(MEXICO)
Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
September 15, 2025
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
HBO’s Maciel, wolf of God makes for good television, but its focus on the main character’s perversions blurs the Catholic Church’s institutional responsibility.
In evoking a wolf, the series portrays Maciel as the lone predator, a myth with which the Catholic Church and other entities gaslight victims of abuse.
The series brings the debate on clergy sexual abuse back to 2010, when Benedict XVI whitewashed the Vatican’s role, with the Gothic tale of Maciel as a lone wolf.
Over the last weeks, Spanish-speaking social media has been abuzz over the TV series devoted to the Legion of Christ’s founder, Marcial Maciel Degollado.
HBO’s Maciel, The Wolf of God offers an accessible look at the main character’s life, a good summary of what he did and some aspects of how he did it.
However, its focus on psychological and individual explanations and its neglect of the broader institutional and cultural context has been the source of criticism on how it deals with the kind of damage him and his “order” inflicted on the lives of their victims and the Catholic Church at large.
The series, currently available over the streaming services of HBO-Max is a four-episode affair, with each installment running close to one hour in time.
For many, the series would be a chance to know, perhaps for the first time, some details about Maciel’s predatorial practices. None of what the series says could be deemed false. Matías Gueilburt, the director, claims it is a tribute to the journalists who broke the story.
It is a gut-wrenching tale of how Maciel became a super sexual predator. Him and other clerics with similar profiles integrate a club of sorts: Chilean Fernando Karadima Fariña, New Yorker Theodore McCarrick, and Argentine Carlos Miguel Buela, just to mention some of the most notable of them, who have been at different points in time the subject of installments of these series on clergy sexual abuse.
But already there lies a weakness of the HBO series. As deep as it goes in Maciel’s flawed character, it fails to offer a similarly thorough understanding of the systemic nature of clergy sexual abuse, even if only within the Legion of Christ itself. That absence is more notable when one takes into consideration how Maciel became a prototype of sorts for other members in the predators club.
Maciel was not alone
That absence is more painful when considering that it even in the Legion of Christ Maciel was not alone. While he was alive there were other noted predators in the order and, given the multiple complicities involved, their crimes went as unpunished as Maciel’s.
As told by a Mexican survivor of another member of the Legion of Christ, the series does not acknowledge that Maciel was not acting alone and that while Maciel was doing what merits the series, there were other priests in the Legion of Christ and many other Catholic “orders” and dioceses doing pretty much the same Maciel was doing to many other victims.
One of the predators abusing innocent victims while Maciel was the lord and master of the Legion was Fernando Martínez, a Legionary priest working at the Cumbres (Highlands) School, a private school in Cancún, the Mexican resort.
In the early 1990s, Analú Salazar, then an 8-year-old girl, was Martínez’s victim. If clergy sexual abuse was not a hellish enough experience, she has had to endure years of ordeal, in accordance with the Legion’s standard operating procedure: silence or else.
Jorge Bernal Vargas (1929-2023), presiding over his birthday Mass in 2023. He was the bishop of what is now the diocese of Cancún-Chetumal when Fernando Martínez abused Analú Salazar. Image from his diocese’s social media.
Whoever dares to criticize the Legion and even today Maciel himself, as she does, risks the relentless attacks of loyalists portraying the Legion’s victims and their relatives as “enemies of the Church,” rancorous “haters,” “communists,” and whatever flavor of hatred is available on any given day from the very loyal members of the Regnum Christi or their relatives.
According to communiques by the Mexican NGO Spes Viva (available here in Spanish and English at Scribd) and a group of former priests of the Legion of Christ (available here in Spanish and English at Scribd) stressed hours after the premiere, said practices happened while Maciel was alive and many of his most loyal disciples participated in them, willing to destroy whoever was willing to come forward to report what Maciel and other predators in that organization, similar to an order, were doing.
And it is not only in Mexico where one finds predators other than Maciel in the Legion of Christ. A notable case in Chile was that of Irishman John O’Reilly. He sexually abused at least two underage girls at the Legion of Christ’s school in Santiago.
He rose to the status of a Chilean celebrity. His flock, some of the new rich in the Andean country, since most of the old money was already in the Opus Dei camp, were eager to find in O’Reilly a hero of sorts, a role the foreign white man was more than willing to play, becoming the Chilean Legion of Christ’s poster boy.
The Irish connection
O’Reilly received all kinds of prizes, accolades, and praise, including the Chilean nationality at a public ceremony. When the details of how he abused at least two girls emerged, in shame, the national congress backtracked the vesting of the Chilean citizenship. He would be put on trial, sentenced to a laughable four-year prison term, and then expelled to his native Ireland.
The first group of Irish members of the Legion of Christ near Saint Peter’s Square, Rome, ca. 1960. Picture shared by the ReGAIN advocacy group in Facebook.
