Legionary professions at Cheshire

On Saturday, August 29 a group of young Legionaries took their religious vows. Here are notes of a friend’s impressions after the ceremonies:

Today at 11am was the day of religious professions for the Legion in Cheshire, Connecticut, at St. Bridget’s Church, which is downtown Cheshire a few miles or so from the seminary. It was chilly and a little wet. Aside from knowing one of the brothers I was anxious to see also how they would handle the whole thing given the circumstances.

There were 23 brothers making first religious vows, 6 renewing their vows, and 6 taking their final vows. They made these vows in these three groups in the middle of Mass.

Father Corcuera himself presided, and said Mass, and gave the homily. There was also a bishop there in attendance, though he wasn’t introduced at Mass and nobody I asked really knew who he was. Many Legionary priests were there, of course, including, I think, the territorial leaders.

They still sprinkle in little commentaries at various points in the Mass they way they used to do with passages from Father Maciel. I didn’t recognize any passages from him today. One talked about how the parents were bringing up the gifts to the altar, symbolizing the sacrifice the parents make to give their children to religious life. There were many fervent Regnum Christ families, women in veils, families kneeling on the marble floor. The church was packed.

I wanted to know how the scandal would be handled, so that’s what I will emphasize. It was not mentioned directly at all, of course, but a lot of what Father Alvaro was saying seemed to relate to it very closely. Here is what Father Alvaro said in his homily, I think pretty accurately as we brainstormed a little to see how much we remembered. We didn’t take notes, but some people were, hanging on his every word. He apologized for his English, but it wasn’t really necessary. He spoke pretty well in English, but some of it wasn’t necessarily perfectly clear.

He began the sermon by saying, thank you all for being here. What a note said to me at a Legionary house where I’m staying, I say also to you, thank you for being here. Thank you to the priests for making the Eucharist possible. Thank you families for being willing to be here. Thank you brothers who are professing, for your witness. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

He said, we are closer to God than ever, because everything works together for the good. We now have pains and difficulties and tears, but we trust in God. Jesus lost everything on the cross but gained everything. “Vale la pena!” The pain is worth it!

He said that he was reading about Saint Francis of Assisi last month. Francis once had a terrible temptation, he lost his happiness and thought God had abandoned him, but he learned that was when God was closest to him. A dark night of the soul, indeed. But the darkest night is when we know God loves us the most.

He talked about how on his recent visit to the Holy Land he prayed in the garden of Gethsemane in front of a 2000 year old olive tree that could have been there with Jesus. In his prayers that day he came to understand how much Jesus suffered. Jesus didn’t know how he could do it and he felt in that prayer that he didn’t know how he was going to get through all this. But suffering leads to the cross and to the resurrection.

He preached on the first reading, the one in which God calls Samuel and he says, “here am I Lord.” This is what the professing brothers have said to the Lord themselves. He joked, sometimes I wish I could go back to sleep until the Lord calls. But that’s not possible. This got a lot of laughter.

He said, I believe, we are sorry for not understanding the suffering of others. We accept our suffering and unite it to the suffering of others. We know that all suffering is united to the suffering of Christ on the cross. We are sorry for what we have done, past, present, and future, yes, even the future, because we know we are weak, and will always be in need of God’s mercy. We are always grateful to God for the Legion and for the Movement.

He ended by saying, and I think this is pretty much a direct quote, “Thank you all again. Thank you for being willing all to be in the same boat. In a storm, you love the boat even more.”

Of course the scandal was not mentioned directly, but Father Alvaro gave the impression in his words of being not so happy with the situation he was in – dark night of the soul, he wished he could just go to sleep, he doesn’t know how he’ll get through the Gethsemane -- and of being very, very grateful to those who are sticking with the Legion. He kept on saying, thank you from the bottom of our hearts. He does have such a beaming and smiling personality.

At the end of the Mass we said the “Prayer for the pope,” “…in your presence I renew my unconditional loyalty to your vicar on earth, the pope. In him you have chosen to show us the safe and sure path…”

Father Corcuera gave a conclusion more prepared than the homily. It was in Spanish and read in translation immediately also again in English by another Father. Again, paraphrasing I think pretty accurately, he said, again, thank you to everyone, from the bottom of our hearts. We ask pardon. And we begin asking forgiveness for ourselves by forgiving others. We love our superiors and thank them for their fidelity. We also forgive our superiors, even our general director. This got a big laugh.

He spoke again of the boat. One section of consecrated women have a model boat and keep thinking, you love the boat even more in a storm. We are safe as apostles in a storm with Christ in the boat. The devil is the enemy of the church and wants to destroy her. We read in the Apocalypse reading a couple weeks ago on the feast of Assumption that the devil swept the stars out of the sky. Let’s not let him sweep the stars out of the sky, but let’s let him sweep the stars all over the sky, so that they give more light to everyone.

He and the bishop walked out down the aisle. Father Alvaro spoke to almost everyone along the aisle, it took a while. One young girl a couple rows back, after meeting him, went, wow!

Cardinals and coverups

Subtle Legionary theologians are working out the distinction between Father Maciel’s unedifying private life and Legionary “mystique,” their idiosyncratic word for religious “charism,” apparently less concerned with the damage their scandal more and more seriously is inflicting on the wider Church.

As exlcblog made us aware last week, Sanjuana Martínez reported in CIMAC that one of the babymommies alleges that Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican Secretary of State, is implicated in the payment of hush money. That would make for a stupendous scandal if the churchman organizing the apostolic visitation had been previously involved in silencing witnesses, especially after calling for “transparency” in the letter announcing the visitation.

I do not and will not believe that allegation without further evidence. But I wondered if either she or Martínez could have meant to name rather the emeritus Secretary of State, Angelo Sodano, whom we know to have been at the service of the Legionaries in the past.

Now Dean of the College of Cardinals, Sodano in 1999 intervened against the group of Maciel’s victims who were seeking a canonical hearing, according to their lawyer. In May 2005 Sodano’s Secretariat of State issued an unsigned document denying that the CDF investigation begun by Cardinal Josef Ratzinger was even underway, which the Legionaries then used to claim publicly that Maciel had been cleared, as in the May 29-June 4, 2005 story in the National Catholic Register, "Vatican Exonerates Legion's Founder."

In March 2006 Sodano was himself found sending a secret, misleading letter through a surrogate to make life difficult for Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, in the matter of the reappointment of Cardinal Camillo Ruini as Vicar of Rome.

Speaking of misleading leaks, the new reports of the massiveness of Father Maciel’s corruption make the shock professed by Legionary leadership in February seem insincere and their approach then seem just another in a long series of attempts at covering up: surface the one daughter, plausibly spin that it was a one-time indiscretion, and try to move on.

A source representing the thought of Cardinal Franc Rodé, head of the Vatican Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, and foremost Vatican champion of the notion of the existence of a Legionary charism, took this tack with Catholic News Agency in an article on February 8. “An official from the Congregation who spoke with Catholic News Agency” said that the Legionary crisis did not warrant outside intervention.

Those looking for conflicts of interest in the Congregation’s oversight of the Legionaries have noted the presence of Legionary Father Clemens Gutberlet on Rodé’s staff.

Then on Monday, February 23, 2009, Catholic News Agency reported confirmation by “Vatican officials” that Legionary leadership would “release a major statement in response to the controversy surrounding the double life of its founder and the future of the order. The statement will be released on Tuesday ‘or Wednesday at the latest’… The source told CNA that it will be a foundational document that will be decisive in determining future action…”

That leak (was it also from Rodé’s Congregation?) had been coordinated with the showing in some Legionary seminaries that same day, February 23, of a video of Cardinal Rodé encouraging Legionaries.

The source proved incorrect. That statement never was made. But the leak seems part of an attempt to assist the Legionaries to wrap things up quickly and handle the scandal on their own terms. The attempt had involved Catholic News Agency, based in Denver, the archdiocese of current apostolic visitator Archbishop Chaput.

The scenario in which the Legionaries would keep their independence from Vatican oversight did not prevail. Instead, the Legionaries’ statement was deferred and on the next day, Tuesday, February 25, Baltimore Archbishop Edwin O’Brien in his archdiocesan Catholic Review made his famous call for a review of the “very basis of the Legion movement.”

Pope John Paul and this sorry chapter

What a trough of excrement to be tramping through! We read that a lawyer, whose child was molested in a Legionary school in Mexico City, is representing three of Father Maciel’s at least six children in a claim on his estate. Children have been paid vast amounts of money in exchange for their silence. A Vatican Secretary of State is reportedly implicated in the payoffs (though it doesn't seem to me the right one was named). Mothers were underage, one a consecrated woman of Regnum Christi. After statutory rape of the mother, Father Maciel in turn molested one of his own daughters.

I empathize with visitator Bilbao Bishop Blázquez Pérez, who cheerfully resents the ruination of his summer vacation by having to think about the horrible Legionaries of Christ.

The new revelations are good if the revulsion they occasion makes the abolition of the Legionaries that much more likely. There is no theological problem in recognizing that the Church’s official approval of the Legion was an error of judgment, farcical Legionary spokesman Jim Fair to the contrary, who trusts “we will be able to close this sorry chapter in the life of our Congregation, renew our service to the Church, and continue forward in our mission.”

