Vatican to investigate Legionaries of Christ

VATICAN CITY — A conservative Catholic movement announced Tuesday (March 31) that it will be the subject of a Vatican investigation, following revelations that its late founder fathered at least one illegitimate child. The Rev. Alvaro Corcuera, general director of the Legionaries of Christ, made the announcement in a letter dated Sunday (Mar. 29), and […]

VATICAN CITY — A conservative Catholic movement announced Tuesday (March 31) that it will be the subject of a Vatican investigation, following revelations that its late founder fathered at least one illegitimate child.

The Rev. Alvaro Corcuera, general director of the Legionaries of Christ, made the announcement in a letter dated Sunday (Mar. 29), and posted Tuesday on the Web site of the group’s affiliated lay movement, Regnum Christi.

The investigation, known as an “apostolic visitation,” will take place “over the next months,” Corcuera wrote, and “will help us to face our present vicissitudes related to the grave facts” revealed in recent years about the movement’s founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel, who died in 2008.


A similar apostolic visitation was conducted in U.S. seminaries to investigate a perceived gay subculture; the Vatican is soon set to launch a probe of U.S. women’s religious communities.

The Legionaries of Christ (or Legion of Christ), which enjoyed Vatican favor under Pope John Paul II, claims to have 800 priests and more than 2,500 seminarians in 21 countries, including the United States. Regnum Christi claims 70,000 lay members in 45 countries.

In 1997, nine former Legionaries accused Maciel of sexually abusing them decades earlier, when they were studying to become priests under his authority. The allegations, which Maciel denied, set off a drawn-out Vatican investigation conducted by the office of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) from 1998 to 2005.

In 2006, with Benedict’s approval, Maciel was asked to limit himself to a “life reserved to prayer and penitence, renouncing all public ministry.”

The Vatican said at the time that Benedict had decided to spare Maciel a church trial, which could have resulted in his permanent removal from the priesthood, because of his advanced age.

At the time, the Legion issued a statement that Maciel had accepted the pontiff’s decision as a “new cross that God, the Father of Mercy, has allowed him to suffer and that will obtain many graces for the Legion of Christ.”


The story took another turn in February of this year when the Legion’s leadership began informing members of disturbing findings about their founder. At least one member has publicly confirmed that Maciel fathered a daughter, now in her 20s.

“We are deeply saddened and sorry, and we sincerely ask for forgiveness from God and from those who have been hurt through this,” Corcuera wrote in Sunday’s letter, addressed to fellow Legionaries, without mentioning any specific charges.

According to the Rev. Thomas D. Williams, an American member of the Legionaries in Rome, at least three Vatican investigators — one each for Europe, North America and South America — will interview all of the movement’s priests and some lay members, in order to evaluate the organization’s basic soundness.

“Everything is theoretically on the table,” Williams said. “The fundamental question for me is, is what I’m involved in a work of God or not? Only the church can tell us that.”

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