http://www.seattlepi.com/national/1110ap_us_priest_abuse.html
Last updated July 13, 2009 2:45 p.m. PT
Catholic priest convicted of abusing Md. altar boy
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
ROCKVILLE, Md. -- A Roman Catholic priest has been convicted of sexually abusing an altar boy at a Germantown church more than seven years ago.
The Rev. Aaron Cote (koh-TAY') is expected to be sentenced Oct. 14 to 10 years of probation. The former part-time youth minister at Mother Seton parish also must register as a sex offender under a plea agreement announced Monday.
Cote was convicted of a third-degree sex offense. He pleaded not guilty and was convicted by a Montgomery County Circuit Court judge, who heard a recitation of undisputed facts.
The 57-year-old priest, who now lives in New York City, reached a $1.2 million settlement two years ago with the victim. The former altar boy claimed Cote had repeatedly molested him from June 2001 until June 2002.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Monday, July 13, 2009
Survivors of abuse still waiting for counselling
Independent.ie
Survivors of abuse still waiting for counselling
By Eimear Ni Bhraonain
Monday July 13 2009
NINETY survivors of institutional abuse are on a waiting list to access counselling services across the country.
The surge in calls to the National Counselling Service (NCS) since the Ryan report was published means that institutional abuse victims are waiting up to four weeks to get an initial appointment.
NCS is a free counselling and psychotherapy service to adults who have experienced trauma and abuse in childhood.
Priority is promised to survivors of institutional abuse but many have to wait four weeks for their first appointment with a counsellor.
It has also emerged that only eight out of the 10 positions for directors of counselling in each of the former health board areas are filled. A statement from the Health Service Executive (HSE) said that two HSE staff were acting as directors in the Dublin and mid-Leinster area.
Cutbacks and the HSE recruitment embargoes have affected NCS in recent years. However, NCS said they were negotiating "for increased resources in staff and finance" to meet the current additional pressure on services.
"In the week following the release of the Ryan report, the NCS received the same number of referrals that was received during the final quarter of 2008," it said.
During one week alone, NCS received 183 referrals which represents a monthly average of referrals during 2008. The majority of these people had not accessed the counselling service in the past nine years.
John Kelly, of Survivors of Child Abuse, said that the waiting times were likely to get much longer for counselling services.
"If there's 90 survivors of institutional abuse still on a waiting list, we can only imagine what it will be like when the next report comes out about the Dublin archdiocese," he said.
- Eimear Ni Bhraonain
Survivors of abuse still waiting for counselling
By Eimear Ni Bhraonain
Monday July 13 2009
NINETY survivors of institutional abuse are on a waiting list to access counselling services across the country.
The surge in calls to the National Counselling Service (NCS) since the Ryan report was published means that institutional abuse victims are waiting up to four weeks to get an initial appointment.
NCS is a free counselling and psychotherapy service to adults who have experienced trauma and abuse in childhood.
Priority is promised to survivors of institutional abuse but many have to wait four weeks for their first appointment with a counsellor.
It has also emerged that only eight out of the 10 positions for directors of counselling in each of the former health board areas are filled. A statement from the Health Service Executive (HSE) said that two HSE staff were acting as directors in the Dublin and mid-Leinster area.
Cutbacks and the HSE recruitment embargoes have affected NCS in recent years. However, NCS said they were negotiating "for increased resources in staff and finance" to meet the current additional pressure on services.
"In the week following the release of the Ryan report, the NCS received the same number of referrals that was received during the final quarter of 2008," it said.
During one week alone, NCS received 183 referrals which represents a monthly average of referrals during 2008. The majority of these people had not accessed the counselling service in the past nine years.
John Kelly, of Survivors of Child Abuse, said that the waiting times were likely to get much longer for counselling services.
"If there's 90 survivors of institutional abuse still on a waiting list, we can only imagine what it will be like when the next report comes out about the Dublin archdiocese," he said.
- Eimear Ni Bhraonain
N.Ireland MP calls for probe into child abuse
belfasttelegraph.co.uk
DUP MP issues call for probe into child abuse
By Noel McAdam
Monday, 13 July 2009
A DUP MP has called for a Ryan report-style investigation into the abuse of children in religious and other institutions in Northern Ireland.
David Simpson also said he hopes to secure the support of Children’s Commissioner Patricia Lewsley later this month for a public inquiry to establish the scale of the problem in the province in the wake of the Ryan revelations in the Republic.
“Whilst there have been individual cases brought against people accused of abusing children in their care in Northern Ireland, such as the prosecution of Brendan Smyth, a member of the Norbertine Order, there has not been a serious investigation into the scale of the problem of child abuse by religious orders and other institutions in Northern Ireland,” the Upper Bann MP argued.
“The Ryan Report showed the extent of the problem in the Republic of Ireland.
“I believe we need to establish the facts surrounding just what went on in Northern Ireland.
“Many lives have been ruined by the child abuse inflicted by those who were in a position of trust.
“We need to establish how many in order to secure compensation and to help those who have suffered,” he added.
DUP MP issues call for probe into child abuse
By Noel McAdam
Monday, 13 July 2009
A DUP MP has called for a Ryan report-style investigation into the abuse of children in religious and other institutions in Northern Ireland.
David Simpson also said he hopes to secure the support of Children’s Commissioner Patricia Lewsley later this month for a public inquiry to establish the scale of the problem in the province in the wake of the Ryan revelations in the Republic.