The children’s lawyer, Jose Bonilla, said, “One must remember that the Legion surrounded and was at the disposal of the founder; practically speaking, everything was his.” Yes, that’s the point: sexual predators create an environment for themselves in which to operate and this is what the Legion most authentically was. Those who approved the Legion and fostered it up to now lacked the awareness to understand this. We trust the visitators and those who will dispose of the Legion do not.

The circus nevertheless threatens to distract from the issue more important than Father Maciel’s personal depravity, which, if not fully, we knew about already: accounting for the damage the Legionaries have done to the Church. What interests me is how the scandal now threatens to derail the legacy of Pope John Paul II.

Reportedly, John Paul gave Maciel’s daughter Norma Hilda Rivas her first Holy Communion at the Vatican. Bonilla claims that John Paul knew about the existence of Father Maciel’s children.

I will not believe that before I see evidence. Circumstantially I find it harder to believe that John Paul knew about Father Maciel’s children than that he was taken in by a randy trickster who would not have wished to destroy the illusion of his posture as a holy man. Father Maciel was endlessly introducing Regnum Christi members and others to John Paul.

The journalism of Jason Berry, from the ground-shaking 1997 Hartford Courant article (with Gerald Renner) through “Vows of Silence” in 2004 to his recent pieces in the GlobalPost, has been a crucial service that anyone interested in truth must thank him for. At the same time, he has used the scandal as a stick to beat John Paul over the head with.

What the Legionaries used to say in their vile and dishonest attempt to discredit Berry’s triumphantly vindicated journalism, that he is an enemy of the pope, was distortedly true insofar as Berry has expressed unsympathy for orthodox Catholic understanding in some matters. To have decoupled truth from Gospel witness in its members is one aspect of the disaster the Legionaries have inflicted on the Church. The National Catholic Register used the same voice both to proclaim pro-life and their loyalty to John Paul and to lie in defense of a serial child rapist.

Those of us who revere the writings of John Paul as prophetic for the new millennium must be willing to recognize his personal shortcomings as well as his holiness. We must appropriate, and not ignore and suppress, all negative Berry-esque material about the Legionaries and John Paul. We must live radically in the truth and nevermore cover anything up. It is simply a fact of history that John Paul the Great recommended to the Church a monstrous child abuser as “an efficacious guide to youth.” Shout it out and theologize it rather than let Jason Berry torment us with it.

John Paul himself acknowledged and apologized to many victims of injustice in the history of the Church. The Church may now acknowledge and apologize to the victims of John Paul’s credulity of Father Maciel and the Legionaries.

Let’s see these photographs that Jose Bonilla claims to have and know completely their circumstances, account for what John Paul was told and who said what to him and what he knew.

Let the cause for John Paul’s canonization get to the bottom of all of it before plans move forward for his beatification on the fifth anniversary of his death next April 2.

The Legion is not the only new religious movement that John Paul promoted. Let’s not shrink from the implications of discovering that John Paul’s approval of a movement did not of itself protect its members from becoming uncritical zombie followers of a narcissist.

Father Maciel is now clearly recognized for the monster he was. The discovery of any more children, victims, or imposture will change little. The Legion can be abolished and its priests dispersed to some more beneficial work. What is now at stake is the prophetic legacy of Pope John Paul, who in mistaken friendship gave his support to such a monster.

Is John Paul's temporal administration of the Church, which included his championing of the Legionaries, immune from a John Pauline purification of memory? It would be unworthy of John Paul's courageous legacy to say so.

Piece in the Colorado Independent

“Denver Archbishop Chaput welcomed discontented Legionaries” has appeared on coloradoindependent.com.

See also the longer article about visitator Archbishop Chaput below.

Tom Hoopes’ move

I am aware that the departures from their posts this month of Tom Hoopes, Brendan McCaffery, and Fathers Jonathan Morris, Timothy Mulcahey, and Antonio Rodriguez, did not all necessarily occur in concert and for the same reason, to make them less available to the apostolic visitation.

In any event any suspicion about reasons can only be circumstantial.

I was aware from Tom Hoopes’ email that his move is in fact a “career change… talk[ed] about for years.”

The point I intended below is that, however meant, these sorts of movements inescapably make more difficult the work of the apostolic visitation.

The visitation is limited in its time, money, and investigative resources and will have to be selective in hearing from former Legionaries and former employees if it chooses to hear them at all.

I hope the visitation will manage to hear Tom Hoopes on how he worked for “repentance and change” at the Register, in the words of Father Raymond de Souza, before moving on in his career.

Legionary Movements

[Moved to the top and updated July 22: Father Antonio Rodriguez, for ages academic dean at the Legionary seminary in Cheshire, Connecticut, has removed to Switzerland. How will he now be able to testify to the apostolic visitation about the seminary?

Tom Hoopes, National Catholic Register editor, resigned this week. Together with Brendan McCaffery, Chief Operation Officer for Circle Media, let go last week, these represent decades and decades of experience at the highest level of Legionary operations in Connecticut. Will the visitation seek them out in Kansas or Les Avants-sur-Montreux or wherever or lose forever their testimony?]

[Updated] Life-after-rc the other day reported that there is evidence that the Legionaries have been moving members around possibly to make them less available for the apostolic visitation to interview.

History may be repeating itself: that’s certainly what the Legionaries did in the late summer of 1956 in the face of the first apostolic visitation. Legionary Brother José Domínguez, who had recently helped Father Maciel draft the fourth vow, was moved for the duration to Massa Lubrense on the southern extremity of the Bay of Naples. Brother Saúl Barrales spent nine months of 1957 in the Canary Islands. (See González “Testimonios y documentos inéditos” 278 and Berry and Renner “Vows of Silence” 182.)

In light of that, interesting:

Father Jonathan Morris, formerly vice rector of the Legionary seminary in Rome, is now on sabbatical for six months or more at Old St. Patrick’s in Manhattan. (exlcblog links to the Old St. Patrick’s bulletin with this information.)

Yesterday, July 16, the National Catholic Register’s accountant was let go. This may have been another cost-cutting move – in the downturn the Register became a bi-weekly -- though cost-cutting was not the purpose of the acquisition of Southern Catholic College announced yesterday as well.

Such movements would provoke an important procedural question for the apostolic visitation: will the visitators interview only Legionaries and employees currently in place or will they also seek out former Legionaries, those on sabbatical, and those no longer employed? It’s not as if Father Morris can hide in lower Manhattan, but how can Bishop Versaldi, whose responsibility includes Italy, interview him if he is not in Rome? How will Archbishop Chaput, whose responsibility includes the US, interview him if he is on sabbatical from a Legionary assignment?

Life-after-rc wrote, “surely the AV would recognise such an obvious tactic [as removing witnesses from the visitation’s path].” However, Sandro Magister says that the visitation is to report in the fall. That is discouraging if true, unless what is meant is some sort of preliminary report or first impression. Four or five months would not likely be enough time to sort through well planned Legionary survival strategies, however transparent they be.

Chilean visitator says apostolic visitation expresses “the affection of the Holy Father for the Legionaries of Christ”

Concepción, Chile Archbishop Ricardo Ezzati Andrello, the most recently named of the five bishops who are conducting an apostolic visitation of the Legionaries of Christ, has expressed in Spanish language interviews his opinions on some of the issues that face the investigation.

Archbishop Ezzati traveled to Rome on June 22 to be appointed by Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarciso Bertone to serve on the visitation, first announced publicly on March 31 and scheduled to have gotten under way on July 15.

In an interview with Chile’s national El Mercurio, published July 4, Ezzati spoke about his role:

"I accept [the appointment as apostolic visitator] as a service that the Holy See has entrusted to me, with much responsibility, humility and as a gesture that expresses the affection of the Holy Father for the congregation of the Legionaries of Christ. I assume it with humility, because the charisms of consecrated life are a gift of the Spirit to his Church before which only amazement and welcome are fitting, and with responsibility, because the Church wishes to respond properly to the charisms conveyed for the spiritual good of so many persons."

The purpose of the apostolic visitation, he said, is “to express, through encounter and dialogue, the fatherly closeness and esteem of the Holy Father, who only wishes the spiritual good of the Legionaries of Christ and the fruitfulness of their service to the Church and the world. I believe that the desire of the Holy See is that this visitation offer all those indications and assist them that they serve the fruitful development of that charism."

In fulfilling his mission as apostolic visitator, Ezzati said that "more than in my personal abilities, I trust in the grace of God and the assistance of the Virgin May."

In echoing remarks, published July 9, Legionary spokesman for Chile, Father Alfredo Márquez, welcomed Ezzati’s appointment. He said that the visitation will be “without any doubt a further step, from the hand of the Pope, in continuing our mission in service to the Church. We continue with our apostolic work with much serenity and with a renewed dream to spend our lives for souls." The appointment, he said, is “very important, because [Ezzati] knows the work of the Legion in this country and we know him and we know that he is a great man of the Church."

With his words Archbishop Ezzati interpreted the visitation as a confirmation of the pope’s good feeling, rather than an investigation into allegations of wrongdoing. The word “charism” has been often used by Legionaries to express their belief that they cannot be reformed, because their foundation has been irreformably recognized by the Church, regardless of shortcomings in the personal life of founder Father Marcial Maciel. There has long been a commonly held view in Catholic theology that approval of religious orders by the Church is an infallible judgment, though it has in recent decades been called into question by some theologians.

Ezzati’s interpretation will disappoint those who have called for radical reassessment, even abolition and refoundation, of the Legionaries. These have included Archbishops Collins of Toronto and O’Brien of Baltimore, theologian George Weigel, and former Legionary Father Thomas Berg.

