The Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, who before he died last year had been barred from public ministry over allegations of sexually abusing young men, is now being accused of having fathered at least one child with a woman with whom he was having a relationship.
The scandal was first reported by the American Papist blog this morning. And the New York Times is now quoting the order's spokesman saying, "We can confirm that there are some aspects of his life that were not appropriate for a Catholic priest."
The Vatican has acknowledged receiving accusations against Maciel starting in 1998. He was not disciplined during the papacy of Pope John Paul II, but Pope Benedict XVI barred him from public ministry in 2006. Maciel died in 2008.
The Legionaries, a conservative religious order whose first U.S. formation house was in Connecticut, claim 800 priests and 2,500 seminarians; their lay movement, Regnum Christi, claims 65,000 members. The movement has been controversial, not only because of its members extraordinary loyalty to Maciel even in the face of multiple abuse allegations, but also because of the movement's allegedly heavyhanded recruiting tactics, which resulted last year in the archbishop of Baltimore imposing a series of restrictions on the order's activity in his diocese.
Over at Beliefnet, David Gibson blogs, "It's hard to see how Maciel, who died in January 2008 after being disciplined by Pope Benedict in 2006, could become more controversial. Maciel was accused of being an almost cult-like leader of the insular community he founded, and so great was his influence in Rome that persistent reports of his sexual abuse of seminarians were ignored."
And at America magazine, the Rev. James Martin blogs about the implications for the debate over the relation between sexuality and abuse, writing, "Father Maciel's abuse was against young men, and so most probably assumed, when the abuse revelations were made public, that he was homosexual. Most psychiatrists and psychologists, however, say that sexual abuse against minors is not so much an indication of sexual orientation--whether homosexual or heterosexual--as much as it indicates a stunted or malformed sexuality overall. This is not to deny that most of the clergy sexual abuse was against adolescent boys and even men, and perpetrated by gay men, but rather to point out how the question of abuse is more complex than is usually thought, and whose solution is more complex than simply barring gay men from holy orders."