Handpicked by Maciel himself, O’Reilly was a member of the Legion of Christ’s first team to Chile. He was tasked with replicating there the model they have perfected in Mexico and Spain: build schools and colleges for the elites with the elites’ monies projecting command of the English language as some kind of passport to a safe and prosperous future.
As it happened as recently as 2024, at the Highlands School in Northern Madrid, Spain, the promise of a bilingual or trilingual education, given the prominent role of French in Spain, comes with risk of becoming prey of a Legionary of Christ.
Irish priests played a key role in Maciel’s designs. They would be the bridge between his order and the affluent, English-speaking, global North. A key feature of the Legion’s Irish connection was a Language School in Ireland.
Maciel had, in that respect a keen understanding that, after World War II, English would play a key role and that it was to his advantage to use Ireland as a key ingredient of his mix. However, the very history of clergy sexual abuse in Ireland makes necessary to wonder if, besides English and the opportunities Ireland offered then, there was another reason for Maciel to look for expansion there.
One was racism. Maciel was extremely aware of the advantages he had in Mexico as a white, blonde male, and he scourged places where he would be able to find “agreeable” white people, so-called Whitexicans as he was or from other countries in the world, willing to partake his criminal enterprise. Ireland was prime for that.
Pope Benedict XVI and then-superior of the Legion of Christ, Álvaro Corcuera Martínez del Río, circa 2010. Source: social media of the Legion of Christ.
A noted alum of the Irish school was Angelo Sodano, the former nuncio to Chile, learnt what he knew of English there. The future Cardinal and Secretary of State of both John Paul II and Benedict XVI, would become, at Rome, a key player in providing cover-up, excuses, and protection to Maciel, Karadima, Buela, the “lay” founders of the now-suppressed Peruvian Sodalitium of Christian Life, Theodore McCarrick, the Brazilian Heralds of the Gospel, and many other predators in the Spanish-, English-, and Portuguese-speaking Catholic worlds.
English Edition
What makes the Sodalitium so relevant?
The Chilean branch of the Regnum Christi compiles the statements that has been forced to issue over the years since this case emerged there. They are available only in Spanish here. However, even there it is notable how while in Chile there is some willingness to acknowledge the scale of the damage caused by some of the closest to Maciel, in Mexico there is still a clear attempt to limit the damage to Maciel.
In that respect, as well documented as the series is, it is hard not to miss some reference to Martínez’s victims in Mexico, O’Reilly’s in Chile, and who knows how many other predators from those or any other Legionary of the countries where that order operates.
The series is structured around a collection of extremely well-documented statements about Maciel’s wrongdoing. The people offering their understanding and knowledge of the issue are not improvised. They were in the trenches of reporting when news about Maciel was breaking, in the late 20th century.
Those segments are coupled with testimonials from some of Maciel’s victims. More troublingly for a segment of the audience, there are also testimonies from individuals who facilitated at different points in time Maciel’s crimes and who now insist on the idea of not knowing the true reach of the situation.
They are among those who usually come forward with rather pompous statements about their commitment with truth and the victims while, in fact, they encourage the most loyal to the work of the Legion of Christ and the Regnum Christi to relentlessly attack whoever calls out the crimes of their members.
Forcing forgiveness
Even when they tone down their aggressive attitude towards survivors, they insist on demanding forgiveness from them, without repairing the damage or at least fully acknowledging the extent of it and, above all, without acknowledging the conspiracy of silence that exists, despite a series such as HBO’s, around Maciel.
Whoever surfs Catholic social media should be aware of how Legionaries of Christ obsessed with becoming influencers there, will use as much as they can Maria Teresa Goretti’s image and biography to force down forgiveness as some kind of Christian duty.
Goretti, a Catholic saint, declared martyr in 1950 by John XXIII, died back in 1902, aged 11, in Nettuno, a town near Rome, soon after her predator tried, unsuccessfully, to abuse her. The predator was not a priest, but a layperson. An example of such attempts to impose forgiveness at spiritual gun point appears after this paragraph, as a posting at Instagram, in Spanish, or here.
Accounts of her death emphasize her will to forgive her predator in her agony, so she is used as a patroness of sorts of said priests over Instagram, Tik-Tok, and other short-format social media.
Granted, they render the need to teach to forgive as part of their duty to help whoever goes through a period of grief, but they have what would be seen as a conflict of interest in promoting that approach towards forgiveness.
More so because, after all, Goretti died a few hours after the attack, which was not only sexual, but an attempt on her life too. In that sense, her death spared her from having to rebuild her own life, having to deal, as an example, with the frequent accusation against many victims of inciting or enticing the assault.
And, it is true, others on top of the Legion of Christ use Maria Teresa Goretti as a “model victim.” A Spaniard survivor of a Jesuit priest made me aware of how the Church uses Goretti.
However, it is clear that in Spanish-speaking social media, using Goretti as a “model victim” is a favorite of Maciel’s disciples. These repeated attempts to force victims to forgive are one of the issues shaping the reaction against the series.
