Mahony Better Watch Out for Legion of Christ

NEW ORLEANS — The Los Angeles archdiocese faces about 500 civil cases stemming from alleged priestly sexual abuse and a grand jury seeking voluminous personnel files on accused clerics. And it may be courting another problem. The Legion of Christ, a Catholic order of priests whose leader has been trailed by accusations of sexual abuse and whose schools have attracted controversy, is seeking to open a prep school in Ventura County.

The Legion derides the allegations against founder Father Marcial Maciel Degollado as "disproved." But sexual-abuse accusations by nine former Legionaries have never been adjudicated by the Vatican.

The charges against Maciel first arose in 1976, when a Mexican priest and a Spanish priest gave the late Bishop John McGann detailed accounts of alleged abuse when they were teenage seminarians in Spain and Rome, where Maciel founded schools in the 1940s and 1950s. In compliance with canon law, McGann sent a dossier of the charges to Rome. The Vatican acknowledged receiving the allegations, and did nothing. McGann continued to push the priests' cause, in 1978 and 1989, but again met with silence from the Vatican. In the 1990s, seven other former Legionaries made similar sexual-abuse charges against Maciel. The Vatican remained silent. Throughout, Maciel, now 84, has maintained his innocence.

In 1998, the papal ambassador to Mexico encouraged the group of ex-Legionaries to take their charges to Rome. The canonical case, filed at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, accused Maciel of "absolving the sins" of his victims in confession. Under church law, profaning the confessional is a crime with no statute of limitation.

In late 1999, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who oversees the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, halted the proceeding without explanation.

The Legion portrays Maciel as a victim of false accusations. It cites a Vatican investigation of drug abuse charges against Maciel in the 1950s. The priest was reinstated after the investigation. But as public allegations against Maciel mounted, the Vatican never proclaimed his innocence. By contrast, the Vatican publicly supported Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin when he was accused, in 1993, of sexual abuse in a civil lawsuit. The suit was dropped when the plaintiff said he could no longer trust his memory.