UNITED STATES
The Daily Beast
Marcial Maciel, once the founder of the Catholic Church’s most lucrative new order, died mired in a massive pedophilia scandal. Now his former number two is also being accused.
JASON BERRY
11.06.16
Roberta Garza felt a familiar tearing this week on reading an Associated Press report that her older brother, Father Luis Garza, 58, had been accused of sexual abuse in a civil lawsuit filed in Waterbury, Conn.
The siblings have not spoken in several years. Roberta is a columnist for Milenio newspaper in Mexico City. Luis, for nearly two decades the second-ranking figure in Rome of the Legion of Christ, now seems to her an exiled figure, cast into an outback as the Philippines regional director of the Legionaries.
In the lawsuit, an adult identified as “John Roe 1” alleges that Father Garza, and two other priests, including the late Marcial Maciel Degollado, the Legion’s charismatic founder, abused the plaintiff as a young adolescent at a center the order ran near Mexico City in the early 1990s.
Father Maciel launched the order in Mexico in 1941, established a campus in Rome in the 1950s, and later an American headquarters in Cheshire, Conn. Maciel, who died in 2008, was the greatest fundraiser of the modern church. He was celebrated by Pope John Paul II for inspiring young men like Garza to become priests, for Maciel’s record in launching prep schools, several universities and religious colleges in Latin America, North America and Europe.
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