“Whilst there have been individual cases brought against people accused of abusing children in their care in Northern Ireland, such as the prosecution of Brendan Smyth, a member of the Norbertine Order, there has not been a serious investigation into the scale of the problem of child abuse by religious orders and other institutions in Northern Ireland,” the Upper Bann MP argued.
“The Ryan Report showed the extent of the problem in the Republic of Ireland.
“I believe we need to establish the facts surrounding just what went on in Northern Ireland.
“Many lives have been ruined by the child abuse inflicted by those who were in a position of trust.
“We need to establish how many in order to secure compensation and to help those who have suffered,” he added.
Jailed evangelist's followers sell suspect goods
Last updated July 12, 2009 11:39 a.m. PT
Jailed evangelist's followers sell suspect goods
By JON GAMBRELL
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
In this photo taken May 4, 2009, a house on property once owned by evangelist Tony Alamo is shown in Dyer, Ark. (AP Photo/Danny Johnston)
DYER, Ark. -- Evangelist Tony Alamo once said God never wanted his ministry to be poor, but money raised by his followers only seems to go his way.
As Alamo, 74, faces accusations he took five preteen girls across state lines for sex, he presides over a multi-million-dollar empire held in his followers' names. Trucking companies, residential property and a number of questionable ventures fund the work of his 100 to 200 acolytes.
"A substantial amount of income is generated that's utilized for the organization, all of which is controlled by Mr. Alamo," FBI agent Randall Harris testified at an October bond hearing. "However ... none of that property ever shows legally as being in his name."
Government agencies show Alamo built his fortune on the backs of his followers, setting them up in commercial operations rather than rely on donations like traditional ministries. By the 1980s, the Labor Department said Alamo had to pay his followers at least minimum wage; the IRS later laid claim to millions of dollars in taxes.
At the end of a four-year prison term for tax evasion in 1998 - after the government seized assets and courts rejected his charity status - Alamo paid $250,000 to cover a fine and penalties.
"How in the world could Mr. Alamo come up with a quarter of a million dollars ... when the entire time he hasn't been able to work, he hasn't held a job other than what he may have been employed in inside a federal penitentiary?" Assistant U.S. Attorney Kyra Jenner asked during Alamo's bond hearing last October.
At its height, Alamo's ministry owned gas stations, a hog farm, grocery store, restaurant and concert venue in Alma, a town near Dyer. Alamo's Nashville, Tenn., clothing store catered to celebrities who bought elaborately decorated jean jackets. His line also carried sharkskin boots, leopard-skin jackets and sequined gowns popular with musicians at the Grand Ole Opry, which Alamo occasionally haunted in the 1980s.
His wife Susan once arrived for an interview wearing a floor-length red-and-white dress and lynx jacket. "God wants his children to go first-class," she once said.
But life at the Alamo compound could be paradise or hell, depending on who you ask. Alamo and his wife enjoyed a heart-shaped pool near a mansion in Dyer, but federal agents said they found followers' sleeping bags in a meeting room. Marshals said some workers earned $5 a day, with shifts lasting as long as 20 hours.
In the latest case, prosecutors allege girls under age 18 were taken across state lines from the current compound in Foulke and raped or sexually abused between 1994 and 2005. A trial starts this week.
If convicted, Alamo faces 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each of 10 counts.
Whether all the business ventures linked to Alamo are legal isn't known.
Peter N. Georgiades, a Pittsburgh lawyer who sued Alamo on behalf of ex-followers in the 1990s, said ministry workers accepted donations of food near its expiration dates, wiped off the dates and resold items to grocers. "It's plain, flat-out fraud," the lawyer said.
Mary Coker, who helped ex-followers contact federal agents before a recent raid, said the ministry has been selling outdated government-donated food since it moved to Fouke in the 1990s.
In March 2007, FBI agents arrested Leslie Ray "Buster" White at the flea market he ran in Texarkana, Texas, and seized $100,000 after charging him with selling counterfeit goods including CDs, shoes and handbags. White, who has identified himself as an associate pastor at Alamo's church, pleaded guilty to trafficking and was initially sentenced to 180 days of house arrest.
On June 30, he was ordered into jail for eight weekends after health inspectors and the FBI said they found copycat designer labels and outdated food, over-the-counter drugs and cosmetics at the flea market.
Investigators say invoices listed Action Distributors and SJ Distribution as sellers of the goods. Court documents and testimony during Alamo's criminal detention hearing in October said both companies are owned by Tony Alamo Christian Ministries members.
White denounced his association with Alamo and the ministry in December, but his lawyer won't say whether he is cooperating with the government.
Also in 2007, FBI agents questioned Thomas Scarcello, who helped incorporate an Alamo-linked charity at Fort Smith, after he was found in a warehouse filled with Tempur-Pedic mattresses intended for Hurricane Katrina victims. A lawsuit says $7 million worth of donated mattresses were offered for sale from trucks and elsewhere until a federal magistrate stopped their sale.
In a deposition, Scarcello denied Alamo had any connection with the businesses, then claimed his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination when asked about his business finances or where he kept his records.
Ernest Peia, a wholesaler, testified in a deposition that he bought clothes, food and candies from Scarcello. Among businesses operated by the Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation, Arkansas records show, are the Alamo Candy Co. and Wholesale Candy.
Two Fort Smith trucking companies are registered in followers' names: Action Distributors and Advantage Food Group. Federal transportation records show those companies logged more than 1.1 million miles in 2006 and 2007. The FBI said those companies likely have as many as 30 tractor-trailers.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks Alamo's church as a hate group, said it had no estimate on its net worth. Even the FBI acknowledged in court that it has trouble untangling a web of related businesses, though there's no question about who is in charge.