As well documented as the series is when dealing with Maciel, comes short when addressing other issues shaping his and other predators’ impunity, and how the Legion keeps trying to achieve impunity for the living predators, to avoid any responsibility towards the survivors of dead predators, and for the “order” as such. Those patterns exist in other organizations, religious or otherwise, known for their predatory practices, in Mexico and elsewhere.
In the Catholic camp one finds them in Giuliana Caccia’s hateful comments going all the way up to Pope Francis. She is the leader of the defense of what is left of the Sodalitium against anyone willing to criticize that, now suppressed, Peruvian organization. That attitude is also evident in the Opus Dei’s defense of their own predatorial practices in Argentina and other South American countries.
In Mexico and the U.S., they are visible in the social media lynching practiced by the loyalists of the Luz del Mundo (Light of the World) church, even after Naasón García Joaquín’s and his mother’s most recent indictment in New York of conspiring with other members of that organization to sexually abuse their flock.
English Edition
Naasón, leader of the Luz del Mundo church indicted on sex trafficking
In the United States it also happens with those willing to criticize the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-days Saints, the so-called Mormons, as they are also levied against those leaving whatever one thinks the Dianetics or Scientology is.
Notable voices
Among the most notable voices providing their knowledge on Maciel’s many abuses, gaslighting, lies, manipulation, and deceit, is Jason Berry, who besides his role in uncovering Maciel’s case, has been writing and investigating about the clergy sexual abuse crises since the early 1980s.
Besides Berry, one can get first-hand accounts of the issue from Carmen Aristegui, Emiliano Ruiz Parra, Raúl Olmos, Mexican journalists; Fernando González, a senior researcher at the National University of Mexico Institute of Social Research; Iacopo Scaramuzzi, and Marco Politi, Italian journalists, and Idoia Sota, a Spaniard journalist, among other voices.
There are also testimonies from some of Maciel’s victims at the Legion of Christ, some of whom played a key role in coming forward against the founder of the order while they were living in the United States, most notably at what was Maciel’s landing pad in the U. S. Eastern seaboard, the diocese of Rockville Centre in New York state.
Among them, one finds José Barba, and Juan José Vaca. One might be tempted to include Elena Sada, who is relevant because she is the daughter of one of the wealthiest families of Monterrey, the Northern industrial capital of Mexico.
She was a so-called “consecrated” of the Regnum Christi, a “movement” associated to the Legion of Christ whose members, as some of the Opus Dei, and more clearly in the recently suppressed Peruvian organization Sodalitium of Christian Life, among many other new Catholic organizations, were kept in some kind of liminal space where they were no longer laypersons, they were even subject to vows and a distorted notion of obedience, acknowledged and legitimized by the top brass at the Vatican, but they were not fully acknowledged as religious.
Picture of a group of seminarians of the Legion of Christ, ca. 1990. Picture shared over the Legioleaks Facebook Group.
That notion of obedience was common also to the priests in the Legion of Christ, it was the so-called private vow. It was a tool of sectarian control, forcing absolute loyalty on Marcial Maciel, and conversely granting himself absolute impunity. Rome allowed Maciel to keep it despite the overwhelming evidence, ever since the 1960s, of the pervasive effects it had on those subjects to it.
The excuse to allow such practice was the boom in vocations at the Legion. Rome was delighted with the massive ordinations becoming a show of spiritual muscle in the Roman and Mexican Basilicas.
English Edition
New cases of abuse at the Legion of Christ: Zero-tolerance is a slogan
That helped him find accomplices in Rome willing to accept, even if “temporarily,” the private vow. Even worse, Maciel praxis, became an example followed by the Argentine Institute of the Incarnate Word, the Peruvian Sodalitium of Christian Life, and the Brazilian Heralds of the Gospel. The story on the Legion of Christ before this paragraph and the one about Cardinal Franc Rodé’s role in the sexual abuse crisis after this paragraph provide more details about the role said massive ordinations had in the Catholic Church during John Paul II’s pontificate.
English Edition
Cardinal Rodé, the sexual abuse missing link
The members of the Legion of Christ and the Regnum Christi had to deal with that notion of obedience as to keep them in that liminal place, ever the underage individuals, second rank faithful, bound to all the duties of a nun or a religious brother, but with none of the rights that the Catholic Church internal rules acknowledge nuns or sisters and monks or brothers.
While Sada’s claims of being unaware of the true extent of Maciel’s abuse are credible, one must wonder why the series wasted so much airtime with the accounts of how her and her female peers in the Regnum Christi were forced to sleep in cars or operating out of paid phones in the pre-mobile phones era.
Would it not have been better to call on an expert to explain what makes credible Sada’s statements about being unaware of what Maciel was doing while spiritually abusing her and others instead of devoting so much time to the reenactments?
