Details of Maciel come to light

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Newly opened archives of Pope Pius XII have shed new light on claims that the World War II-era pontiff remained silent about the Holocaust. But they also provide details about another contentious chapter in Vatican history: the scandal over the founder of the Legionaries of Christ.

Entire books have already been written about the copious documentation that reached the Holy See in the 1940s and 1950s, showing that its officials had evidence of the Rev. Marcial Maciel’s dubious morals, drug use, financial recklessness and sexual abuse of his young seminarians.

Yet it took the Holy See more than half a century to sanction Maciel, and even longer to acknowledge that he was a religious fraud and con man who sexually abused his seminarians, fathered three children and built a secret, cult-like religious order to hide his double life.

The newly opened archives of Pius’ papacy, spanning from 1939 to 1958, add some new details to what has been in the public domain, as they include documentation previously unavailable from the Vatican’s secretariat of state.

They confirm that Pius’s Vatican was cracking down on Maciel in 1956 and was prepared to take even harsher measures against him, including removing him from the priestly ministry altogether, but that Pius’s death in 1958 allowed Maciel’s supporters to take advantage of the leadership vacuum to save his name and order.

Real evidence

In 2012, some of Maciel’s Mexican victims posted online more than 200 documents spanning the years 1940-2002 detailing the Vatican’s evidence of Maciel’s depravities, but also how decades of bishops, cardinals and popes turned a blind eye.

Now new documents from the Vatican’s central governing office are fleshing out that story, providing more details about who in the Vatican helped Maciel and who sought to take a harder line, as Pope Pius XII was taking.

The draft is significant because it shows that in 1956, at least some in the Vatican took seriously reports that had reached Rome that Maciel was sexually abusing his young seminarians and wanted to protect them — and wanted to punish Maciel with one of the Church’s harshest penalties.

However, it was not until 2006 that the Vatican finally sentenced Maciel to a comparatively light sentence of “a lifetime of penance and prayer” for sodomizing his young recruits.

Maciel Scandal

Marcial Maciel was accused of sexual abuse and died in 2008 without being tried by the Vatican.

Power and impunity

The priest became a figure of power and influence in the Catholic Church, and was able to act with impunity between 1940 and 1960, sexually abusing minors, mostly men. Maciel fathered four children with several women, and in 2006 Pope Benedict XVI ordered him to retire to a life of “prayer and penance.”

Accept the facts

After decades, the Legionaries of Christ organization admitted that its founder sexually abused 60 minors, according to a report published by the institution in December 2019. According to an investigation, most of the victims were children between 11 and 16 years old. Seminarians are also said to have abused minors.

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