"It's my understanding from the interviews we've conducted that hardly a penny is spent without ultimately (Alamo's) authorization," Harris said at Alamo's hearing last fall.
Jailed evangelist's followers sell suspect goods
By JON GAMBRELL
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
In this photo taken May 4, 2009, a house on property once owned by evangelist Tony Alamo is shown in Dyer, Ark. (AP Photo/Danny Johnston)
DYER, Ark. -- Evangelist Tony Alamo once said God never wanted his ministry to be poor, but money raised by his followers only seems to go his way.
As Alamo, 74, faces accusations he took five preteen girls across state lines for sex, he presides over a multi-million-dollar empire held in his followers' names. Trucking companies, residential property and a number of questionable ventures fund the work of his 100 to 200 acolytes.
"A substantial amount of income is generated that's utilized for the organization, all of which is controlled by Mr. Alamo," FBI agent Randall Harris testified at an October bond hearing. "However ... none of that property ever shows legally as being in his name."
Government agencies show Alamo built his fortune on the backs of his followers, setting them up in commercial operations rather than rely on donations like traditional ministries. By the 1980s, the Labor Department said Alamo had to pay his followers at least minimum wage; the IRS later laid claim to millions of dollars in taxes.
At the end of a four-year prison term for tax evasion in 1998 - after the government seized assets and courts rejected his charity status - Alamo paid $250,000 to cover a fine and penalties.
"How in the world could Mr. Alamo come up with a quarter of a million dollars ... when the entire time he hasn't been able to work, he hasn't held a job other than what he may have been employed in inside a federal penitentiary?" Assistant U.S. Attorney Kyra Jenner asked during Alamo's bond hearing last October.
At its height, Alamo's ministry owned gas stations, a hog farm, grocery store, restaurant and concert venue in Alma, a town near Dyer. Alamo's Nashville, Tenn., clothing store catered to celebrities who bought elaborately decorated jean jackets. His line also carried sharkskin boots, leopard-skin jackets and sequined gowns popular with musicians at the Grand Ole Opry, which Alamo occasionally haunted in the 1980s.
His wife Susan once arrived for an interview wearing a floor-length red-and-white dress and lynx jacket. "God wants his children to go first-class," she once said.
But life at the Alamo compound could be paradise or hell, depending on who you ask. Alamo and his wife enjoyed a heart-shaped pool near a mansion in Dyer, but federal agents said they found followers' sleeping bags in a meeting room. Marshals said some workers earned $5 a day, with shifts lasting as long as 20 hours.
In the latest case, prosecutors allege girls under age 18 were taken across state lines from the current compound in Foulke and raped or sexually abused between 1994 and 2005. A trial starts this week.
If convicted, Alamo faces 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each of 10 counts.
Whether all the business ventures linked to Alamo are legal isn't known.
Peter N. Georgiades, a Pittsburgh lawyer who sued Alamo on behalf of ex-followers in the 1990s, said ministry workers accepted donations of food near its expiration dates, wiped off the dates and resold items to grocers. "It's plain, flat-out fraud," the lawyer said.
Mary Coker, who helped ex-followers contact federal agents before a recent raid, said the ministry has been selling outdated government-donated food since it moved to Fouke in the 1990s.
In March 2007, FBI agents arrested Leslie Ray "Buster" White at the flea market he ran in Texarkana, Texas, and seized $100,000 after charging him with selling counterfeit goods including CDs, shoes and handbags. White, who has identified himself as an associate pastor at Alamo's church, pleaded guilty to trafficking and was initially sentenced to 180 days of house arrest.
On June 30, he was ordered into jail for eight weekends after health inspectors and the FBI said they found copycat designer labels and outdated food, over-the-counter drugs and cosmetics at the flea market.
Investigators say invoices listed Action Distributors and SJ Distribution as sellers of the goods. Court documents and testimony during Alamo's criminal detention hearing in October said both companies are owned by Tony Alamo Christian Ministries members.
White denounced his association with Alamo and the ministry in December, but his lawyer won't say whether he is cooperating with the government.
Also in 2007, FBI agents questioned Thomas Scarcello, who helped incorporate an Alamo-linked charity at Fort Smith, after he was found in a warehouse filled with Tempur-Pedic mattresses intended for Hurricane Katrina victims. A lawsuit says $7 million worth of donated mattresses were offered for sale from trucks and elsewhere until a federal magistrate stopped their sale.
In a deposition, Scarcello denied Alamo had any connection with the businesses, then claimed his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination when asked about his business finances or where he kept his records.
Ernest Peia, a wholesaler, testified in a deposition that he bought clothes, food and candies from Scarcello. Among businesses operated by the Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation, Arkansas records show, are the Alamo Candy Co. and Wholesale Candy.
Two Fort Smith trucking companies are registered in followers' names: Action Distributors and Advantage Food Group. Federal transportation records show those companies logged more than 1.1 million miles in 2006 and 2007. The FBI said those companies likely have as many as 30 tractor-trailers.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks Alamo's church as a hate group, said it had no estimate on its net worth. Even the FBI acknowledged in court that it has trouble untangling a web of related businesses, though there's no question about who is in charge.
"It's my understanding from the interviews we've conducted that hardly a penny is spent without ultimately (Alamo's) authorization," Harris said at Alamo's hearing last fall.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Convicted sex offender Lee given compo deal from Catholic Church
Pervert gets £15k payout
Convicted sex offender Lee given compo deal from Catholic Church over claims of abuse
By Ciaran Barnes
Sunday, 12 July 2009
A sex beast who indecently assaulted a disabled teenager has won a £15,000 payout from the Catholic Church. Depraved James Lee (54) got his hands on the cash after saying he had been molested as a teenager in the De La Salle Boys Home, Kircubbin, Co Down.