In another interview, three years ago, Ezzati, then an auxiliary bishop in Santiago, adopted publicly a Legionary interpretation when explaining the meaning of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s Communiqué of May 19, 2006. The Communiqué suspended Maciel from public ministry, but its wording was so gentle that it was susceptible to alternative readings by pro-Legionaries as not in fact being a discipline.

In May 2006 Ezzati told El Mercurio that he thought reasonable the eight years that had elapsed between the canonical suit brought before the CDF in 1998 by a group of former Legionaries who accused Maciel of sexual abuse and abuse of the confessional and the day the charges were finally dealt with in 2006:
“The Holy See analyzes carefully the things put under its judgment. Through experience it knows that many accusations are true and that others are not. The respect for the rights of the person requires it to be very responsible, to use the greatest care in dealing with situations to reach conclusions that respect the truth and legal rights.”


Asked how the discipline would affect the Legionaries, he answered:
“Two considerations: one, what the Holy See’s Communiqué states: ‘the worthy apostolate of the Legionaries of Christ and of the Association “Regnum Christi” is gratefully recognized’; and second, what the Legionary declaration [in response to the Communiqué] states: ‘We renew our commitment to work with great intensity to live our charism of charity and extend the Kingdom of Christ serving the Church.’ I hope that the two considerations offer the Legionaries the stimulus necessary to look on with serenity and to commit themselves more and more to the task of making present the person and the message of Jesus in the world today, especially among young people.”

 

“The declaration …emphasizes three things: the fact of the denunciations, the affirmation of innocence by Father Maciel, and their compliance with the decision of the Holy See. It is a logical reaction and one of faith: there is the pain of the accusations made against their father founder, their conviction about his innocence, and their welcoming in the spirit of faith the decision of the Holy See.”

 

Asked what the discipline meant and whether Father Maciel was still entitled to a presumption of innocence, Ezzati answered:
“In the Church there are penal laws and medicinal laws. In this case, ‘bearing in mind Father Maciel's advanced age and his delicate health,’ [the Church] has chosen to invite Father Maciel on the way of ‘a reserved life of penitence and prayer, relinquishing any form of public ministry.’ It is good to remember that the fruitfulness of Christian life is not shown only in the great deeds and gestures that catch public attention. The sanctity that flourishes in enclosed monasteries, in the circumscribed lives of so many elderly, the pain of so many of those who suffer-- their contribution has a incalculable worth for society and for the Church.”

In speaking this way, he used the language characteristic of many pro-Legionaries at the time who interpreted the discipline minimally. These included Mexico City Archbishop Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera and the late American Father Richard John Neuhaus who said of the CDF discipline, “it should be noted that ‘penitence’ in this connection does not connote punishment for wrongdoing.”

The Legionary interpretation of the CDF discipline was agnostic as to whether the CDF had judged Maciel guilty; characteristically omitted the words “independently of the person of the Founder” when quoting the Communiqué’s sentence, "Independently of the person of the Founder, the worthy apostolate of the Legionaries of Christ and of the Association 'Regnum Christi' is gratefully recognized."; and claimed that the discipline was no discipline, but only an invitation to the same prayer and penitence all Christians are called to.

A pro-Legionary stance would make Archbishop Ezzati the new Polidoro van Vlierberghe, the Belgian Franciscan missionary to Chile and future apostolic administrator and territorial prelate of Illapel, Chile. As apostolic visitator in the first visitation of the Legionaries from 1956-8, Polidoro became the advocate for Father Maciel’s versions of events and Legionary savior when the first visitator, whom he succeeded, had wanted radically to reform the Legionaries.

Another Chilean connection: longtime Legionary supporter and troubleshooter Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Vatican Secretary Emeritus of State and Dean of the College of Cardinals, forged his first links with Father Maciel and the Legionaries (as he did as well with Chilean President of the Republic Augusto Pinochet) during his years as apostolic nuncio to Chile, 1977-88. In those years Ezzati was in Santiago directing the Salesian seminary, serving as Salesian superior, and teaching at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.

Archbishop Ricardo Ezzati Andrello is 67, was born in Campiglia dei Berici, a town of Vicenza in the Veneto in northern Italy, educated by the Salesians in Italy and Chile, where he moved when he was 17, and ordained a priest of the Salesians at 28 in 1970. He has long taken an interest in and served on committees regarding education, catechetics, and religious life. He was appointed in 1996 bishop of Valdivia, Chile, in 2001 auxiliary bishop of Santiago, and in 2006 archbishop of Concepción. He was made a Chilean national by special act of Chilean Congress in 2006.

Archbishop Ezzati plans in the event to begin work as apostolic visitator the week of July 27, delayed by pastoral commitments, though he has already met in preliminary way with Legionary superiors in Chile.

Legionary Movement

[Updated] Life-after-rc the other day reported that there is evidence that the Legionaries have been moving members around possibly to make them less available for the apostolic visitation to interview.

History may be repeating itself: that’s certainly what the Legionaries did in the late summer of 1956 in the face of the first apostolic visitation. Legionary Brother José Domínguez, who had recently helped Father Maciel draft the fourth vow, was moved for the duration to Massa Lubrense on the southern extremity of the Bay of Naples. Brother Saúl Barrales spent nine months of 1957 in the Canary Islands. (See González “Testimonios y documentos inéditos” 278 and Berry and Renner “Vows of Silence” 182.)

In light of that, interesting:

Father Jonathan Morris, formerly vice rector of the Legionary seminary in Rome, is now on sabbatical for six months or more at Old St. Patrick’s in Manhattan. (exlcblog links to the Old St. Patrick’s bulletin with this information.)

Yesterday, July 16, the National Catholic Register’s accountant was let go. This may have been another cost-cutting move – in the downturn the Register became a bi-weekly -- though cost-cutting was not the purpose of the acquisition of Southern Catholic College announced yesterday as well.

Such movements would provoke an important procedural question for the apostolic visitation: will the visitators interview only Legionaries and employees currently in place or will they also seek out former Legionaries, those on sabbatical, and those no longer employed? It’s not as if Father Morris can hide in lower Manhattan, but how can Bishop Versaldi, whose responsibility includes Italy, interview him if he is not in Rome? How will Archbishop Chaput, whose responsibility includes the US, interview him if he is on sabbatical from a Legionary assignment?

Life-after-rc wrote, “surely the AV would recognise such an obvious tactic [as removing witnesses from the visitation’s path].” However, Sandro Magister says that the visitation is to report in the fall. That is discouraging if true, unless what is meant is some sort of preliminary report or first impression. Four or five months would not likely be enough time to sort through well planned Legionary survival strategies, however transparent they be.

Can the Legionaries be undone?

Former Legionary Father Thomas Berg said a few days ago: “[We] need to know from the highest Church authority whether there ever really was a genuine charism inspired by the Holy Spirit at work in the Legion and Regnum Christi or whether what the Church has witnessed in the sixty-eight year phenomenon of the Legion was rather God simply drawing much good out of a primarily human and deeply flawed enterprise.”

Current Legionaries, by contrast, to justify their survival have been assuming the traditional theological view that the Church has already, infallibly and irreformably, recognized a genuine charism, when it twice granted the Legion an official approval, a decretum laudis.

The article below “Is Church approval of a religious order an infallible judgment?” sketches the history of that theological question.

I write that:
=Papal approval of religious orders dates from the time of Innocent III (1198-1216) and the controversy over Franciscan charism stimulated formulation of a doctrine of papal infallibility.

=Jesuit theologian Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) became a forcible exponent of the view that “the Pope cannot err in the approval of a religious order.”

=Widely held for almost four centuries, this was, however, never more than a theological opinion and theologians after the two Vatican Councils have now questioned more carefully the scope of infallibility to matters beyond those of revelation itself.

=The apostolic visitation of the Legionaries now underway can, it seems, reverse the decreta laudis if it chooses without affecting the theology of papal infallibility.

I thank Rev. John W. O'Malley, SJ; Prof. Sydney F. Penner; and especially Rev. Francis A. Sullivan, SJ for having helped me prepare this article. They are of course in no way responsible for any errors or for the opinions expressed.

Read “Is Church approval of a religious order an infallible judgment?”.

Is Church approval of a religious order an infallible judgment?

Before concluding the now underway apostolic visitation of the Legionaries of Christ into the unedifying private life of founder Rev. Marcial Maciel and its effects on his institute, the Vatican will face a dilemma: confirm an imposter as nonetheless conveyer of valid charism or revoke a religious institute’s formal approval. The Legionaries, to justify their survival as a congregation without a founder they can look back to as model, informally claim that the approval of their institute and constitutions was an infallible judgment by the Church. And indeed, the view that the Church’s approval of a religious order is irreformable has been a theological commonplace for centuries. But it is now no longer unexamined at a time when theologians question more carefully the scope of infallibility to matters beyond those of revelation itself, the “secondary object of infallibility” as it is called. Starkly has the case of the Legionaries posed in real life a longstanding question in the theology of infallibility.