Also, as helpful as it is having Sada there, sharing her painful experience, it is notable the absence of other members of the extremely powerful Mexican financial and political elites with known associations to the Legion of Christ.
And, if not them, of experts talking about how Maciel’s power was the by-product of his ability to secure the unwavering support, up until now, of the Slim family, among others in the Mexican elites, willing to cross the gates of hell in their support of the founder of the Legion of Christ.
At center, archbishop Charles Scicluna, officer of the now Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith at the ceremony where he and Jordi Bertomeu, to his left, asked for forgiveness on behalf of Pope Francis over the handling of the Karadima case at the Cathedral of Osorno, Chile. June 17, 2018. Picture shared over the social media of the Mayor of Osorno, Jaime Bertin.
There are portions of video where one can hear and in some cases see key members of the Catholic hierarchy offering their opinions on the subject, such as Charles Scicluna. He is a Maltese archbishop who is relevant because he was tasked with the original report after the so-called Apostolic Visitation of 2009-10.
Of said report, as far as I have been able to scour the Internet over many years, the only item actually available to the public is a statement released, only in Spanish, available here.
The “abominable lone predator,” again
There one finds already an explanation, common on reports on clergy sexual abuse. The best way to summarize it is the idea or notion of Maciel and many others as the “abominable lone predator”
English Edition
Is the Catholic Church‘s talk about zero-tolerance for real?
When going over the rather inconsistent use of a language of “zero-tolerance” while addressing the clergy sexual abuse crisis, this series dealt with the implications of using that metaphor to explain cases such as Maciel’s in the stories linked before from June, in the section “The abominable lone predator” and in July, linked after, in the section “The lone predator and the blind overseer”.
English Edition
Benedict XVI and sexual abuse: real zero-tolerance?
That approach is present in the HBO documentary series in the segments where one hears Austrian Legion of Christ priest, Andreas Schöggl. The series identifies him as the current general secretary of the organization. The screenshot below comes from 29:10 of the fourth episode, where Schöggl appears identified as “Secretario general Legionarios de Cristo,” that is to say General Secretary of the Legion of Christ.
However, when going over the order’s main website in both English and Spanish it is Luis Alberto Henao who appears as the current general secretary of the congregation. Schöggl hold that position from 2018 until an undisclosed date according to the same source in the page available here.
Overall, the series provides a comprehensive account of who Maciel was, the kind of accomplished manipulator, the ultimate narcissist he was. All the interviewees help to uncover Maciel’s shtick, as some sort of holy man with the acumen of an accomplished businessman who would play to be a member of the secret services of both Mexico and the United States, while abusing even his own offspring.
Andreas Schöggl, former general secretary of the Legion of Christ. Screenshot of the HBO documentary.
But it is also notable the absence of a broader analysis of the role of the leadership of the Legion of Christ and those of the Mexican bishops, the Mexican political and financial elites, and the Vatican leadership, and how this absence contributes to furthering the lone predator thesis.
And it is true, there is a Legionary who appears showing only his back and who, after the series’ premier, published over social media a one-page additional statement where he talks about the fear of coming out openly to criticize Maciel, his underlings and their successors at the Legion.
However, the very fact that ideas as relevant as those come from an anonymous source forces one to wonder if there were not other choices to convey those issues to the public.
Searching for purpose
Personally, and this is clearly a matter of taste and personal preference, the HBO series has no clear purpose in dwelling on details of Maciel’s life through a series of reenactments of significant points in his life.
For the most part, they avoid the details of Maciel’s sordid life, so even if it is HBO, it is not the HBO of Taxicab Confessions or Real Sex, and other 20th century series where HBO used to push the boundaries of what would be acceptable.
The reenactments actually add little or nothing of value to the narrative. It is a visual aid of sorts that has been praised by audiences who prioritize the ability of storytellers as those behind those segments to recreate scenarios from Rome to New York, from Mexico to Spain, at different points in time.
They depict with all possible detail people signing checks with long series of zeros; Maciel’s overdosing in Morocco on his drug of choice, Dolantina; Maciel going into some greasy-spoon locale in Mexico to meet one of his sexual partners or Sada living in a car in the United States. The same could be said of meetings where key decisions regarding the Legion of Christ and the order’s timid attempts to rein in Maciel’s excesses.
These reenactments of Maciel’s life further reinforce that narrative already present in the Vatican’s statement about the allegedly thorough Apostolic Visitation during Benedict XVI’s pontificate. A couple of paragraphs from that statement are enough to catch the gist of it:
“The Apostolic Visitation has been able to confirm that F. Marcial Maciel Degollado’s conduct has caused grave consequences in the life and structure of the Legion (of Christ), up to the point of making necessary a point of deep review.
