RHODE ISLAND
Vancouver Sun
By Michelle R. Smith And Nicole Winfield, The Associated Press
February 16, 2013
PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Newly unsealed documents in a lawsuit brought against the Roman Catholic order Legion of Christ show the group’s former second-in-command testified he discovered the order’s founder, the late Rev. Marcial Maciel, had fathered a daughter in 2006.
However, the Rev. Luis Garza said he never confronted Maciel about his double life and didn’t share the news with the group’s broader membership.
The documents, previously sealed in a lawsuit in Superior Court in Rhode Island, include thousands of pages of testimony from high-ranking leaders at the Legion, its members, and relatives of Rhode Island widow Gabrielle Mee, who bequeathed $60 million to the Legion before her death at age 96 in 2008. …
In a deposition December 2011, Garza says he became suspicious while visiting Maciel in 2006 at a hotel in Jacksonville, Florida, because of two women he saw there. He later learned they were Maciel’s daughter and her mother, a fact he confirmed with both women.
Garza said he obtained the daughter’s birth certificate as proof — listing the father as “Jose Rivas.” Later, it was revealed that Maciel used the “Jose Rivas” pseudonym with his other hidden family, a Mexican woman with whom he had two sons.
Yet Garza said he never asked Maciel about his daughter or discussed it with him, and he didn’t think it was necessary to share the news with the Legion’s membership or its lay movement, Regnum Christi. He said he only told the Legion’s superior and two other priests.
“I didn’t think at the time that the fact that fathering a child would change in any way the way we needed to behave vis-a-vis Father Maciel or the actions that we needed to do,” Garza said in the deposition. “Because we needed to comply with indications of the Holy See and also because there was an issue of privacy and respect for the mother and the daughter.”
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