The Legionaries are approved as a congregation of pontifical right, with a nihil obstat in 1948 under Pius XII, first decretum laudis in 1965 under Paul VI, and final decretum laudis in 1983 under John Paul II. In the way they speak, Legionaries assume that that judgment is irreformable and that their charism, embodied in the approved constitutions, is therefore a concrete reality outside all interference. As Legionary Director of Vocations Rev. Anthony Bannon told donors on March 18, “Our constitutions were approved 25 and a half years ago. At that time it was like the Church took what we were, our constitutions, our charism, out of our hands. It was seen as a charism that came from God… What the church has guaranteed as a valid charism, it also protects.” In an August 2007 lawsuit, the Legionaries claimed their constitutions “proprietary” and “for internal dissemination only” against ReGain, an internet discussion site on which the constitutions had been discussed openly and not treated with the respect due a sanctified object.

The assumption that the approval of the congregation is irrevocable underlies the serenity with which the Legionaries have met disgrace. Father Maciel’s duplicity embodied “the great mystery of how the Holy Spirit can play beautiful melodies on a broken instrument… We count on the closeness and support of the Holy Father and Cardinal Rodé and many other churchmen who appreciate [our] charism,” according to the post-scandal “Guidelines for answering some questions.” Legionary spokesman Jim Fair has said: “whatever our founder's failings, the Holy Spirit somehow delivered the charism to us through him.” Legionary Father Thomas Williams has said that the founder's writings are "an integral part of the charism of the order, which the Church has approved as authentic." Or as all this filtered down to one Regnum Christi member, who wrote, representatively I believe, in an internet comment, “Whatever happens, the Legion and Regnum Christi are approved by the Church. As a Catholic, I trust in the pope's infallibility and in God's mysterious plan.”

To understand what theology Legionaries rely on when they make such assertions and teach others to make them we need to go back in history. It was the Church’s legitimizing, of all things, a new form of religious life, the radical poverty of the mendicant friars, beginning in the late twelfth century, that stimulated formulation of the doctrine of papal infallibility, according to Brian Tierney’s Origins of Papal Infallibility (1972).

Before Innocent III (pope 1198-1216), bishops would approve religious life in their dioceses. After him, the pope approved them for the whole Church, one among many ways in which Innocent regularized Church life, as, for another example, with the canonization of saints. Many groups experimenting with radial Gospel witness, lay and religious, confronted Innocent, who, organized and legal-minded, sought to keep them in the Church after examination and approval. His reconciliation by 1212 of elements of the separated Poor Men, begun in Lyons in the 1170s, was a turning point. Innocent’s administration assumed, if implicitly, that approval of religious groups was exclusively the responsibility of the apostolic see. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) forbade the further founding of new religious orders and the Second Council of Lyons (1274) confirmed the ban, suppressing any previously unapproved.

Francis of Assisi, whose radical poverty intended no obvious subversion of papal authority, sought approval for his new way of life from Innocent in 1210 and Gregory IX (1227-1241) granted approval formally with Quo elongati (1230). Successive papal bulls privileged the Franciscans, exempting them from episcopal oversight; if ever in conflict with a bishop, they could claim the support of the pope, who had authorized their activities. Nicholas III (1227-1280) solidified the Franciscan position with Exiit qui seminat (1279), something of a second foundational constitution, which approved the Franciscan way of life and affirmed it as the way of perfection that Christ had taught the apostles.

Was Exiit irreformable? John XXII (1316-1334) thought not. In Cum inter nonnullos (1323) he condemned the radical Franciscan theory of evangelical poverty, that neither Christ nor the apostles owned anything, which prompted Franciscan theologians, in defense of their charism, to defend Exiit as an irreformable judgment. If Franciscans needed a doctrine of papal infallibility to protect them from Pope John, they revived in its favor the innovative arguments of Franciscan Pietro Olivi (1248–1298), which, according to Tierney, were inextricably bound up with his desire to see Francis’ teaching authenticated. An infallible papacy protected Franciscan charism. As the notion of papal infallibility developed after the fourteenth century, the notion of infallible or inerrant papal approval of a religious institute developed as part of it, becoming the widespread theological opinion.

Dominican theologian Melchior Cano (1509-1560) disputed it and held, in writing about the authority of councils in De Locis Theologicis (5.5.5, 1563), that the Church could err in judgment on mores (both “morals” and “ways of living,” that is, the “secondary object of infallibility”):

The approval of religious orders surely pertains to mores… Undoubtedly some orders have been approved not only uselessly, but even harmfully. In so many orders and institutes religion has been so set back that, among the other remedies for evils, pious men would have rightly and properly expected also this one from a general council: after a few select religious orders have been kept, the others should be ushered off the stage. Church officials are sometimes wrong and imprudent about mores and sometimes the Church approves what it ought not to have approved.

Jesuit theologian Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) here thought Cano gravely mistaken and his cogent and long refutation in De virtute et statu religionis (2.15-18 (from 1608)) and De Fide Theologica (5.8.9 (1621)) remained normative in Catholicism for almost 400 years. Suárez is the foremost theologian of the view that “the Pope cannot err in the approval of a religious order.”

By approving an order, Suárez says, the Church, “after sufficient examination declares that this mode of life is holy, without any error or superstition, and that both in its end and in its means provides a way to perfection.” If earlier forms of religious life, such as that of Augustinians and Benedictines, had been approved locally by local bishops and possessed a universality in the observance of a rule, but not by a universal centralized government, orders after Innocent require papal approval because they were now “instituted for the universal Church, that they spread throughout the whole Church.” Universal approbation can only imply papal approbation.

For the authority of that approbation, Suárez cites distantly Augustine Epistle 118, “to dispute that what the universal Church is doing should be done is an act of the most insolent craziness.” He cites Aquinas in Contra impugnantes Dei cultum et religionem, “Since some religious orders… have been established by the Apostolic See [for many benefits and good works], anyone who tries to condemn one such clearly incurs condemnation himself,” which cites the 465 synodal allocution of Pope Hilary, “It is improper and hazardous for anyone rashly to judge divine constitutions or decrees of the Holy See.” He also cites the agreement of his contemporaries, Jesuit theologians Juan Azor and Gregorio Valencia.

Papal approbation of a religious order is infallibly authoritative because analogous to the canonization of saints, also assisted by the Holy Spirit. The contrary is unthinkable:

If the approval of sanctity by public Church declaration is necessary that saints be honored publicly and universally without danger of error or superstition, similar approval is no less necessary for a congregation and mode of life that the Church proposes as holy and useful for attaining perfection… This special privilege of the Pontifical dignity [approving religious orders] cannot be delegated; just as the Pontiff cannot delegate his power of canonizing saints or of defining some Catholic truth with the assistance of the Holy Spirit.

Robert Bellarmine had noted in De Monachis 4 that the evangelical counsels obviously need no pope’s approval, but the individual modes of life in which those vows are undertaken do. Suárez continues that religious orders have a particular “charism” and that is why they need approval:

[An order requires] the addition of certain observances that make it a particular order or way of life… otherwise there would be no distinction between religious orders… But the danger of error is imminent in what is added through human intention. To avoid this Church approval is necessary.

Altogether Suárez concludes:

The pope’s approval [of a religious order] has divine authority from the special assistance of the Holy Spirit that he is believed to have lest he should err in so serious a matter and therefore the approval has an infallible certainty.

Nineteenth and twentieth century manuals of Catholic theology perpetuated the opinion Suárez had codified. Joseph Wilhelm and Thomas B. Scannell in 1906, reporting Matthias Scheeben's Handbuch der katholischen Dogmatik (1873-87) to the English-speaking world held that the approval of religious orders was one among “many truths… inseparably connected with matters of morals… so connected and interwoven with Revelation that they cannot be separated from it.”

Charles Coppens, SJ in A Systematic Study of the Catholic Religion (1903) says:

…whether the Church utters explicit definitions, or simply performs her quotidianum magisterium, her daily office of instructing the faithful, she frequently judges… that certain systems of education are or are not injurious to faith and morals, that certain societies are immoral, that others are laudable, etc.; else she could not efficiently guide her members in matters necessary to salvation.

Francis A. Sullivan, SJ in De Ecclesia (1962) on the eve of the Second Vatican Council wrote in the tradition of Suárez, to use his own English paraphrase:

the solemn approval of a religious order would be based on a doctrinal judgment that its rule was consonant with the evangelical counsels, and was such as would promote the striving for religious perfection. The underlying argument was that the harmful consequences of the solemn approval of a rule that was not consonant with the evangelical counsels would be such that the Holy Spirit would prevent such an error on the part of the magisterium.

Msgr. Dominique Le Tourneau in “Infallibilty” in The Papacy: an Encyclopedia (1994, English 2002) wrote recently in quite the same terms:

If the magisterium of the Church had no power over [truths within the secondary object of infallibility], it could neither preserve or conveniently explain the truths of salvation that make up its first object. The truths virtually revealed – or secondary object – are: truths of a spiritual order, such as the preambles to the faith, certain truths of a historical order, like the legitimacy of a council or its ecumenical nature; the objective meaning of an article; the canonization of saints; the solemn approval of religious orders; the recognition of a rite and so forth. The Magisterium is infallible in each and every one of its acts.

So to this day we hear the echo of Pietro Olivi: “It is impossible for God to give to anyone the full authority to decide about doubts concerning the faith and divine law with this condition, that He would permit him to err.”