“The extremely grave and objectively immoral behavior of F. Maciel, confirmed by irrefutable testimonies, represent true crimes and reveal a life absent of scruples and true religious sentiment. Said life was unknown to most of the Legionaries, above all because of the system of relationships built by F. Maciel, who had been able to skillfully build alibis, gain the trust, closeness, and silence of those surrounding him while strengthening his own role as charismatic founder.”
As noted, there is no available official translation of the statement, not that I know of, so, it is my translation.
Excuses
If that was not enough, there are also segments, scenes, where current leaders of the Legion of Christ do their best to excuse themselves and their forerunners in similar positions to dismiss any knowledge of Maciel’s crimes and the tactics he followed to achieve such crimes.
That the lone predator fable is flawed has been acknowledged by Charles Scicluna himself. He was forced to do so after he tried to replay the same tune when he was tasked with a similar report for Fernando Karadima’s case in Chile.
Faithful at the doors of the Cathedral of Osorno display a banner quoting the Book of Jeremiah (23:1). It reads: Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the flock of my pasture. Laicos y laicas de Osorno Facebook group, 2018.
Scicluna was forced to change the official Vatican’s narrative on Karadima when confronted with the repudiation of what was an Andean copycat of Maciel’s report, blaming Karadima for whatever happened at the so-called Priestly Pious Association, an organization of local clergy in Santiago de Chile.
English Edition
Commissions to prevent clergy sexual abuse in Latin America, a report
After Pope Francis’s Chilean Waterloo back in 2018 (see the story linked above), Scicluna had to go over the evidence again and accept the many mistakes him and his team made on the original report dealing with Karadima.
Same could be said of the rather thorough report the Secretary of State of the Vatican published when providing an explanation of Theodore McCarrick’s crimes. If something is clear in that case is that Rome was willing to provide a detailed account not only of McCarrick’s misdeeds, but also of one of his partners in crime, the Argentine Maciel-like predator, Carlos Miguel Buela.
The story linked after this paragraph, published soon after McCarrick’s death early this year, goes into the details of said relationship between both super predators. More significantly, in that report, it is clear that people with knowledge of the situation, warned John Paul II about the potential risks of promoting McCarrick and he was, despite said warnings, willing to put people at risk to be able to achieve some other political or financial goals.
English Edition
Theodore McCarrick: Dead dogs don‘t bite?
However, unlike what happened with the first report on Karadima or with the one dealing with McCarrick (available here at Scribd or here at the Vatican’s website, when dealing with Maciel, there has never been a retraction of the 2010 excuse for an actual probe. At least officially, what remains as the “established truth” of the Catholic Church is the lone predator thesis.
That is more significant as in McCarrick’s case there was no attempt at using the “lone predator myth” thesis. A potential reason is that the report was originally designed to discredit what Carlo María Viganò, a known promoter of conspiracy theories, was saying at the time about Pope Francis.
Viganò was nuncio to the United States from 2011 through 2016. Ever since his tenure there ended, due to his age, he has devoted his life to attacking Francis as part of a broader effort to promote conspiracy theories, including those against the use of vaccines. Excommunicated in 2024, Viganò tried to blame the Argentine Pontiff of promoting McCarrick. That was impossible since McCarrick’s retired as bishop, at 75, in 2006, seven years before Francis’s election in 2013.
However, it is clear that when dealing with McCarrick, the Holy See made a special effort to avoid the abominable lone predator tale because there were several stories published in respected media in the English-speaking world with a thorough and comprehensive explanation of how McCarrick’s power came to be.
Also, because there was the expectation of a trial that ultimately never happened, as McCarrick was already 88 when Pope Francis forced him out of the College of Cardinals in 2018, and 89 when the former archbishop of Washington, DC, was “reduced to the lay state,” “laicized,” or defrocked. In 2023, two years before his death, early this year, a judge ruled him unfit to stand trial.
The Church’s narrative choices in those reports are not neutral. They can be hostage to internal power struggles, but also to the pressing need to offer a credible explanation.
When Scicluna admitted his many mistakes in his first try at explaining what had happened with Karadima, he faced crowds at the Osorno Cathedral holding signs, inside and outside the sacred place, blasting bishop Juan de la Cruz Barros Madrid, one of the so-called “Karadima bishops”.
Faithful inside the Cathedral of Osorno, Chile, massively display banners calling for Juan de la Cruz Barros Madrid’s resignation as bishop there, ca. 2017. From the Laicos y laicas de Osorno Facebook group.
They granted impunity and what seemed to be an endless stream of cover ups and excuses, for their guru. Sadly, only the Chilean faithful at Osorno have been willing to be as explicit in their repudiation of predatory practices in Latin American Catholicism.
Besides McCarrick’s official report and how Scicluna changed his argument about Karadima’s abuse after Francis’s disastrous 2018 pastoral trip to Chile and Peru, the best example of dropping the lone predator thesis comes from what Scicluna did in Lima when probing the Sodalitium.
