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Mollie Wilson O’Reilly August 26, 2014
Don’t miss Jason Berry’s lengthy update on the Legion of Christ’s ventures in the Holy Land, in the National Catholic Reporter this week. How has the order coped with diminishment and disgrace following the belated exposure and censure of its founder, serial sexual abuser and all-around con artist Marcial Maciel? Oh, you know, they’re working on it.
“Marcial Maciel’s initials are also MM, just like Mary Magdalene. She had a problematic past before her deliverance, so there’s a parallel. Our world has double standards when it comes to morals. Some people have a formal, public display and then the real life they live behind the scenes.
“But when we accuse someone else and we are quick to stone him, we must remember that we all have problems and defects. With modern communications so out of control, it is easy to kill someone’s reputation without even investigating about the truth. We should be quieter and less condemning.”
Berry quotes the above from a booklet promoting the Legion’s new project, the $100 million Magdala Center at the Sea of Galilee. (Learn more at this website — but be warned, there’s a startling autoplaying introductory video.) The author is Fr. Juan María Solana.
When the allegations against Maciel were first surfacing in the media, I remember hearing that rank-and-file Legionaries themselves were shielded from the worst of it. That, at least, was the excuse offered for why some priests didn’t leave the order sooner. Given the amount of control Maciel and his fellow leaders exerted over the lives of their recruits, it seems plausible. But Maciel is dead; his corruption and crimes are definitively exposed; the order is supposedly reforming itself under Rome’s supervision. So what’s the excuse now for someone in a leadership position with the LCs to be referring to Maciel as having had any kind of “deliverance” (when, in fact, he and the order denied the allegations against him to the end of his life, even after Benedict removed him from ministry and ordered him to a life of repentance), or using his story as an example of how “We should be quieter and less condemning”?
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