UNITED STATES
Steel Magnificat
November 21, 2016 by Mary Pezzulo
When I was a teenager, for a couple of years, my mother forced me to attend meetings of the ECYD, the youth branch of Regnum Christi. Regnum Christi was the lay branch of the Legionaries of Christ, and the Legionaries of Christ had yet to be exposed as a cultlike organization founded by a voracious pedophile. At the time, all my mother knew was that the rich and conservative homeschoolers sent their daughters to ECYD meetings, so I was sent to the meetings as well even when I begged not to. After awhile, I came to see them as authorities.
Our leader was an excitable and fervent housewife whose fuschia lipstick exactly matched her window shutters, which exactly matched the impatiens growing in the garden out front. She taught full-blown heresy and alarmism on a grand scale. “You can’t see God,” she said. “If you ever saw God you would drop dead. You only ever see Jesus.” And just when I thought she’d misspoken when denying the divinity of Christ, she said the exact same thing again. She told us that our guardian angels were incapable of seeing anything except the face of God and our own activity, and if we didn’t pray to them daily they’d be lonely. She talked about Limbo as if it were settled teaching of the Church. She acted as though Protestants and people of other faiths were evil con artists only pretending to agree with Catholics on some points to be devious: “if they’re not with us, they’re against us!” She claimed that God would send us to hell for not working hard enough to harangue our friends to come to ECYD meetings.
Our leader was assisted by a housewife who used to lead ECYD meetings in Mexico and whose lipstick rarely matched anything; she taught us that it was disrespectful to pray in the bathroom. I stopped praying in the bathroom, even when my painful bowel condition left me crying in there for hours, for fear I’d offend God.
We also had guest teachers, mostly from Latin American countries, who had taken a solemn promise to wear expensive dresses and not pants in order to “bring back the dignity of woman.” They taught us that “Nuestro Padre,” the pedophile Father Marcial Maciel, personally approved everyone who joined the Legion and was best friends with the Pope. They explained that their organization was unique in the Church, in that it always went first to rich and powerful people rather than the poor. “Think what influence we’ll have!” I knew that this was the exact opposite of what Christ had chosen to do, and therefore the opposite of what the Church should do, but I kept my mouth shut so I wouldn’t catch it.
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