In Peru, Scicluna and his team avoided the notion of blaming the Sodalitium founders, Germán Doig and Luis Fernando Figari. Scicluna acknowledged what he was unwilling to do with the Legion of Christ: its features as a predatory, sectarian organization. Not that the Sodalitium was unwilling to pull that one. They did, but nobody but their loyalists in the Peruvian far-right were willing to believe them.
The Legion of Christ sticks to the idea that Maciel was acting alone, as their 2020 report portrays Maciel as an awful character, one who did what he did on his own, fooling them all.
Playing victim, again
The HBO series excels when doing archival research regarding pictures, both public and private, and even when using available footage from the Legion’s many promotional videos.
The Legion offered access to said materials, so they were happy to further the idea that they were victims too. But even there, their instincts get the worse of them. After the premiere, people close to the Legion played their favorite game, the role of victim, claiming HBO (Warner Bros. to be more precise) somehow took advantage of the good will of the Legion by using the pictures, even if the producers were careful to digitalize the faces of some of the people appearing in those pictures.
Even on that, the Legion runs behind other Catholic “orders” known for their perpetual double game of embracing predatory behavior while playing victim whenever possible. Back in 2024, the Opus Dei, made similar allegations against Gareth Gore, the author of a book exposing some of the most predatory aspects of that Spaniard entity.
It is clear that the series did a good job when putting together some of these elements together. HBO knows how to do TV and that is the main problem. The series offers a sound foundation to understand some aspects of how Maciel became the kind of predator he was.
However, as useful as explanations of Marcial Maciel’s absent and abusive father are in the “building the beast” process, they are so only if one chooses to narrow the focus only on him, and not on the implications of his corrosive behavior in Mexico and elsewhere.
The authoritarian absent father, Maciel’s own obsession with pleasing his mother, his alleged limited access to formal education, and so forth are features relevant only up to a certain extent if one wants to actually understand a phenomenon far larger than him in the Catholic Church at large.
English Edition
The Legion of Christ admits ‘serious incidents‘ at Highlands School
In the last year or so two extremely close disciples of Maciel Degollado himself have been arrested in Spain (Marcelino de Andrés Núñez as the story linked above details) and Mexico (Antonio María Cabrera Cabrera, see the story below).
Both played relevant roles in key institutions of the Legionary empire. Both were the very epitome of proximity to Maciel. They were with him in his final years in Florida, as the stories devoted to them prove.
English Edition
New cases of abuse at the Legion of Christ: Zero-tolerance is a slogan
Maciel’s genealogy
As accurate as it is on many aspects of Maciel’s background the series dismisses some key aspects of the milieu, the environment, where Maciel grew in the Mexican Lowlands, the so-called Bajío, in the aftermath of the Cristero War. This variety of Mexican Catholicism, with its deep family ties and local power structures, was the perfect milieu for a figure like Maciel to thrive. His family’s connections were particularly key to his rise.
If one looks for examples of what social scientists such as Toine Spapens and Hans Moors call “intergenerational transmission of delinquent behavior as well as criminal ‘leadership,’” it would be hard to find a better example than Maciel’s deep and wide relations with the structures of local Catholicism in the Mexican Lowlands.
When one looks at Maciel’s genealogy, even one oversimplified by the difficulty of finding out data about all his cousins, nephews, and nieces who entered religious life following the Guízar bishops or Maciel himself it is clear that family played a huge role not only granting him access to a career but more importantly in keeping him unaccountable.
The fame of his bishops uncles, especially that of Rafael Guízar Valencia, the bishop of Jalapa, the capital of the state of Veracruz, canonized in 2006 by Benedict XVI, allowed Maciel to build mythologies about him and the kind of relationships he had with his five uncles and one cousin who were bishops.
When Maciel began abusing his fellow seminarians at one of his uncles’ seminaries there was always another uncle willing to play the ordinations’ casino with him. When Rafael kicked Maciel out, Antonio Guízar Valencia, then archbishop of Chihuahua rescued his nephew.
Marcial Maciel Degollado had extensive family connections, which included four great-uncles, one uncle, and a cousin who were all bishops.
When Maciel showed his true colors once again, there were José María González Valencia then archbishop of Durango, and, ultimately, Luis Guízar Barragán then bishop of Cuernavaca.
It would be his uncle Luis who (allegedly) ordained Maciel at some point. It should be noted that there are some who claim that actually never happened, at least not when Maciel said it happened.
Later in life, Maciel had an additional ally in his cousin Ricardo Guízar Díaz, who would become the archbishop of Tlalnepantla, the territory where the main campus of the Universidad Anáhuac, the Legion’s flagship college, is located.
These two elements, Maciel’s ties with a well-established dynasty of the Catholic Church in Mexico and the context in which the Guízar family achieved that status is relevant to understand how Maciel came to be what he was.
Maciel’s genealogy as a PDF file.
