ROME
National Catholic Reporter
John L. Allen Jr. | Jan. 13, 2014
Under ordinary circumstances, a religious order’s general chapter is nobody’s idea of a news event.
Basically a business meeting for representatives of the order from around the world, a general chapter typically is consumed by minutiae and insider baseball, and elections for new leaders are often of interest only to the candidates themselves — sometimes, honestly, not much even to them.
For the embattled Legionaries of Christ, however, the circumstances are anything but ordinary.
By dint of circumstance, most notably spectacular revelations of abuse and misconduct by their founder, the late Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the Legionaries have become a leading symbol of the sexual abuse scandals that have plagued Catholicism. They’ve essentially been in papal receivership for the past three years, since Pope Benedict XVI imposed a Vatican overseer on the order and its related Regnum Christi lay movement in 2010.
For critics, the Legionaries represent the worst of the abuse scandals, not only because of Maciel’s misconduct, which included relationships with two women and fathering up to six children as well as charges of abuse of boys, including seminarians, but because of the way the influential Mexican cleric was long protected by church authorities, up to and including Pope John Paul II.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.