Lee's allegations were never proven in court, but the Dublin-based De La Salle order sanctioned the huge secret pay-out.
And Lee received the bumper payment in February this year — eight months after he himself was convicted of a sex crime.
Sunday Life called to Lee's Hannahstown home earlier this week.
We wanted to know if he would consider donating his newly acquired £15,000 to the wheelchair-bound boy he abused.
But pervy Lee, a street trader who flogs goods outside pop concerts, refused to talk to us at his semi-detached house in Hawthorn View.
Instead his wife came out to confront our reporter.
Despite her husband's conviction she denied he was a sex abuser and said media interest in the case had driven her to the brink of suicide.
“I've been tortured. My windows have been broken and my car has been paint-bombed. I'm ready for a nervous breakdown or to drive my car into the Lagan,” said Lee's wife.
“It wasn't abuse that he was done for. James is going to appeal.”
In June last year Lee was sentenced to three months in jail and put on the sex offenders' register for seven years for indecently assaulting a disabled 17-year-old boy.
The youth was confronted by Lee after going into the public toilets at Castle Court shopping centre to change out of his school uniform to prepare for a job interview.
Lee blocked his exit and grabbed his thigh. The youth eventually managed to break free and alert his friends.
After his conviction, Lee told a local newspaper: “I’m not denying I touched that teenager’s leg, but I thought he wanted me to do it. I thought it was consensual.
“I would describe myself as bisexual, I can’t really remember what happened, but I did touch him. I’m not to going to say sorry for something like that.” Less than a month after appearing in court Lee was in trouble again.
This time he was cautioned by police for stalking a teenager.
Victims of clerical abuse have criticised the church's decision to award the convicted sex offender £15,000. Jean Carson, whose son Paul Anthony Carson committed suicide after being abused by west Belfast church sexton Martin Kerr, said: “He won't get any sympathy from me because he's become an abuser. He shouldn't have got a penny.
“I'm sick of hearing the old chestnut that abuse leads to abuse. I know loads of cases where this isn't the case,” added Jean.
The De La Salle order has never admitted child abuse took place at its boys’ home at Rubane House, Kircubbin.
But it has made a number of out-of-court payments to men
who claimed they were abused by monks while at the Kircubbin home. Belfast man John Leathem, who was abused at the same care home, sees the order's pay-out as an admission of guilt.
He asked: “Why pay money out if nothing happened? By doing this they are accepting abuse occurred.” Sunday Life has seen a copy of a letter sent by De La Salle to James Lee.
In a letter to pervert Lee, alongside his £15,000 cheque, De La Salle's Brother Francis Manning wrote: “The De La Salle Order was founded to care for abandoned, disadvantaged and deprived boys and regrets if any boy was abused while under its care.”
Sunday Life asked De La Salle did it know Lee was a convicted sex offender when it paid him £15,000, and if it now accepted child abuse occurred at Kircubbin.
Convicted sex offender Lee given compo deal from Catholic Church over claims of abuse
By Ciaran Barnes
Sunday, 12 July 2009
A sex beast who indecently assaulted a disabled teenager has won a £15,000 payout from the Catholic Church. Depraved James Lee (54) got his hands on the cash after saying he had been molested as a teenager in the De La Salle Boys Home, Kircubbin, Co Down.
Lee's allegations were never proven in court, but the Dublin-based De La Salle order sanctioned the huge secret pay-out.
And Lee received the bumper payment in February this year — eight months after he himself was convicted of a sex crime.
Sunday Life called to Lee's Hannahstown home earlier this week.
We wanted to know if he would consider donating his newly acquired £15,000 to the wheelchair-bound boy he abused.
But pervy Lee, a street trader who flogs goods outside pop concerts, refused to talk to us at his semi-detached house in Hawthorn View.
Instead his wife came out to confront our reporter.
Despite her husband's conviction she denied he was a sex abuser and said media interest in the case had driven her to the brink of suicide.
“I've been tortured. My windows have been broken and my car has been paint-bombed. I'm ready for a nervous breakdown or to drive my car into the Lagan,” said Lee's wife.
“It wasn't abuse that he was done for. James is going to appeal.”
In June last year Lee was sentenced to three months in jail and put on the sex offenders' register for seven years for indecently assaulting a disabled 17-year-old boy.
The youth was confronted by Lee after going into the public toilets at Castle Court shopping centre to change out of his school uniform to prepare for a job interview.
Lee blocked his exit and grabbed his thigh. The youth eventually managed to break free and alert his friends.
After his conviction, Lee told a local newspaper: “I’m not denying I touched that teenager’s leg, but I thought he wanted me to do it. I thought it was consensual.
“I would describe myself as bisexual, I can’t really remember what happened, but I did touch him. I’m not to going to say sorry for something like that.” Less than a month after appearing in court Lee was in trouble again.
This time he was cautioned by police for stalking a teenager.
Victims of clerical abuse have criticised the church's decision to award the convicted sex offender £15,000. Jean Carson, whose son Paul Anthony Carson committed suicide after being abused by west Belfast church sexton Martin Kerr, said: “He won't get any sympathy from me because he's become an abuser. He shouldn't have got a penny.
“I'm sick of hearing the old chestnut that abuse leads to abuse. I know loads of cases where this isn't the case,” added Jean.