Not that it is the only issue, as there are countries with no semblance of a similar Church-State conflict as Mexico, which have had their own share of clergy sexual predators with uncles and other relatives in the right locations of the Catholic hierarchy willing to help them make a mockery of the allegedly rigid rules for seminarians and clergymen at large.
But it also should be noted that Maciel weaponized the conflict to his favor. Back in the 1980s, he would even go as far as to claim having been active in the Cristero War guerrillas challenging the Mexican army, despite the fact there is no evidence of him doing so and, above all, despite the fact he was born in 1920, so he was between 6 and 9 when the major battles of the conflict happened.
Again, Maciel was not alone
In the Spanish-speaking world the second-best example of a predator with support in the right places is Fernando Karadima Fariña. The Chilean super-predator only had one uncle bishop, Pío Alberto Fariña Fariña.
Even if Alberto Fariña Fariña was only an auxiliary bishop of Santiago de Chile, he was so at a time when the see remained vacant for a while, which was the precise point when Karadima was a young priest. That allowed bishop Fariña to help his nephew move up the ecclesial ladder by appointing him to a prime location: the Sacred Heart parish at the extremely affluent Providencia neighborhood.
And yet, Karadima had a deep understanding of the need to have allies and, even better than Maciel, to have accomplices in higher places. That is how the so-called “Karadima bishops” came to exist (content in Spanish). Depending on the sources they would be four or five, including the aforementioned Barros Madrid, and a small army of priests.
A nuanced understanding of Maciel’s origins is relevant because the Lowlands are crucial to understand Mexican Catholicism as, at least two-thirds of the bishops, were either born or formed at seminaries of that region during the 20th century.
Many of the most distinguishable features of Catholicism in Mexico were developed there by the ever-conflictive mixture of cultures populating up until now that region of Mexico, where deep religious convictions often mix with open disdain for the authority, as told over and over by corridos both old and new, the so-called narco-corridos.
Besides Maciel’s five uncles and one cousin who were bishops, he was the relative of other priests, some of them monsignors. As a side note, that title in the Spanish-speaking Catholic world is not reserved only to bishops and Cardinals. It is a title actively pursued and used, as a sign of status, by senior priests, some of them members of the chapters of basilicas and cathedrals all over Mexico.
Among the perks, it allows their holders to use Cardinal-like cassocks, with vibrant reds, scarlet, on each button of their garments.
One of such monsignors was Jesús Guízar Villanueva, one of many cousins of Maciel and a member of the chapter of the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Back in 2010, he barely survived an attempt on his life to die days after being forced out of the hospital where his brothers had entered him. The section “Murders everywhere” of the story linked after this paragraph includes his case.
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And if that was not enough, Maciel also had relatives who were nuns. One of them was Sister María de Jesús Guízar Barragán, she was Maciel’s aunt and bishop Luis Guízar Barragán’s sister. She, as Maura Degollado, Maciel’s mother, is already a “servant of God,” one of the stages for those of their way to sainthood.
María de Jesús, other nuns, and other laypersons, belong to Maciel’s very large extended family with deep roots in the Mexican Lowlands, active in the parishes and dioceses there, very willing to devote their lives to the Church and to support Maciel, their “paisano”, the homeboy, regardless of the accusations brought against him and his partners at the Legion of Christ over the recent decades.
And there is more. When the then prelature of Chetumal came to exist in the early 1970s, where Cancún is located, Maciel moved whatever was within his power in Rome to get control of the new religious entity there. In doing so, he was able to get at least two of his most loyal underlings at the Legion consecrated as bishops.
Pedro Pablo Elizondo Cárdenas current bishop of Cancún and top member of the Legion of Christ and Ana Paolina Salazar Cantillo a member of his team at the diocese, 2025. From the diocese’s social media.
First, Jorge Bernal Vargas, who would be the bishop there from 1973 until 2004, and then Pedro Pablo Elizondo Cárdenas who, at 76 is about to find who will take over that diocese in the coming weeks.
In theory, Pope Leo XIV is able now to send a bishop with no ties to the Legion of Christ, as the territory is now a diocese and not a prelature, but whoever goes there will have to deal, one way or the other, with the Legion of Christ.
Catching the imagination
Granted, Maciel’s personality easily catches the imagination even of those with little or no interest is psychological analysis of narcissists such as him. The permanent contradiction he was able to live in, satisfying his seemingly endless need for sexual satisfaction while being obsessed with apparently spiritual matters.
But in stressing as the series does Maciel’s sordid personality features it hides or minimizes the large-scale sexual abuse that was already happening while he was alive and still happens now at establishments such as the Highlands School in Northern Madrid, Spain.
It is impossible not to wonder if he is still running a number on us, same way he did when alive, when he was obsessed seeking yet another victim to sexually please him while desperately moving all his power into turning his mother into a saint and trying to become a Cardinal.
The funeral Mass of Marcial Maciel Degollado in February 2008. The picture was shared on the Legioleaks Facebook group.
