Child abuse case reaches to the Vatican

[Pah]

Catholic hero now faces Vatican inquiry

Mexican founder of secret order at centre of child abuse allegations

Jo Tuckman in Mexico City
Sunday February 6, 2005
The Observer

Complete article

It was nearly 50 years ago, but José Barba winces as he remembers Father Marcial Maciel, founder and icon of the Legion of Christ, the secretive Roman Catholic order said to be second only in papal influence to Opus Dei.

Barba wants the church to recognise publicly the crimes he and many others claim Maciel committed. 'We want people to know that the founder of an institution so close to the Pope and who has written so much about chastity is in fact a pederast.'

Along with seven other former seminarians - all now in their sixties - this mild-mannered university lecturer has been trying to get the Vatican to investigate Maciel for years. Several of the eight plaintiffs approached bishops as early as the 1960s, only to be told to leave it all in God's hands. One of the group, Juan José Vaca, sent several complaints to the Vatican and got no response. The group lodged formal charges at the Vatican in 1998. A year later they were informed the case had been shelved with the extra-official justification that their suffering could not compare to the risk of disillusioning thousands of Catholics.

Maciel picked out his favourite pupils and took them to study, first in Franco's Spain and then in Rome. They lived in tightly controlled isolation, instilled with the belief that their leader was the epitome of holiness. But at the same time as preaching the strictest moral code for others, Maciel allegedly indulged an addiction to morphine and a warped sexuality.

Initiation typically began, the plaintiffs claim, with Maciel saying he had an illness in his groin. 'He would say he had received special dispensation from the Pope to have nuns massage out the pain, but that his total commitment to his chastity vows obliged him to ask us for help instead,' recalled Vaca, in a telephone interview from New York, where he teaches psychology in Mercy College. Vaca claims he was abused from the age of 12 until he was 24. He became a priest and stayed in the legion for a further 15 years.

The defining moment came, he says, when he was promoted to be head of the Legion in the US as a reward for successfully covering up a case of abuse involving one of his colleagues.