The De La Salle order has never admitted child abuse took place at its boys’ home at Rubane House, Kircubbin.
But it has made a number of out-of-court payments to men
who claimed they were abused by monks while at the Kircubbin home. Belfast man John Leathem, who was abused at the same care home, sees the order's pay-out as an admission of guilt.
He asked: “Why pay money out if nothing happened? By doing this they are accepting abuse occurred.” Sunday Life has seen a copy of a letter sent by De La Salle to James Lee.
In a letter to pervert Lee, alongside his £15,000 cheque, De La Salle's Brother Francis Manning wrote: “The De La Salle Order was founded to care for abandoned, disadvantaged and deprived boys and regrets if any boy was abused while under its care.”
Sunday Life asked De La Salle did it know Lee was a convicted sex offender when it paid him £15,000, and if it now accepted child abuse occurred at Kircubbin.
Latest scandal
A secret shame: Inside the latest scandal to rock the Catholic church
When Todd Carpunky was 16, he joined the Legion of Christ. I his six years with the Catholic order, he bore witness to a culture of sexual abuse that rocked the Church. Here, he talks candidly to Peter Stanford about the secretive world created by the order's founder while the papal authorities looked the other way
Sunday, 12 July 2009
Carpunky says: 'I thought he was looking into my soul. Now I think he was checking me out'
• More pictures
The papal plane is heading for Mexico and John Paul II is busy preparing for the first of his many overseas trips. It is January 1979. At his right hand, briefing him, is the Mexican-born Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the ultraconservative Legion of Christ, one of the youngest but fastest-growing religious orders in the Catholic Church. This dapper, well-connected priest, worshipped by his adoring followers as "Nuestro Padre" ("Our Father") shares with the Polish pontiff a conviction that the liberal reform of Catholicism in the 1960s needs to be halted, especially in Latin America.
That trip was the first public sign of the extraordinary bond between Maciel and the man in charge of a church of 1.2 billion souls. In the subsequent 26 years of John Paul's reign, the Legion was regularly lauded by him for its unwavering fidelity to church teaching, its intolerance of dissent, and its conviction that only Catholicism could save the world. Maciel was a prince of the Church, in the papal inner circle, sitting on the most important Vatican committees and running his own congregation of 800 priests and 2,500 seminarians, plus the 70,000 lay members of the associated Regnum Christi movement, as it spread around the globe, including a base in London.
Much has been made of the power wielded by the secretive Opus Dei under John Paul II, not least by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code, but many Vatican-watchers believe that the Legion of Christ was bigger, richer (annual budget £435m), more influential, and even more sinister.
Parents of youngsters recruited as Legionaries described it as a cult that targeted the young and naive in particular, some of them just 13, and then "brainwashed" them. But it is Maciel himself who has proved most controversial. Nuestro Padre was, according to one biographer, "a narcissistic sociopath" with a taste for flights on Concorde and five-star hotels. He is acknowledged by the Legion to have fathered at least one child – a 23-year-old daughter said to be called Norma Hilda and now living in Madrid.
It has also been alleged that he was a paedophile. The first accusation came in 1976 from the former head of the Legion in the US. By 1998, the Vatican had received sworn statements from eight men, all detailing how Maciel had abused them when they were young recruits.
Throughout the 1990s, a series of allegations of sexual abuse of minors by priests that had been covered up by the church authorities shook Catholicism in America, Canada, Australia, Ireland, the UK and other countries. At least two cardinals were forced to retire, dozens of paedophile priests were jailed for their crimes, and the Church paid out millions of pounds in compensation to victims. The damage to its reputation in the eyes of its own congregations has been huge, and bishops have struggled to convince sceptics that they have put into place procedures rigorous enough to ensure that such a betrayal never happens again.
Yet in Maciel's case, it took 30 years – until 2006, after John Paul's death – for the new pope, Benedict XVI, finally to issue a public rebuke, and then it was simply an order that he should see out his days in private prayer rather than face a court. The long delay is evidence, some have suggested, that the Vatican still does not take the issue of paedophile priests sufficiently seriously.
A year after Nuestro Padre's death in 2008, the Vatican announced an investigation into the Legion. An unnamed official told America's National Catholic Reporter newspaper that the total number of Maciel's abuse victims was "more than 20 and less than 100". As a team of cardinals opens the locked cupboards of an organisation that prided itself on secrecy – all new recruits had to take a unique private vow (abolished by Benedict in 2007) never to speak ill of the founder and to report to superiors anyone who did – the Catholic Church is once more mired in a scandal about the sexual abuse of minors, and the abuse of power.
Ex-priests and nuns are often easy to spot. It is something to do with how uneasy they look in civvies, and their reluctance, learnt in the seminary and the convent, to look anyone in the eye. But Todd Carpunky, a corporate lawyer in the City of London, gives few outward clues of his past as a Legionary of Christ when we meet in a bar near Liverpool Street station. Tall, blond and open-faced in his well-cut suit, this Illinois-born 34-year-old has an easy sense of humour, both about the world around him, and his six years in the Legion. "My grandmother raised me," he explains. "She was great, but so Catholic she makes the Pope look like the anti-Christ. The rest of my family was just nuts. I wanted to get away from them, and the Legion knew that."
Founded by the then 21-year-old Maciel in Mexico in 1941, almost four years before he was even ordained as a priest (he had been asked to leave more than one seminary), the Legion of Christ spread rapidly, supported by bishops who felt embattled by government anti-clericalism in Mexico, the result of a church-state spilt in 1917. Soon it was running schools and universities. Its militant, old-style Catholic spirituality was directed mainly at the wealthy with the result that it members were known as "the Millionaries of Christ".
