(MEXICO)
Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
June 12, 2025
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
Antonio María Cabrera faces sexual abuse of minors accusations. The Catholic priest, and member of the Legion of Christ will be arraigned in the coming hours.
A report was filed back in January; a judge issued an arrest warrant in May. The police arrested the Legion of Christ priest when he was trying to leave Mexico.
Cabrera was a member of Marcial Maciel’s inner circle and held key roles at the Legion of Christ’s flagship college in Mexico City.
On Wednesday June 11, around 6 pm, the Mexico City International Airport became the epicenter of the global clergy sexual abuse crisis as officers of the Attorney General’s Office arrested Catholic priest Antonio María Cabrera, a member of the Legion of Christ.
As far as it is possible to know, there has been no official statement from either the Attorney General’s Office (FGR, after its Spanish-language acronym), which originally made the arrest at the airport, or from the State of Mexico’s Attorney’s Office, which is the authority ultimately responsible for prosecuting Antonio Cabrera’s case, as sexual abuse, including that of minors, is a state crime under Mexican law.
Originally a Spaniard but with several years living in Mexico, there is a chance he holds both nationalities. He currently is at the jail in Barrientos, a neighborhood near the border between the City and the State of Mexico, waiting for the arraignment procedures that could take up to 72 hours in Mexico.
The report leading to his arrest was initially filed back in January 14, and a judge issued an arrest warrant on May 26. When warned about Cabrera’s attempt to leave Mexico for an undisclosed destination, the FGR arrested him at the airport.
It must be noted that unlike what happened in Spain back in March when news emerged of the arrest of yet another member of the Legion of Christ there, as told in the story linked below, in this case, the Legion of Christ remains silent. The last time their account at what used to be Twitter posted new information was on May 28, when they announced new appointments for their Mexican province.
English Edition
Legion of Christ, five new victims of sexual abuse
Cabrera is no lightweight in the complex structure of the Legion of Christ, as he is credited with some closeness with the founder of that order.
Although it is hard to find accurate information about him in the many websites linked one way or the other to the Legion of Christ and the schools and colleges associated with the order founded in the 1940s by Mexican serial predator Marcial Maciel, it is possible to assume that Cabrera was among the elite of the Legion of Christ.
Despite its rather low resolution, there are pictures of him in close proximity of Maciel himself while the founder of the Legion of Christ indulged in at the stores available at luxury malls in Florida and other high-priced locations, allegedly serving the “punishment” imposed on him by Pope Benedict XVI soon after taking office.
Oddities or patterns?
After Maciel’s death Cabrera, as many others of Maciel’s inner circle, retained a position of relative power in the Legion’s flagship college in the Northern, rather posh, outskirts of Mexico City, the Universidad Anáhuac.
Chances are this is related to his association with both Maciel himself and with the close circle of die-hards who accompanied the elderly and disgraced founder of the Legion of Christ in his last years.
Although it is impossible to prove, there is the evidence of him emerging with a key position at the flagship college in Mexico City four years after Maciel’s death (2008).
There he was for over nine years (2012-21) chair of the Faculty of Bioethics, dealing with abortion, the Catholic Church’s top priority during the pontificates of both John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and more recently with issues such as transhumanism, the use of artificial intelligence, and the like.
It must be noted that already back in 2023 there were questions about Cabrera’s character. A posting from that year at the Legioleaks Facebook page identified Cabrera in a picture with none other than Marcial Maciel himself.
The photo is low quality, probably a digital picture with the low-resolution cameras of the Aughts, and it has been degraded after several years of postings and repostings in all available social media outlets, where the survivors of clergy sexual abuse try to discredit the idea of “orders” such as the Legion of Christ not being aware of Maciel’s and other predators’ in that and other congregation abuses.
Oddly enough, in the posting, Cabrera is explicitly mentioned as a risk factor for the Legion of Christ. He is not alone; it also explicitly names Marcelino de Andrés, a Spanish priest and fellow Legionary accused of sexually attacking underage female students at the Highlands School in Northern Madrid.
That case that has been the subject of several installments in the weekly series on clergy sexual abuse here at Los Angeles Press, already referenced before. The posting at the Legioleaks Facebook page fully identifies them as Antonio Cabrera (or Antonio María Cabrera Cabrera, as is customary in both Mexico and Spain) and Marcelino de Andrés.
The picture before this paragraph comes from the posting available after this paragraph or directly at Facebook here.
Résumé of sorts
A résumé of sorts of Cabrera has been available at the Universidad Anáhuac website here, but there is a chance that it could be removed from the website in the future, so it is advisable to use the link at the Internet Archive.
There one reads he got the equivalent of a degree in theology with a specialty on Moral Theology from the Legion of Christ’s college in Italy, the Ateneo Regina Apostolorum, back in 2001.
Ten years later, in 2011, he reportedly got a doctoral degree in bioethics at the same institution in Rome. Another decade after, he got a second doctoral degree on “Interdisciplinary Research” at the very same institute he was the chair of at the aforementioned Legion of Christ’s college in Mexico City, the Universidad Anáhuac.
As such, in what in any other context would be called an “academic incest” or “intellectual inbreeding”, he was also the chief editor of the Medicina y ética (Medicine and ethics) magazine, a joint venture of the faculties of Bioethics and Health Sciences at the same Universidad Anáhuac.
After leaving the position as chair of the Bioethics Faculty, he was appointed as chair of the Center for the Strategic Development of Bioethics, the so-called (CADEBI).
He left the position in 2022 for undisclosed reasons, as with most of the “information” of his institutional résumé page at the Universidad Anáhuac. There is no date of birth, no actual dates for his degrees, and even more striking, no dates for any pastoral assignment, not even a date for his ordination as priest.
His résumé of sorts credits him with the foundation of three projects. One dealing with infertility, one identified as “Bioethics for all”, and one dealing with the clinical side of bioethics.
He claims membership in the National Academy of Bioethics in Mexico. An internal committee on Ethics at the Universidad Anáhuac, and as member of the Ethics and research committee of the post-graduate program in Medical, Dentistry, and Health Sciences at the National University of Mexico, although it was not possible to confirm his relationship with this institution.
He recently published a Spanish-language book dealing with infertility and a collective volume in Spanish edited by him dealing with several areas of development of bioethics.
The lack of information about his assignments, pastoral or academic, are one of the reasons it was so relevant in the Spanish-speaking world to have a ruling from an upper court in Colombia forcing the dioceses there to open their archives and to facilitate the identification of the assignment, for pastoral or other professional duties, of their priests.
As far as Cabrera is concerned, it is possible to assume that he was ordained a priest soon after his graduation in theology in 2001. It is also possible to assume that such ordination was part of the massive ordinations with which Maciel used to brag about the vitality of his order, but there is no specific information as to where he spent his, at this point, probably more than 20 years as active priest.