This then is the tradition in which the Legionaries claim Church approval of their order irreformable. Theologians today, however, commonly recognize in that earlier view merely a long-standing theological opinion. Vatican I, confirmed by Vatican II, as is known, delimited the conditions for infallibly rendered judgment. Father Sullivan himself reconsidered the matter and 21 years later in Magisterium: Teaching Authority in the Catholic Church (1983) did not mention the approbation of religious orders as an example of a matter thought to pertain to the secondary object. He wrote there:

While the fact that there is a secondary object of infallibility is held by most Catholic theologians to be certain, there is by no means unanimity with regard to what is contained in this object… many manuals of ecclesiology prior to Vatican II reflected the broad description of the secondary object as ‘truths connected with revelation.’ The current trend would be to limit the object to what is strictly required in order that the magisterium might be able to defend and explain the Gospel.

The careful opinion of Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ (1918-2008) in Magisterium (2007) has been cited often amidst the Legionary crisis and found wide agreement:

Some authors [apparently Suárez and his followers] defend… a kind of ‘practical infallibility’ in papal actions such as the approval of religious institutes. Although the common teaching of theologians gives some support for holding infallibility in these cases, it is difficult to see how they fit under the object of infallibility as defined by the two Vatican Councils.

Sullivan, theology professor at Boston College and past dean of the faculty of theology at the Gregorian in Rome, called my attention in an email to John Paul II’s addition with Ad tuendam fidem (1998) of a new paragraph to canon 750 of the Code of Canon Law that describes the secondary object of infallibility as “each and every proposition required for the sacred preservation and faithful explanation of the deposit of faith.” Sullivan said that in his opinion “a decretum laudis [the formal approval of a religious order] as such is not a doctrinal statement, but it does imply a doctrinal judgment that the rule is consonant with the evangelical counsels. To that extent I think it would enjoy some ordinary, non-definitive magisterial authority delegated from the Pope to the Prefect of the Congregation of Religious.”


A controversial new order gives the impression that the Church has apostatized and that they alone, inspired by the Holy Spirit, constitute the truth. Against the bishops they antagonize they claim for survival an infallibly granted papal support. Fourteenth century Franciscans or early twenty-first century Legionaries? Well, to their credit, the Legionaries never claimed John Paul for the anti-Christ, whose coming Pietro Olivi did fear any pope who relaxed Franciscan rule would hasten. Yet Father Maciel was no St. Francis. And here is one area where the Legionaries, while claiming the vanguard of the Second Vatican Council, maintain a theological view that prevailed before the First Vatican Council, with its counter-Reformation feel. The Council of Trent (in 1563) declined to hinder the Jesuits in any way, approved as they were by the Holy See. The Council of Constance (1415) had condemned the propositions of John Wycliffe that members of religious orders are not members of the Christian religion and that all religious orders were founded by the devil.

Historically the doctrine of papal infallibility has not been always discussed in the abstract, but by critics and proponents who have had a dog in the fight. Fourteenth century Franciscan theologians defended it to defend their existence and charism. John XXII opposed it to oppose a limitation on his sovereignty, his ability to reverse an act of his predecessor. Suárez was explicating papal approval of the Jesuits. In our day, those who feel that popes have decided incorrectly on, say, matters of sexuality and gender are motivated to discern the limits of infallibility’s secondary object. Conservatives who want the Legionaries abolished and re-founded are happy to cite that Avery Dulles passage. It is as paradoxical that rebellious Franciscans, not curial theologians, brought the theory of papal infallibility into the theological mainstream in the thirteenth century as it would be if the conservative Legionaries were to offer an irrefutable counter-example to the opinion that the secondary objects of infallibility include approval of religious orders.

Part of the drama of this apostolic visitation is the backdrop of that 800-year-old question. Baltimore Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien, an outspoken critic of the Legionaries, has said that abolition is something that the visitation may consider and Father Thomas Berg on leaving the Legion allowed that “the serious issues within the congregation will require its thorough reformation if not a complete re-foundation,” but neither was necessarily speaking with any more theological precision on the matter than the Legionary who tells you privately, it’s a good thing we were approved before all this came out, or repeats to seminarians the informal words of Cardinal Franc Rodé, “If the Legion stops practicing its charism, I’ll kill you.”

Father Williams himself has also said, “[We] need a reconfirmation by the church that [the Legion] is something that is good, that is a work of God, and that this has to go on, and not the contrary," though this is something more appropriately said to journalists than donors or the impressionable young. What did Pope Benedict imply on the matter when in 2007 he abolished the fourth Legionary vow never to speak ill of a superior, an element of the once approved constitutions added by an all too recognizable “human intention”? Young men and women who consecrated themselves within the Legion and Regnum Christi trusting it was “a way to perfection” without “error or superstition” and then left it abused, damaged, and faithless will think its Church approval to have been merely a fallible prudential judgment and be unimpressed with any defense of its charismatic constitutions as distinct from the way in which the constitutions were actually lived.

Many Legionaries are endeavoring to carry on with the charism, yet their charismatic obedience to the pope stops short of agreeing in advance to extinction if he should so decide. Evidently confident of their future, they have in recent months agreed to acquire Southern Catholic College in Dawsonville, Georgia, and watched Pope Benedict bless the cornerstone of their Magdala retreat house of the Pontifical Notre Dame of Jerusalem Center. They go on recruiting and accepting young candidates undaunted. When they link their own indefectibility to that of the Church, bishops and others who have felt the Legionaries prone to setting themselves as a parallel church will recognize a characteristic confusion. But if the visitation discerns that the Legionaries were founded “uselessly” and “harmfully” and that Legionary orthodoxy and good works have been merely the salesmanship of an “entrepreneurial genius,” in Archbishop O’Brien’s memorable phrase, and recommends an end to privilege for the foundation of a sexual abuser and hypocrite, the Church may, apparently, treat the approval of the Legionaries as reformable and reverse the decreta laudis without damaging the theology of papal infallibility, despite all the self-interested Legionary assumptions and assertions to the contrary.

The first apostolic visitation of the Legionaries of Christ: 1956-1959

The Vatican’s second decision to conduct an official investigation, a so-called apostolic visitation, of the Catholic religious congregation the Legionaries of Christ was made public on March 31, not long after the 50th anniversary of February 6, 1959, the day Legionary founder Rev. Marcial Maciel counted as the day of his reinstatement after the conclusion of the first. Few know the full story of the first visitation: it concluded obscurely and Father Maciel and the Legionaries were able to misrepresent it for fifty years afterward. But the visitation did occur and actually concluded that Maciel needed to be removed from office and that the Legionaries needed reform. The Legionaries defeated that first apostolic visitation with untruth, appetizing presentation, and the help of curial friends. This is something that anyone interested in the honest outcome of today’s visitation needs to be aware of.

(This account of the first visitation draws substantially from Fernando M. González Los Legionarios de Cristo; testimonios y documentos inéditos (Mexico City: Tusquets Editores 2006), which has not been much discussed in English. González publishes documents of the case verbatim (some in facsimile) from two archives, one that of Father Luis Ferreira Correa, Legionary vicar general at the time, supplied by José Barba, and another made available to him by a source. This account also draws from Jason Berry and the late Gerald Renner Vows of Silence (New York: Free Press 2004), the standard account of the first visitation in English, which, however, González greatly supplements.)

(Accompanying this article is a timeline of the first apostolic visitation of the Legionaries of Christ.)

(Update 19 July: wxre has briefly summarized this article in Italian within the larger discussion of “Chi Era Realmente Marcial Maciel?”)


Cardinal Valerio Valeri, prefect of the Vatican Congregation of the Affairs of Religious, ordered the first apostolic visitation of the Legionaries in 1956. He was prefect from 1953 to his death in 1963 at 79. He had been the apostolic nuncio to France accredited during the war to the Vichy government and then forced from France after liberation by Charles de Gaulle, to be succeeded there by Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII.

Though by 1954 Maciel hoped his institute was close to definitive Vatican approval and Valeri was supportive enough in February 1956 to have approved the new name “Legionaries of Christ,” Maciel, aged 36 in 1956, was becoming incapacitated from addiction to narcotic painkillers Dolantin and Demerol. On January 3, 1956 Spaniard Legionary Father Rafael Arumí, 29, novice master at the Legionary College in Rome, found Maciel so unstable from drugs that he summoned from Mexico Father Luis Ferreira Correa, 41, rector of the Legionary apostolic school (minor seminary) at Tlalpan in Mexico City and Legionary vicar general. The crisis lasted for days. Arumí, Ferreira, and Spaniard Legionary Father Antonio Lagoa, 36, rector of the Legionary College in Rome, considered how to deal with the scandal and contemplated Maciel’s replacement as superior. Valeri was hearing such things from sources in Rome and Mexico and himself saw Maciel in poor condition detoxing in Salvator Mundi Hospital in Rome in spring 1956.

Two Legionaries took responsibility (treasonably, as Maciel saw it) for informing authorities: Ferreira Correa and Spaniard Brother Federico Domínguez, prefect of studies at Tlalpan, who as Maciel’s private secretary had observed him closely.

In a letter dated August 24, 1954, Domínguez, then 27, had reported Maciel’s shortcomings to the vicar general of the Mexico City archdiocese: he doesn’t follow the religious rule, recite the Breviary, or meditate. He disrespects confidentiality in matters of conscience. He uses “lies, distortions, exaggerations” and acts as if “the ends justify the means.” He lacks the spirit of religious poverty, travels first class, eats luxurious food rather than that prepared for the community, spends more time in the houses of women donors than in his own religious houses. He considers his desire for sexual gratification to be a urological problem. He gives himself narcotic injections and carefully conceals it. “Under the effect of the drugs, he makes magnificent plans of apostolate and [violating confidentiality] talks publicly about the private defects of those he is with. This is understood by the religious who don’t know what is going on as a proof of Father Maciel’s ‘spiritual clairvoyance.’”