By the 1950s, it had gone international with branches in Spain, Chile, Italy, Ireland and the United States. Carpunky came across one of its recruitment drives in the early 1990s via his grandmother. "They began visiting me at home and invited me on a summer programme. It was fun and my grandmother was delighted. She's still upset I'm a lawyer." He went to one of the Legion's boarding schools in Connecticut at the age of 16, seeing it as a means of escape from an unhappy home life. "Our contact with home was strictly limited, but that suited me. All our mail was reviewed. Even the Catholic newspapers were censored. They would have great holes in them where articles had been cut out. It was to protect our vocation, we were told."
Life at the school followed a strict schedule. "We'd get up early in the morning, shower with our bathing suits on, even though there were curtains, because apparently it was faster and more chaste. We slept in our swimming trunks under our pyjamas. There was meditation – usually on the writings of Nuestro Padre. It was all very regimented. We were not allowed free time. It was cult-like. Maciel played mind games."
All of this, Carpunky acknowledges, is said with the benefit of hindsight. At the time, he quickly moved into the noviciate and was sent to Spain to train as a priest. "I felt part of something. I was happy. I didn't rationalise."
What was Maciel like? "He had charisma. He told great stories. He was the great conspiracy theorist. According to him, he had left the seminaries in Mexico because he was misunderstood and was trying to save the Church. The Jesuits, he said, were very jealous of him. He used conspiracy theories to explain away all of these things. He had been persecuted because he was just too holy, too clever, too Catholic. He actually claimed never to have said no to God – which implies he never sinned."
Maciel was also, Carpunky claims, intent on controlling every aspect of the life of every Legionary. "We had a green book of rules of etiquette and social norms," he recalls. "We'd have classes about not piercing a vegetable with a fork when we were eating, or how to eat a banana with a knife and fork."
Carpunky was singled out for attention by Maciel. "When he came to Madrid, I was asked to serve his meal. I took it as a great honour. I thought he was a living saint. So when he would follow me with his eyes, I thought he was looking into my soul. Now I think he was checking me out because apparently he liked blonds."
The first major question mark was raised over Maciel's personal conduct as early as 1956, when he was suspended by the Vatican while charges that he was addicted to pain-killing drugs were investigated. Two years later, the inquiry was dropped and he was reinstated. Then, in 1976, Father Juan Vaca, who had joined the Legion as a 10-year-old in Mexico and risen to be its US director, but subsequently left to work as a priest in a Catholic diocese on Long Island in the States, formally reported Maciel to his bishop for sexually abusing him from the age of 12. This was a time before the sexual abuse of minors by priests had been exposed. In 1978, fearing that his accusations had been swept under the carpet, Vaca sent a long statement about what had happened to him direct to the Vatican, and even received an acknowledgement. And then, nothing.
In 1998, eight other former members of the Legion (one now dead) filed sexual-abuse charges against Maciel in the Vatican's Court of Canon Law, but Rome seemed to delay. It was only in 2004 that an official investigation, headed by canon lawyer Monseigneur Charles Scicluna, was set up. That led, in 2006, to the decision to discipline Maciel.
Was Carpunky sexually abused? "I am one of the few people who has been in Maciel's bedroom without... you know... because he has a bedroom in each of the Legion's houses, reserved for him. In the American house at Cheshire in Connecticut, he even had his own Mercedes reserved for him 'because of his back problems'. He always had these weird things. He could only drink Evian water. For medical reasons, he'd eat only steak or a specific type of chicken that had to be obtained from Spain. I wasn't sexually abused, though a friend of mine in seminary had been molested by a Brother in the Legion in his early teens. When the rector found out, he told Maciel, and within 24 hours that Brother was sent to Rome, where he was later ordained as a priest."
It raises the suggestion of a culture of sexual abuse inside the Legion, taking its lead from the founder and covered up by the "private vow". Carpunky is not convinced. "Maciel was a monster and others were abused, but they were more the exceptions than the rule."
Consider, though, the experience of Stephen Dougan – not his real name – from Belfast. Now a university student, he was wooed by the Legion as a 14-year-old. "It was hard not to be enthused by what you were shown," he recalls. "As their guest, I enjoyed good food, went on hikes, played table tennis, watched movies and did sport with happy seminarians. When I actually joined [in the early 1990s at the Legion's Dublin seminary], I did not have even a vague idea of the Legion's spirituality or its rules, only that, as I was being told, I had been called as part of God's plan."
Around the time of his 18th birthday, Dougan was summoned one night to the bedroom of his novice master. "He said he had severe cramps in his stomach. He unbuttoned his pyjama top, poured oil on his stomach and asked me to massage him. I did. Very soon he unbuttoned his pyjama bottoms and poured on more oil. He asked me to 'do it deeper'. He meant lower down. His penis was erect. I was shocked and confused. I can remember my hands in his pubic hair. I closed my eyes and prayed."
Dougan's abuse by the Father almost exactly mirrors allegations against Maciel, made by Fernando Perez, one of the eight to file charges, about what happened to him at 14. Maciel even told his victims, one reported, that he had a special dispensation from the Pope to allow him to be masturbated because of the pains he suffered as a result of his "delicate" health.
Dougan never spoke while in the Legion about what had happened, though he has subsequently reported it to the police. "The vow I had taken meant that no Legionary could in any way criticise the defects or mistakes of any superior. This included internal – in your mind – criticism." Eighteen months after the incident, he was told that he didn't have a vocation and asked to leave. "It was hard for me to adjust to normal life," he admits. "I am still battling with the belief that God has spat me out of his mouth because I left. I have been in counselling on and off ever since."
