ROME
Catholic News Service
By Francis X. Rocca
Catholic News Service
ROME (CNS) — When accusations of sexual abuse against Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder and then-general director of the Legionaries of Christ, were first published in 1997, Father Eduardo Robles Gil was running one of the congregation’s schools in Mexico City.
Father Robles Gil did not believe Father Maciel had molested boys in his own seminaries, yet the accusations troubled him, and he asked himself what he would do if they turned out to be true.
“I said, ‘I am happy being a priest, it is where God wants me, and he called me to the Legion, so I would continue being a Legionary priest,'” he told Catholic News Service Feb. 28. “Having made that decision, I was no longer affected so much by what might come out in the newspaper.”
Today, Father Robles Gil is the troubled congregation’s new general director. He is the congregation’s first elected leader after nearly four years of Vatican-supervised reform that, he said, have left members full of “hope, enthusiasm (and) optimism.”
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