Domínguez’s letter got back to Maciel, who then to help him discredit Domínguez sought out Belgian Benedictine Gregorio Lemercier, prior of the Benedictine priory he founded near Cuernavaca. Lemercier was an unlikely potential ally, a pioneer in the use of psychoanalysis in vocational discernment and religious life and a well-read exponent of liturgical renewal, who ten years later would himself fall foul of Vatican authorities. Maciel had miscalculated: if Lemercier first had the impression that Domínguez needed counseling, he soon gathered that Maciel himself was the problem and instructed Domínguez, then Ferreira, to report the drug and sex abuse they knew about before leaving the Legion, as they intended to do.

By summer 1956, four Mexican bishops knew at least something about the Maciel problem, the archbishops of Mexico City, Morelia, and Yucatan, and the bishop of Cuernavaca. Cuernavaca Bishop Sergio Méndez Arceo wrote cautiously on August 14 to Arcadio Larraona, Secretary of the Vatican Congregation of the Affairs of Religious, recommending Maciel’s removal and an investigation of three charges: “devious and lying behavior, use of narcotic drugs, acts of sodomy with boys of the congregation.” On August 31 Mexico City Archbishop Miguel Darío Miranda also wrote to Larraona agreeing that “immediate intervention is necessary” in the Maciel case and reiterating those three charges: “sins against the sixth commandment committed with members of the congregation,” drug addiction, and mendacity to achieve his ends.

Ferreira had on August 23 written at length to the Mexico City vicar general about a number of cases of Maciel’s “impurely touching” apostolic school boys and subsequent explanation, when the boys had told Ferreira of this, that he had been in pain and must have been unconscious. He told the story of Maciel’s drug crisis in Rome in early January and wrote of Maciel’s lies and evasions and his theory of having a urological problem that required emission of semen.

The three letters from August 1956 – those of Méndez Arceo, Darío Miranda, and Ferreira Correa – document an important point: the charge of sexual abuse was part of what triggered the original investigation of Maciel. Maciel never admitted that, claiming, as in his book-length autobiographical interview with Jesús Colina, Christ is My Life (Manchester, New Hampshire: Sophia Institute Press 2003 (English version)), that what he called the “slanders” against him involved only drugs and lies. The standard understanding of this is conveyed, for example, in the Wikipedia article, “Sexual abuse scandal in the Legion of Christ”: “In 1956 the Vatican had him removed as superior and investigated allegations of drug abuse… There are no records of any members reporting sexual abuse at that time.”

Things moved quickly. On September 20 Larraona had the documentation sent to Domenico Tardini, Secretary of the Roman Curia, suggesting the Pope be informed and that Maciel step down and find help. Maciel’s suspension, signed by Valeri and dated the next day, was relayed through the Apostolic Delegation in Mexico, as Larraona had asked, sidestepping Cardinal Giuseppe Pizzardo, Secretary of the Holy Office, a Maciel friend.

Maciel arrived in Rome by October 1 and on October 3 wrote to Valeri, accepting his suspension by the Congregation respectfully, “with absolute submission and unconditional compliance,” and agreeing “to go to a clinic, suspended for that time from the exercise of my responsibility of superior general of the Institute.” All the same he claimed good health, enclosing as evidence a certificate from papal physician Ricardo Galeazzi Lisi (who as it turned out would be dismissed from papal service later in 1956 amid talk of gambling debts and caused distaste in 1958 by selling photos and stories of Pius XII’s dying days) and declared himself the victim of calumny. Maciel was exiled to Spain, restricted from Rome. Legionary administration for the time being was taken up by Lagoa, as College rector; Arumí, as novice master; and Ferreira, as vicar general, assisted by Domínguez.

On October 13 Valeri appointed as apostolic visitator Anastasio (of the Holy Rosary) Ballestrero, general superior of the Discalced Carmelites. Anastasio was 43, born in Genoa in 1913, a Discalced Carmelite priest from 1936. He served as general superior from 1955 to 1967 and would become archbishop of Bari in 1973 and of Turin in 1977 and a cardinal made by Pope John Paul II in 1979.

The Legion geared up to obstruct the visitation. In August or September, Maciel asked Legionary José Domínguez, Federico’s brother, to help draft an official religious vow for Legionaries to take, never to criticize a superior and to report those who do. Maciel explained this “second private vow” in a long letter dated September 15, 1956, addressed to all the Legionaries of the Front of Mexico. He wrote:

The vow in question is a formal commitment contracted with God which consists in: First, not expressing externally, in any way, either orally, in writing, or by physical gestures, anything which might result in the detriment of the person or the AUTHORITY of the Superior. Secondly, notifying your Superior as a soon as possible if you should realize that another member of the Institute has faulted against the vow thus understood….

The Private Vow has as its specific purpose the safeguarding of the criterion and principle of authority in the Legion and the making of a more efficacious government through the absolute ADHERENCE to the Superior as authority and as a person in order to ultimately obtain a compact and internal union as Christ ardently desired in the last supper: “That they all may be one… (John 17.21)”…

The Private Vow guards against all external criticism, not only [of] acts of government and authority of the Superior but also his entire human personality: temperament, character, physical, intellectual and moral defects and his way of proceeding in any area outside the exercise of his authority. Consequently the Superior MUST SIMPLY BE RESPECTED regardless of any negative aspect whatsoever….

The fruits of the vow were intended to be the “COMPACT UNION between Superiors and subjects,” “THE PRACTICE OF CHARITY,” and “SELF DOMINION.” He wrote:

I am well aware that because of the strong conflicting forces of our nature it is not an easy vow to fulfill. But it is Christ who has wished to inspire this providential means in his Legion and who will give strength to each and every one who makes it up and who forms its ranks so that this vow may be held in esteem and fulfilled as something that truly constitutes the heart of the Legion...

Though there is evidence for its existence in some form as early as 1950, the trademark Legionary “vow of charity” was a heritage of the very moment that occurred between the Mexican bishops’ letters asking for intervention and the appointment of an apostolic visitation less than two months later. The private vow was taken by Legionaries until Pope Benedict reportedly put an end to it in 2007.

The language of persecution and martyrdom came easily to Maciel, who grew up during the Mexican Cristero war. In August he told Juan Vaca, Legionary seminarian from Mexico, aged 19, and future accuser, “You know they are enemies. The devil has managed to put them inside the Vatican to destroy the Legion. If they destroy it, they destroy the work of God and your vocation.” In October he told seminarian Alejandro Espinosa, future author of El Legionario (2003), “Remember: you saw nothing, you know nothing, you heard nothing!” Before leaving for Spain, Maciel issued instructions from the clinic he entered in outer Rome: “Don’t tell them what they cannot understand and will misinterpret as a pretext to destroy the Legion.”

José Barba, another Mexican seminarian and future accuser, remembers Maciel’s tearful farewell speech on October 10: “I have been attacked and am subjected to a great test by my enemies… The Legion is said to be a good work, but what is the chance that the Legion, the tree, the branches, and the fruits are good, but I, the trunk, am evil? What sense is there in that?”

After Maciel’s departure, days before the arrival of the visitators, Legionaries of the time remember Lagoa calling them into assembly hall to tell them to be prudent, quiet, and faithful. Documents were secreted. Legionaries suspected of wanting to cooperate were moved away from Rome. José Domínguez, fourth vow drafter, was removed to Naples.

Ferreira and Federico Domínguez, who had reported Maciel to authorities, were marginalized. Domínguez said, “None of my old friends would talk to me. It was circle the wagons… The Carmelite was not getting any information from the people there.” Vaca admitted that, at the suggestion of Maciel himself, he would stir laxative into Ferreira’s morning coffee. Ferreira developed severe diarrhea, and, unable to discover its cause and sick for months, returned to Mexico in December.

Even from exile, Maciel managed a “mischievous presence” to his institute, in Alejandro Espinosa’s phrase. He would secretly meet Legionaries once a month on the outskirts of Rome or in a bus and joke, “I’m on a bus, not on Roman soil. I’m not disobedient!” The administration of Lagoa and Arumí served in some respects as a dodge for Maciel to continue to run the congregation.

Anastasio conducted his investigation of the Legionary College in Rome from October to February 1957, assisted by his own Discalced Carmelite vicar general, Benjamin (of the Holy Trinity) Lachaert. He interviewed each seminarian briefly and studied the Constitutions and the founder’s letters. Carmelite Father Ippolito (of the Holy Family) visited the Legionary apostolic school (minor seminary) in Ontaneda (Santander) Spain in the first week of December.

Conflicted young Legionaries were agonized, bound securely by vow of charity to the Legion and Father Maciel. If Maciel was a saint, as they believed, if the Church had approved the Legion, why was the Church now investigating? A Mexican seminarian, 19, José Antonio Pérez Olvera, remembers the visitator’s threatening him with excommunication unless he told the full truth, but lying even so: “I felt proud of my fidelity to Father Maciel. He was above canonical right, above the Church, its precepts, its magisterium. He had breakfast daily with the Sacred Heart… Still, my conscience would not let me rest… Canonically I was excommunicated.” “I lied,” says Barba. “I lied,” says Vaca.