Not all ex-members – some of whom belong to the support group, ReGain – have unhappy memories. Adam Dunbar – he is not willing to use his real name because he is still in touch with former colleagues from in the Legion – is a 62-year-old bookkeeper and grandfather from Dublin. He was among the first recruits to the Legion's Irish mission which started in 1960. "What attracted me as a youngster was the energy of it, the ability to inspire, and the fact that they used young men to recruit young men and filled us full of idealism." Maciel, he reports, was "gentle, considerate, patient. My memories of him are sweet. I never had any experience of anything irregular nor did I see anything that in retrospect might be judged as misbehaviour."
Matthew Muggeridge, the 39-year-old grandson of the celebrated writer and broadcaster Malcolm, is currently working as a lawyer in the US. He joined the Legion in 1990 because he saw it as "dynamic, challenging and growing. It enthused me about my faith – and you don't get that with ordinary diocesan seminaries." Though he left six years later, he did so, he says, with no regrets and remains a supporter of the order and its defence of traditional Catholic values.
He was part of Legion plans to establish a base in London. Still a seminarian, he was sent to the affluent parish of St James, Spanish Place, in Marylebone, central London, along with an Irish Legionary priest. However, Cardinal Basil Hume, head of the local Westminster archdiocese, was not keen on their presence, Muggeridge recalls. "He tended to equate the Legion with Opus Dei, about which he also had well-recorded concerns, but we were not the same. We were so visible, whereas Opus Dei tends to act behind the scenes." The Legion is still thought to have ambitions on London. In the past year, one of its priests has been calling on parishes in wealthy areas of the capital.
Maciel had prepared himself a tomb in Our Lady of Guadalupe, the church he built in Rome in the 1950s. In the event, he was laid to rest in January 2008 in his family's modest crypt in his hometown in Mexico. The past 18 months have been a traumatic time for Legionaries. The secrecy rules meant they knew nothing of the charges against Nuestro Padre. The first they heard was when, a year after Maciel's death, Father Alvaro Corcuera, his hand-picked successor, confirmed the existence of Norma Hilda.
The Legion is tight-lipped about its current predicament. Jim Fair, its communications director, declined even to discuss the issues raised by the former Legionaries in this article. In brief written answers to questions I submitted, he said that the Legion was "grateful" for the present Vatican investigation and "sad" about the "aspects of our founder's life of which we were not aware". On the charge that the order has a cult-like approach, Fair wrote: "We listen carefully to what former members have to say. At the same time we listen to the voice of the Church and to the principles of religious life throughout the centuries as a guideline."
Adam Dunbar feels the revelations will have had a profound effect on his friends still in the Legion. "Imagine, after half a century of being told that Maciel was a living saint, you discover that this is a hall of smoke and mirrors. Who is the victim then? Apart from the sexual abuse, if it existed, what about this abuse of lives?"
Back in the City of London, Todd Carpunky has, he says, put the Legion (and his Catholicism) behind him. His doubts began when he contracted a liver infection because painful gallstones had gone untreated. His superiors advised him instead to swim and pray to Mary. Later, he was made to wait several months for an operation on a disc problem in his back that had left him disabled, because Nuestro Padre couldn't decide what to do with him. "The final straw came when I was sitting in a doctor's office and the Legionary with me admitted they had been lying about not being able to find a surgeon to see me. I was told, 'Just obey.' That's when I snapped and realised they were crazy. I checked my brain back in and left."
For him, the story of the Legion is not just another aspect of clerical sex abuse. "It really comes down to the fact that they cared more about building the Kingdom of Maciel than the Kingdom of God. The Legion calls itself Catholic but it is inhumane and really damages people. That is what distinguishes it from other religious orders." n
A catalogue of abuse
Britain Father Michael Hill (pictured) was convicted in 1997 of sexual abuse of nine children. It emerged that his local bishop, the future Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, had been aware that concerns had been raised about Hill's behaviour, but had moved him to another parish.
US Allegations of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests were first made public in 1984. In September 2003, the archdiocese of Boston paid $85m in compensation to 552 victims. Many other dioceses have made similar payments – to an estimated total of $1bn. In 2004 the archdiocese of Portland declared itself bankrupt as a result.
Austria Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër was dismissed as Archbishop of Vienna by Pope John Paul II in 1995 after it emerged that he had abused young boys at Catholic schools over a 40-year period. One expert suggested he may have had 2,000 victims.
Ireland In May 2009, High Court judge Sean Ryan published a report of his nine-year investigation detailing the beating, rape and humiliation of thousands of children by priests and nuns in the schools they ran.
Australia In July 2008 in St Mary's Cathedral in Sydney, Pope Benedict XVI made an unprecedented apology for the crimes of priests against minors. "I am deeply sorry for the pain and suffering the victims have endured and I assure them that, as their pastor, I too share in their suffering." PS
The papal plane is heading for Mexico and John Paul II is busy preparing for the first of his many overseas trips. It is January 1979. At his right hand, briefing him, is Mexican-born Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the ultraconservative Legion of Christ, one of the youngest but fastest growing religious orders in the Catholic Church. This dapper, well-connected priest, worshipped by his adoring followers as 'Nuestro Padre' ("Our Father') shares with the Polish pontiff a conviction that the liberal reform of Catholicism in the 1960s needs to be halted, especially in Latin America.
