VATICAN CITY - First, one of the Legion of Christ’s top officials abruptly quit the troubled religious order in frustration over the slow pace of change. Then priests in the cultlike movement empowered proteges and associates of the order’s disgraced founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel, to vote for their next leader.
The past month has seen some setbacks in the Legion’s efforts to rehabilitate itself as it moves toward electing new leadership next month, the culmination of a three-year Vatican experiment aiming to overhaul a damaged order. Yet even as the Legion prepares to present a new face, high-ranking members continue to speak nostalgically and even reverently of Maciel - a sexual predator who molested his seminarians, fathered three children and was, in the words of Vatican-appointed investigators,“devoid of scruples and authentic religious meaning.” Maciel died in 2008.
It all means that hopes are dwindling that the Vatican’s effort to radically reform the Legion has succeeded, raising the question of what Pope Francis will do with the once-powerful and wealthy order after the mandate of the papal envoy running it expires.
Francis’ predecessor, Benedict XVI, took over the Legion in 2010 and appointed a Vatican cardinal to govern it after investigators determined that the congregation itself needed to be “purified” of Maciel’s influence.
To be sure, some progress has been made during the pastthree years of Vatican receivership: The order rewrote its constitutions, released statistics about sex abuse cases, and a well-respected priest recently begged forgiveness from Maciel’s victims for how he and the Legion ignored and defamed them. But if recent elections in the Legion’s consecrated lay branches are any indication, the membership has voted for the status quo.
Francis has already said the Legion’s assembly, or General Chapter, isn’t the end of the reform process but merely a “step.”
Yet the process itself seems questionable when even the Legion’s current leader continues to speak fondly of Maciel.
The Rev. Thomas Berg, an American priest who left the Legion in 2009, said such nostalgia shows that a considerable portion of the Legion membership is still unable to shake itself from Maciel’s toxic influence.
“The continual resurgence in private and public of the storyline thatMaciel is a ‘flawed instrument,’ but an instrument of God no less, is proof in the pudding that the purification has not gone deep enough,” he said.
Religion, Pages 15 on 12/14/2013