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…