As far as his mother was concerned he accomplished the first step of the process, moving whatever was required in the diocese of Zamora to bring, Maura Degollado Guízar, to the altars.
Mexican medium, then a magazine, Proceso published back in 2005 a story (content in Spanish) detailing how Maciel, already 85 and publicly accused of being a predator, had commissioned Spaniard Legionary of Christ priest Juan Pablo Ledesma, with promoting Maura Degollado’s canonization.
As far as becoming a Cardinal, it was a tall order, as he was only a presbyter, what is commonly known in Catholicism as a priest. But there was precedent for priests to be appointed or, in Church’s jargoon, “created” a Cardinal.
Back in 2001, Jesuit priest Avery Robert Dulles, by then a prominent theology professor at Fordham University, had been promoted to Cardinal by John Paul II. He declined the chance to become a bishop, as he was already 82, but Dulles’s attitude towards the Church and his role as priest and theologian was Maciel’s opposite.
Where Dulles converted to Catholicism and become a priest despite his deep links with the U.S. political elites (he was the son of former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles), Maciel used Catholicism and his deep familial links to the Mexican episcopate to try to insert himself in the Mexican elites, while sexually abusing people near him.
Desperately seeking sainthood?
But even when seeking sainthood for his mother, Maciel was already signaling something else. Ever the narcissist, there was always deceit in his moves. When asked about Maciel’s chances at becoming a saint, Ledesma the Spaniard Legionary tasked with making Maura Degollado a saint, was not shy about the next item in his agenda as a saint-maker: Marcial Maciel’s canonization.
Was Maciel a wolf? Indeed, he was. A rabid specimen, but he was not acting alone, and as much as the general secretary of the Legion, Schöggl, claims innocence and the implicit desire to give the Legion a chance at redemption, it is hard to believe him, as proven by the letter a group of former Legionaries published over social media on September 2, 2025, already cited before.
More so when one takes into consideration that the Legion has been keeping priests with a close relation with Maciel and their own questionable behavior in positions where they remain public figures with access to those who the Catholic Church insists on describing as “vulnerable.” That is the summary of Marcelino de Andrés Núñez as a chaplain of sorts at the Highland School in Madrid, having access to underage females.
That is why as much as I deeply respect some of the participants in the HBO series, their longstanding fight for truth and justice, cannot share the enthusiasm with the release of the series as it is.
I believe Jason Berry, Fernando González, Emiliano Ruiz Parra, Raúl Olmos, and all the other experts consulted by the series are fully aware of how deep Maciel’s complicities go. This critique is not against their writings or scholarship.
One only needs to go over Berry’s account in Render unto Rome. For example, when he writes about Father A, who had a way of “making friends” in Rome (p. 195 when talking about an envelope delivered to Cardinal Eduardo Martínez Somalo with 90 thousand USD). Or when he talks about Father B and his “elegant way of giving a bribe” in the eponymous section starting at page 191, both in the chapter, “Maciel, lord of prosperity,” to see the full context.
Main problem is that after watching the series, it is clear that the notion of the “wolf of God,” a new iteration of the lone predator tale, overwhelms Berry’s and others’ more nuanced accounts of how Maciel did what he did and the shared responsibilities in the Catholic Church, going back to Maciel’s uncles, and Pope Pius XI and each of his successors, including Pope Francis who fulfilled one of Maciel’s dreams: giving the Legion of Christ a Cardinal.
The Legion’s first Cardinal was not Maciel, but his former “man in Rome,” Fernando Vérgez Alzaga, who, as a young Spaniard priest, was tasked by Maciel himself with two duties.
Officially, Vérgez Alzaga was for a while the secretary of Eduardo Pironio, the Argentine Cardinal charged with overseeing religious orders worldwide at the then Congregation now Dicastery for Religious and Secular Institutes. Unofficially, he was one of the many Legionary priests, as Fathers A and B in Berry’s book, delivering fat-bottomed envelopes with U.S. Dollars Maciel used to buy his impunity in Rome.
If HBO’s Wolf of God brings the audience to those more complex accounts one finds in Berry’s, González’s, Ruiz Parra’s, Olmos’s, and other authors’ books, then the series is a success. If the audience remains in the oversimplified version delivered by HBO, then it is a huge failure, because it perpetuates the lone predator myth.
One just needs to keep in mind how other depictions of wolves in media can be misleading. The best example is Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. As Jordan Belfort in Wall Street, Maciel was viable as a successful predator because the Catholic Church and the Mexican government, despite the Mexican political elites never-ending prattle about something called “lay State,” offered him a loosely regulated milieu where he was able to do what he wanted.
PHOTO: From left to right, Marcial Maciel Degollado, Cardinal Eduardo Pironio and his then secretary, now Cardinal Fernando Vérgez Alzaga, Rome, June 30, 1983. From the Legion of Christ’s social media.