Anastasio did not develop evidence about drug and sex abuse sufficient to render judgment. But in four months he nevertheless learned enough to reach harsh conclusions in his report, dated February 11, 1957. In the report, he recognized that the seminarians were reticent, uncomfortable, and coached and that he hadn’t gotten the full truth. The institute was “juridical chaos” with structures in violation of canon law and spiritually fragile. Its young members had been “fanaticized” by the founder, “but it is substantially healthy and well-intentioned and offers hope insofar as it can be freed from fanaticism. Which seems doubtful.”

Anastasio therefore recommended: return Legionary headquarters and schools to Mexico from Rome and Spain; allow the Legion new members only at the discretion of the Holy See; add Mexican episcopal oversight; forbid new initiatives; name an appropriate new superior from outside the institute; revise the Constitutions radically, abolishing the idiosyncratic Legionary vows. “Maciel must be removed from office as fundamentally and solely responsible for the many serious juridical irregularities and administrative abuses. Silence about the rest appears prudent for internal and external reasons, at least for the moment.”

Anastasio had worked briskly, taking time from administering his own order, filed his report, asked to be relieved, and must have thought that the work was done. But two new and less critical apostolic visitators succeeded him (for what reason is unclear) and they neutralized his recommendations.

On July 10, 1957 to succeed Anastasio in Rome Valeri named Msgr. Alfredo Bontempi, 62, rector of the Nepomucenum, the Czech Pontifical College in Rome. Born in 1894 in Castelfidardo, a town in the Marches, Bontempi served as rector from 1950 until his death in 1963. He would be ordained bishop and granted a titular see in 1962. After six months of his own experience with the Legionaries, Bontempi told the Congregation of the Affairs of Religious on January 24, 1958, that the Legionaries had warmed to him and that he was impressed by the “spirit of piety” in their seminary. He noted that the library lacked the works of Congar, de Lubac, and Maritain; he liked the vow of charity; he had told Arumí that his report would reflect favorably on the founder because “the tree is known by its fruits.”

Also appointed that day was a new visitator for Legionary houses in Mexico and Spain, a Belgian Franciscan missionary to Chile, Polidoro van Vlierberghe, 48, who from 1961 would become apostolic administrator and territorial prelate of Illapel, Chile. Polidoro became mouthpiece for Maciel’s versions of events: Anastasio should have been more balanced; ambitious Ferreira and the Jesuits had intrigued against Maciel; accusations came from bad sources; the institute has borne its sufferings with faith. In January 1958 Anastasio criticized Polidoro’s perspective to Larraona -- the Jesuits must be given a chance to respond to so serious an accusation, for one thing -- but did not prevail.

Though a 1964 curial summary of earlier documents noted that “the conclusions don’t appear to correspond to the logic of the facts,” the Maciel case was concluded along the lines of a compromise proposed on September 10, 1958, by Redemptorist Domenico Mozzicarelli, an official in the Congregation of the Affairs of Religious who dealt with apostolic visitations. Even if Maciel’s removal seemed advisable, the Legion was built on his “mysterious” personality and no new superior could replace his “heroic mysticism” or his ability to fundraise. Because of “its great good mixed with bad” the institute should continue. A smoldering wick should not be quenched. So a compromise: leave to Valeri when eventually to restore Maciel, reserve the right to further visitations, appoint the counsel general and financial officer required by canon law, and absolutely forbid Maciel from giving spiritual direction, much less hearing confession, or otherwise intruding on the internal forum of members of the congregation. (This last in accordance with 1917 Canon Law Code canon 530, which strictly forbade religious superiors from coercing a manifestation of conscience from a subordinate under obedience.) The Congregation of the Affairs of Religious wrote Cardinal Clemente Micara on October 13, 1958 reinstating Maciel on roughly those terms. On February 6, 1959 Micara wrote Maciel.

Pope Pius XII died October 9 and Pope John XXIII was elected October 28. It has never been clear why the reinstatement of Maciel was issued in the papal interregnum or why it fell to Micara, Cardinal Vicar General of Rome from 1951 to his death at 85 in 1965, to deliver it, or why he delayed it for four months. In any event, another curial summary from 1962 states that in settling the Maciel matter the Congregation of the Affairs of Religious could not go further than the Mozzicarelli compromise because of the “recommendations and interventions of high persons.” Who those were we don’t know, but in his autobiographical interview, Christ is My Life, for helping him survive the visitation Maciel thanks Cardinals Micara, Pizzardo, Gaetano Cicognani (Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura), Giovanni Piazza (Discalced Carmelite Secretary of what is now the Congregation for Bishops), and Federico Tedeschini (Apostolic Datary).

So Maciel and the Legion were cleared and moved on. The discontinuity in Vatican administration in October 1958 may account for why Maciel was never held to the stipulated restrictions on his ministry. After Maciel’s reinstatement, Ferreira left the Legion to serve in the archdiocese of Morelia (Michoacán) Mexico until he died in 2001. Domínguez transferred to Maynooth seminary in Dublin, in fall 1957 also left the Legion, eventually married, and lived in Los Angeles. Lagoa, at 80 in 2001, and Arumí, at 79 in 2006, both died as Legionary priests. In 2003 Maciel eulogized Lagoa as “close to me in the great trials and tribulations of the Legion: he remained faithful, unmoved, and he unconditionally bore witness to his love for Christ by fulfilling his mission.”


The investigators of today’s visitation – not yet named officially, but reported to be Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.; Alessandria, Italy Bishop Giuseppe Versaldi; Tepic, Mexico Bishop Ricardo Watty Urquidi, M.Sp.S; and Gregorian University Rector Gianfranco Ghirlanda, S.J. -- may wish to apply the lessons of history as they begin their work. And if fifty years ago the Vatican ignored the conclusions of its first visitator and missed the chance to abbreviate Father Maciel’s damaging career, it may well consider the consequences for the future of doing a superficial job of dealing with the Legionaries now, though the second visitation will doubtless be held more accountable than the first.

How the first visitation ended is itself an issue for the second. High Vatican officials were among those who enabled Father Maciel’s double life by annulling the recommendations of Anastasio in February 1957 and Mozzicarelli in September 1958. Since 1997, when Berry and Renner began to report the efforts of Vaca, Barba, and others to bring Maciel to justice for the abuse they covered up for him under duress forty years before, the Legionaries relied repeatedly in his public defense on what they claimed was his Vatican clearing after thorough investigation.

Addressing the first visitation with Jesús Colina in Christ is my Life, Maciel spoke untruthfully when he said, “no official written document ever reached me.” He wrote a resignation. Or when he said, “I was denied any possibility of defense.” or “the accusations [were] amply proven false.” González in 2002 managed confirmation from the then Discalced Carmelite superior general that Fathers Anastasio and Benjamin did serve as apostolic visitators in 1956-8. Colina, director of the Legionary affiliated Zenit news service, was journalist less enterprising when in the interview he allowed Maciel to refer to Bontempi and Polidoro, his supporters, as the “two visitators.” For emphasis Maciel noted that in 2003 Polidoro was (at 94) still alive. (He would live to be 97 and died in 2006.) In a letter to the Hartford Courant December 20, 1996, according to Berry and Renner, the Legionaries stated falsely that visitator Anastasio had died, though he lived until June 21, 1998, to age 84.

That Pope Benedict abolished the private Legionary vow of charity in 2007, 50 years after Anastasio’s recommendation, does not in itself guarantee that the visitators will hear the whole truth when interviewing Legionaries. The March 31 words of current Legionary General Director Álvaro Corcuera did promise welcome and cooperation to the visitation, but the two Legionary camps that have emerged since the revelation of Maciel’s daughter on February 3, the “full disclosure” group and the “carry on with the charism” group, are clearly the successors of the camps of 50 years ago, the small “cooperate with the Vatican” group and the loyal “circle the wagons and lie” group. There has not so far been much, let alone full, disclosure. Committed curial Legionary supporters Cardinals Franc Rodé, prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, and Angelo Sodano, Secretary Emeritus of State and Dean of the College of Cardinals, are the successors in our day of Pizzardo et al.

Baltimore Archbishop Edwin O’Brien, a Legionary critic, who himself served as an apostolic visitator of Catholic seminaries in America from 2005 to 2008 in an interview with National Catholic Reporter in April could not say he was confident that the Legionaries would cooperate fully with the visitation. “It depends on so many individuals being open, because it just takes a few to try to block it and to mislead,” he said.

To know history is to realize that Maciel’s fraudulence was already spelled out to Church authorities more than fifty years ago: the double life, excessive time spent with benefactresses, sexual abuse, coercive vocational pressure, cult of personality, arrogant superiority to the Church, financial irregularities, fanaticized members who need deprogramming. It is to recognize that many tropes in defense of Maciel are also more than fifty years old: it looks too good to be bad, it’s a new cross to bear, Maciel was unconscious or ill when he did it, judge the tree by its fruits.

History demonstrates what long institutional experience the Legionaries have of cultivating complaisant churchmen and resisting ecclesiastical oversight, covering up for their mysterious, charismatic founder, and justifying their institutional survival with effective fundraising and other goods mixed with bad. The visitators will have to be on their guard. What apostolic visitator Anastasio wrote in January 1958 remains true: “The problem of this visitation is precisely to try to avoid the passion pro and con. At least for now it’s necessary to prescind from personalities and judge deeds with a strictly juridical criterion.”

