credible, principally, that he had, in fact, engaged in sexual misconduct, including the sexual abuse of several of the Legion’s first seminarians, and committed the canonical crime of giving sacramental absolution to at least one of the victims he abused.4 A communiqué from the Vatican Press Office on May 19, 2006, read in part:
After having submitted the results of the investigation to an attentive study, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under the guide of its new Prefect, His Eminence Cardinal William Levada, decided—taking account of the advanced age of the Reverend Maciel and his delicate health—to renounce any canonical process and to invite the Father to a reserved life of prayer and penance, renouncing every public ministry. The Holy Father [Pope Benedict XVI] has approved these decisions.
After Maciel’s death in 2008, there came more revelations: Maciel had, in fact, been addicted to painkillers for years and had enlisted a close circle of trusted Legionaries to obtain a steady supply of drugs for him. In addition to sexually abusing young seminarians, he had fathered at least three children: a daughter (by one woman) and two sons (by another woman). The latter two have alleged that Maciel sexually abused them as children.
Maciel was, in actuality, a colossally enigmatic individual—a sociopathic sexual omnivore who presented to a broader public the credible persona of a religious leader and reformer, friend of popes, and darling of much of the Roman curia, who secretively used the Catholic religious order he founded to feed his lusts.
Subsequently, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, ordered an “apostolic visitation” of the Legionaries in 2009—a close scrutiny of all Legionary houses of formation and apostolate conducted by a team of bishops appointed by the pope. Following that visitation, early in July 2010, Cardinal Velasio de Paolis was named papal delegate to the Legionaries of Christ to shepherd the congregation through a “process of profound re-evaluation” as mandated in a communiqué from the Holy See to the Legionaries in early May of that same year.
Maciel had roused the suspicions of at least two major superiors as early as 2004. For its part, the Holy See, in May 2006 had already disciplined Maciel, consigning him to “a life of prayer and penance,” the outcome of its own independent investigation of Maciel, completed in late 2005, which had already deemed credible the principal accusations made against him. Father Álvaro Corcuera (then general director of the Legionaries, who succumbed to a brain tumor in 2014) had been summoned to a meeting at the Vatican in March 2006 and was informed of this outcome.
From that moment on, every member of the congregation had a fundamental right to know the truth regarding their revered founder. Moreover, the very good of the Church demanded an immediate and transparent communication of these facts.
We know today that by the end of 2006, Corcuera had been presented with further, independent evidence that Maciel had fathered at least one child.5 Yet it was not until late 2008 that Corcuera finally opted for a slow and overly cautious rollout of a watered-down and minimalized version of the founder’s sordid life. But it was to be shared first only with the congregation’s superiors; rank-and-file members of the congregation would be informed at some undetermined point in the future. It was a plan that would prove catastrophic.
In reality, for nearly three years Corcuera kept the vast majority of Legionaries and members of Regnum Christi—the Legion’s lay apostolic movement—in the dark until the Legionary leadership was finally forced to publicly admit Maciel’s guilt in late January 2009 as leaked details about his mistress and child were about to hit the press.
Nor did Corcuera desist during those same years from continuing to foster the cult of personality that had enveloped Maciel for decades. In his homily at Maciel’s funeral Mass, Corcuera several times used expressions indicating his apparent conviction that Maciel was already enjoying his eternal reward in heaven: “Now he is receiving God’s eternal embrace, something he always longed for,” explained Corcuera. He then went on to paint a hagiographical account of the founder’s final breath just as several priests were beginning to concelebrate Mass at his bedside: “We celebrated that Mass,” affirmed Corcuera, “when he was already in heaven.”
Yet, anyone who knew Corcuera would know very well that he did none of this out of malice. In reality, Álvaro Corcuera remains a tragic figure in the history of the Legionaries. A lifelong and childlike devotee of Maciel, Corcuera was handpicked by the founder to succeed him as general director of the congregation—bereft as Corcuera was of some of the most basic and essential qualities of governance. I can only think that his impossibly poor judgments were largely the fruit of his own interior bewilderment, confusion, and utter loss of good sense as the facts about Maciel came to light and the congregation began to implode.
In 2014, a newly elected director general of the Legionaries apologized for “hesitations and errors of judgment when setting out to inform the members of the congregation and others … which have increased the suffering and confusion of many.” Yet those determinations were more than the result of inept leadership or unspeakably poor judgment on the part of Corcuera; they resulted from the deliberate intent on the part of some individuals within the Legionary leadership to keep rank-and-file members of the congregation in the dark. As well, it defies belief to think Corcuera was not guided by certain members of the Roman Curia, themselves the product of a mindset which, in a case such as Maciel’s, held that “prudence” required silence, secrecy, and subterfuge in order to “avoid further scandal.”6 Further, it remains simply implausible that Maciel’s closest collaborators for decades could not have known anything about his egregious behavior, or at least have serious suspicions about him, well prior to 2006.7
In the end, the Legionaries released an official statement to the press on February 3, 2009, that read in part:
We have learned some things about our founder’s life that are surprising and difficult for us to understand. We can confirm that there are some aspects of his life that were not appropriate for a Catholic priest.
What ensued in the coming days was a public-relations fiasco and a pastoral nightmare. In the final days of January, Legionary superiors had scrambled to break the news to priest members of the congregation. Thousands of stunned and bewildered Legionary supporters only became aware of the revelations from news accounts on February 3.
Their questions and demands for explanations were met, more often than not, by subterfuge aimed at minimizing the gravity of the crisis. For their part, Legionaries and members of Regnum Christi were expected to follow the Legion’s customary ways of not externalizing negativity, not criticizing the superiors and directors, nor expressing negative emotions to anyone but their spiritual directors.
In late January 2009 my own religious superior finally sat me down to confirm that the allegations were true.
I immediately went numb—there’s no other way to explain what I felt.
Shortly after the Holy See’s actions against Maciel in May 2006, I had ceased trying to account for it all as some kind of unique “cross” that God had permitted Maciel to bear. For three years, I struggled mightily to believe in my congregation, and to validate it in the eyes of the Church. Now, in the course of one conversation with my religious superior over a late supper at a local diner, my entire world was upended. The accusations were essentially true. In one moment of pristine and devastating clarity, I realized that for the better part of twenty-three years I had been caught up in a lie, in a massive deception of unprecedented proportions in the Church.
Within days a raw, emotional pain was setting in hard, pain like I had never felt before. At age forty-four,
