation, you would strive internally to set aside any curiosity on the matter. Besides, throughout our years of formation, we had absorbed the congregation’s narrative according to which, “enemies” of the Legion had time and time again plotted against Maciel, attempting to oppose “God’s plan” for the congregation. Time and time again, those attempts were thwarted by “divine providence.”
And according to that narrative, enemies of the congregation had lowered themselves to make untoward accusations about the founder as early as the 1950s. We heard that he had been accused of an addiction to painkillers, that he had engaged in questionable relationships with a young woman or two in Mexico, but each of these had its explanation: each was an attack, a lie aimed at discrediting Maciel and stopping the progress of the Legion. That narrative—of Maciel, the saintly founder, continually bearing the cross of defamation and inexplicable hatred, his lot in life as founder of this new work of God—was the very backbone of our self-understanding as a congregation.
So, in February 1997, by default, most Legionaries grappled to fit these new accusations into that narrative. I tried as well, and worked hard at it. Yet from that moment on, I struggled with periods of doubt about the congregation. I kept those doubts to myself for years, and my subconscious worked hard to bury them. But my faith in the congregation began to erode ever so slowly until its utter collapse twelve years later.
Meanwhile, the Legion published a statement vigorously denying the allegations and calling into question the motivations and moral integrity of the accusers. For my part, I did in fact seek as much information from the superiors as they were willing to give me about the whole situation, and particularly about the accusers.
My own interactions with Maciel had been limited in comparison with those of other Legionaries, never longer than an hour or two at a time, mostly while I was studying in Rome and later as a Legionary priest in New York. These were always in the company of at least a few others. Based on these experiences, and with my interior life nourished by reading spiritual letters we believed he had written, I thought I knew this man.2 And I loved him as a spiritual father. We would refer to him as “Nuestro Padre,” our father founder—an expression which, when in print, would always be written with a capital N and a capital P.
From 1997 onward and into the first years of my priesthood, and bolstered by my own psychological defense mechanisms, I worked hard at sustaining—both for myself and others—the grand narrative of our heroic founder and the divinely assisted establishment of the congregation. But so did the vast majority of Legionaries, including most of the superiors. In so doing, we were unwittingly keeping ourselves immersed in a kind of parallel universe: we were all protagonists in this great, providential work of God—our congregation. We were called “to build up the Legion” (“hacer Legión”). Such was the Kool-Aid we drank, and it was readily available.
Seven long years would pass before the Holy See would reopen its investigation of Maciel in 20043 and determine, within the course of a months-long investigation, that the primary accusations against Maciel were credible, principally, that he had, in fact, engaged in sexual misconduct, including the sexual abuse of several of the Legion’s first seminarians, and committed the canonical crime of giving sacramental absolution to at least one of the victims he abused.4 A communiqué from the Vatican Press Office on May 19, 2006, read in part:
After having submitted the results of the investigation to an attentive study, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under the guide of its new Prefect, His Eminence Cardinal William Levada, decided—taking account of the advanced age of the Reverend Maciel and his delicate health—to renounce any canonical process and to invite the Father to a reserved life of prayer and penance, renouncing every public ministry. The Holy Father [Pope Benedict XVI] has approved these decisions.
After Maciel’s death in 2008, there came more revelations: Maciel had, in fact, been addicted to painkillers for years and had enlisted a close circle of trusted Legionaries to obtain a steady supply of drugs for him. In addition to sexually abusing young seminarians, he had fathered at least three children: a daughter (by one woman) and two sons (by another woman). The latter two have alleged that Maciel sexually abused them as children.
Maciel was, in actuality, a colossally enigmatic individual—a sociopathic sexual omnivore who presented to a broader public the credible persona of a religious leader and reformer, friend of popes, and darling of much of the Roman curia, who secretively used the Catholic religious order he founded to feed his lusts.
Subsequently, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, ordered an “apostolic visitation” of the Legionaries in 2009—a close scrutiny of all Legionary houses of formation and apostolate conducted by a team of bishops appointed by the pope. Following that visitation, early in July 2010, Cardinal Velasio de Paolis was named papal delegate to the Legionaries of Christ to shepherd the congregation through a “process of profound re-evaluation” as mandated in a communiqué from the Holy See to the Legionaries in early May of that same year.
Maciel had roused the suspicions of at least two major superiors as early as 2004. For its part, the Holy See, in May 2006 had already disciplined Maciel, consigning him to “a life of prayer and penance,” the outcome of its own independent investigation of Maciel, completed in late 2005, which had already deemed credible the principal accusations made against him. Father Álvaro Corcuera (then general director of the Legionaries, who succumbed to a brain tumor in 2014) had been summoned to a meeting at the Vatican in March 2006 and was informed of this outcome.
From that moment on, every member of the congregation had a fundamental right to know the truth regarding their revered founder. Moreover, the very good of the Church demanded an immediate and transparent communication