The first apostolic visitation of the Legionaries of Christ: a timeline

(Drawn from Fernando M. González Los Legionarios de Cristo; testimonios y documentos inéditos (Mexico City: Tusquets Editores 2006))

24 August 1954 Legionary Brother Federico Domínguez, prefect of studies of the Legionary apostolic school in Mexico City, reports Maciel’s shortcomings in a long letter to Rev. Francisco Orozco Lomelí, vicar general of the Mexico City archdiocese: Maciel doesn’t follow the religious rule, disrespects confidentiality in matters of conscience, uses “lies, distortions, exaggerations,” and acts as if “the ends justify the means.” He lacks the spirit of religious poverty, travels first class, eats luxurious food rather than that prepared for the community, spends more time in the houses of women donors than in his own religious houses. He considers his desire for sexual gratification to be a urological problem. He gives himself narcotic injections and carefully conceals it. “Under the effect of the drugs, he makes magnificent plans of apostolate and talks publicly about the private defects of those he is with. This is understood by the religious who don’t know what is going on as a proof of Father Maciel’s ‘spiritual clairvoyance.’”

3 January 1956 Legionary novice master Father Rafael Arumí finds Maciel in a stupor in the Legionary house in Rome and summons from Mexico Father Luis Ferreira Correa, rector of the apostolic school at Tlalpan in Mexico City and Legionary vicar general. The crisis lasts for days. Arumí, Ferreira, and Father Antonio Lagoa consider Maciel’s replacement as superior and how to deal with the scandal.

28 January 1956 Franciscan Callisto Lopinot, a consultor to the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, writes to the Congregation of the Affairs of Religious that he knows from a Catholic doctor in Rome (Walter Behrens) that Father Maciel is addicted to narcotics.

February 1956 Cardinal Valerio Valeri, prefect of the Vatican Congregation of the Affairs of Religious, approves the new name “Legionaries of Christ.”

spring 1956 Valeri sees Maciel in poor condition detoxing in Salvator Mundi Hospital in Rome in the presence of Juan Vaca.

summer 1956 By June at least four Mexican bishops know at least something about the Maciel problem, the archbishops of Mexico City, Morelia, and Yucatan and the bishop of Cuernavaca.

14 August 1956 Cuernavaca Bishop Sergio Méndez Arceo writes to Arcadio Larraona, Secretary of the Congregation of the Affairs of Religious, recommending Maciel’s removal and an investigation of three charges: “devious and lying behavior, use of narcotic drugs, acts of sodomy with boys of the congregation.”

23 August 1956 Legionary Father Luis Ferreira Correa, rector of the apostolic school at Tlalpan in Mexico City and Legionary vicar general, reports in a long letter to Rev. Francisco Orozco Lomelí, vicar general of the Mexico City archdiocese, a number of cases of Maciel’s “impurely touching” apostolic school boys and his explanation that he was in pain and must have been unconscious. He reports the story of Maciel’s drug crisis in Rome in early January, specifying Dolantin, Sedol, and Demerol, and tells of Maciel’s lies and evasions and his theory of a urological problem that requires emission of semen.

31 August 1956 Mexico City Archbishop Miguel Darío Miranda writes to Arcadio Larraona agreeing that “immediate intervention is necessary” in the Maciel case and reiterating the charges: “sins against the sixth commandment committed with members of the congregation,” drug addiction, and mendacity to achieve his ends.

August or September 1956 Maciel asks Legionary José Domínguez, Federico’s brother, to help draft an official fourth religious vow, never to criticize a superior and to report those who do.

15 September 1956 Maciel in a long letter addressed to all the Legionaries of the Front of Mexico explains the “second private vow”:

The vow in question is a formal commitment contracted with God which consists in: First, not expressing externally, in any way, either orally, in writing, or by physical gestures, anything which might result in the detriment of the person or the AUTHORITY of the Superior. Secondly, notifying your Superior as a soon as possible if you should realize that another member of the Institute has faulted against the vow thus understood…

The Private Vow has as its specific purpose the safeguarding of the criterion and principle of authority in the Legion and the making of a more efficacious government through the absolute ADHERENCE to the Superior as authority and as a person in order to ultimately obtain a compact and internal union as Christ ardently desired in the last supper: ‘That they all may be one… (John 17.21)’…

The Private Vow guards against all external criticism, not only [of] acts of government and authority of the Superior but also his entire human personality: temperament, character, physical, intellectual and moral defects and his way of proceeding in any area outside the exercise of his authority. Consequently the Superior MUST SIMPLY BE RESPECTED regardless of any negative aspect whatsoever.

Maciel intends the fruits of the vow to be the “COMPACT UNION between Superiors and subjects,” “THE PRACTICE OF CHARITY,” and “SELF DOMINION.”

I am well aware that because of the strong conflicting forces of our nature it is not an easy vow to fulfill. But it is Christ who has wished to inspire this providential means in his Legion and who will give strength to each and every one who makes it up and who forms its ranks so that this vow may be held in esteem and fulfilled as something that truly constitutes the heart of the Legion.

20 September 1956 Larraona sends the documentation to Domenico Tardini, Secretary of the Roman Curia, suggesting the Pope be informed and that Maciel step down and find help.

21 September Msgr. Sapinelli, an official of the Congregation of the Affairs of Religious, asks Angelo Dell’Acqua, a deputy at the Secretariat of State, to send back to the Apostolic Delegation in Mexico City Maciel’s suspension as superior general. The document is signed by Cardinal Valeri. The relaying of Maciel’s suspension through the Apostolic Delegation in Mexico, as Larraona had asked, sidesteps Giuseppe Pizzardo, Secretary of the Holy Office, a Maciel friend.

3 October Maciel, having arrived in Rome by October 1, writes Cardinal Valeri, respectfully accepting suspension by the Congregation and exile to Spain, “with absolute submission and unconditional compliance,” and agreeing “to go to a clinic, suspended for that time from the exercise of my responsibility of superior general of the Institute,” though claiming good health and declaring himself the victim of calumny.

Legionary administration is taken up by Legionary Fathers Lagoa, Arumí, and Ferreira, as vicar general, assisted by Brother Domínguez.

10 October Maciel gives a tearful farewell speech to the congregation: “The Legion is said to be a good work, but what is the chance that the Legion, the tree, the branches, and the fruits are good, but I, the trunk, am evil? What sense is there in that?”

13 October Cardinal Valeri appoints as apostolic visitator Anastasio (of the Holy Rosary) Ballestrero, general superior of the Discalced Carmelites.

October 1956 to February 1957 Anastasio investigates of the Legionary College in Rome, assisted by Discalced Carmelite vicar general, Benjamin (of the Holy Trinity) Lachaert.

first week of December 1956 Discalced Carmelite Father Ippolito (of the Holy Family) visits the Legionary apostolic school in Ontaneda (Santander) Spain.

11 February 1957 Anastasio reports, concluding the Legion was “juridical chaos” with structures in violation of canon law and spiritually fragile; its young members had been “fanaticized” by the founder; “but it is substantially healthy and well-intentioned and offers hope insofar as it can be freed from fanaticism. Which seems doubtful.” He recommends: return Legionary headquarters and schools to Mexico from Rome and Spain; allow the Legion new members only at the discretion of the Holy See; add Mexican episcopal oversight; name an appropriate new superior from outside the institute; revise the Constitutions radically, abolishing the idiosyncratic Legionary vows. “Maciel must be removed from office as fundamentally responsible for the many serious juridical irregularities and administrative abuses. Silence about the rest appears prudent for internal and external reasons, at least for the moment.”

10 July 1957 Cardinal Valeri names Nepomucenum rector Msgr. Alfredo Bontempi and Franciscan missionary to Chile Polidoro van Vlierberghe as apostolic visitators for Rome and Mexico and Spain. Polidoro adopts Maciel’s versions of events.

15 January 1958 Anastasio criticizes Polidoro’s perspective to Larraona, but does not prevail. He writes, “The problem of this visitation is precisely to try to avoid the passion pro and con. At least for now it’s necessary to prescind from personalities and judge deeds with a strictly juridical criterion.”

24 January 1958 Bontempi tells the Congregation of the Affairs of Religious that he is impressed by the Legionary “spirit of piety” and has told Arumí that his report will reflect favorably on the founder because “the tree is known by its fruits.”

10 September 1958 Redemptorist Domenico Mozicarelli, an official at the Congregation of the Affairs of Religious, proposes the compromise that concludes Maciel case: leave to Valeri when eventually to restore Maciel, reserve the right to further visitations, appoint to the congregation the counsel general and financial officer required by canon law, and forbid Maciel from giving spiritual direction, hearing confession, or having access to the internal forum of members of the congregation.

9 October 1958 Pope Pius XII dies.

13 October 1958 Congregation of the Affairs of Religious writes Cardinal Clemente Micara, vicar general of Rome, reinstating Maciel on the terms of the Mozzicarelli compromise.

28 October Pope John XXIII is elected.

6 February 1959 Cardinal Micara writes Maciel, reinstating him.

19 June 2003 Legionary Father Antonio Lagoa, administrator of the Legion during the years of the apostolic visitation, who had died 5 September 2001 at 80, is eulogized by Maciel as “close to me in the great trials and tribulations of the Legion: he remained faithful, unmoved, and he unconditionally bore witness to his love for Christ by fulfilling his mission.”