That trip was the first public sign of the extraordinary bond between Maciel and the man in charge of a church of 1.2 billion souls. In the subsequent 26 years of John Paul's reign, the Legion was regularly lauded by him on account of it unwavering fidelity to church teaching, its intolerance of dissent, and its conviction that only Catholicism could save the world from ruin. Maciel was truly a prince of the Church, in the papal inner circle, sitting on the most important Vatican committees and running his own congregation of 800 priests and 2,500 seminarians, plus the 70,000 lay members of the associated Regnum Christi movement, as it spread round the globe, including setting up a base in London.
Much has been made of the power wielded by the secretive Opus Dei under John Paul II, not least by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code, but many Vatican-watchers believe that the Legion of Christ was bigger, richer (annual budget £435 million), more influential, and even more sinister.
Parents of youngsters recruited as Legionaries described it as a cult that targeted the young and naive in particular, some of them just 13, and then 'brainwashed' them. But it is Maciel himself who has proved most controversial. Nuestro Padre was, according to one biographer, 'a narcissistic sociopath' with a taste for flights on Concorde and five star hotels. He is acknowledged by the Legion to have fathered at least one child – a 23-year-old daughter said to be called Norma Hilda and now living in Madrid.
It has also been alleged that he was a paedophile. The first accusation came in 1976 from the former head of the Legion in the US. By 1998, the Vatican had received sworn statements from eight men, all detailing how Maciel had abused them.
When Todd Carpunky was 16, he joined the Legion of Christ. I his six years with the Catholic order, he bore witness to a culture of sexual abuse that rocked the Church. Here, he talks candidly to Peter Stanford about the secretive world created by the order's founder while the papal authorities looked the other way
Sunday, 12 July 2009
Carpunky says: 'I thought he was looking into my soul. Now I think he was checking me out'
• More pictures
The papal plane is heading for Mexico and John Paul II is busy preparing for the first of his many overseas trips. It is January 1979. At his right hand, briefing him, is the Mexican-born Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the ultraconservative Legion of Christ, one of the youngest but fastest-growing religious orders in the Catholic Church. This dapper, well-connected priest, worshipped by his adoring followers as "Nuestro Padre" ("Our Father") shares with the Polish pontiff a conviction that the liberal reform of Catholicism in the 1960s needs to be halted, especially in Latin America.
That trip was the first public sign of the extraordinary bond between Maciel and the man in charge of a church of 1.2 billion souls. In the subsequent 26 years of John Paul's reign, the Legion was regularly lauded by him for its unwavering fidelity to church teaching, its intolerance of dissent, and its conviction that only Catholicism could save the world. Maciel was a prince of the Church, in the papal inner circle, sitting on the most important Vatican committees and running his own congregation of 800 priests and 2,500 seminarians, plus the 70,000 lay members of the associated Regnum Christi movement, as it spread around the globe, including a base in London.
Much has been made of the power wielded by the secretive Opus Dei under John Paul II, not least by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code, but many Vatican-watchers believe that the Legion of Christ was bigger, richer (annual budget £435m), more influential, and even more sinister.
Parents of youngsters recruited as Legionaries described it as a cult that targeted the young and naive in particular, some of them just 13, and then "brainwashed" them. But it is Maciel himself who has proved most controversial. Nuestro Padre was, according to one biographer, "a narcissistic sociopath" with a taste for flights on Concorde and five-star hotels. He is acknowledged by the Legion to have fathered at least one child – a 23-year-old daughter said to be called Norma Hilda and now living in Madrid.
It has also been alleged that he was a paedophile. The first accusation came in 1976 from the former head of the Legion in the US. By 1998, the Vatican had received sworn statements from eight men, all detailing how Maciel had abused them when they were young recruits.
Throughout the 1990s, a series of allegations of sexual abuse of minors by priests that had been covered up by the church authorities shook Catholicism in America, Canada, Australia, Ireland, the UK and other countries. At least two cardinals were forced to retire, dozens of paedophile priests were jailed for their crimes, and the Church paid out millions of pounds in compensation to victims. The damage to its reputation in the eyes of its own congregations has been huge, and bishops have struggled to convince sceptics that they have put into place procedures rigorous enough to ensure that such a betrayal never happens again.
Yet in Maciel's case, it took 30 years – until 2006, after John Paul's death – for the new pope, Benedict XVI, finally to issue a public rebuke, and then it was simply an order that he should see out his days in private prayer rather than face a court. The long delay is evidence, some have suggested, that the Vatican still does not take the issue of paedophile priests sufficiently seriously.
A year after Nuestro Padre's death in 2008, the Vatican announced an investigation into the Legion. An unnamed official told America's National Catholic Reporter newspaper that the total number of Maciel's abuse victims was "more than 20 and less than 100". As a team of cardinals opens the locked cupboards of an organisation that prided itself on secrecy – all new recruits had to take a unique private vow (abolished by Benedict in 2007) never to speak ill of the founder and to report to superiors anyone who did – the Catholic Church is once more mired in a scandal about the sexual abuse of minors, and the abuse of power.
Ex-priests and nuns are often easy to spot. It is something to do with how uneasy they look in civvies, and their reluctance, learnt in the seminary and the convent, to look anyone in the eye. But Todd Carpunky, a corporate lawyer in the City of London, gives few outward clues of his past as a Legionary of Christ when we meet in a bar near Liverpool Street station. Tall, blond and open-faced in his well-cut suit, this Illinois-born 34-year-old has an easy sense of humour, both about the world around him, and his six years in the Legion. "My grandmother raised me," he explains. "She was great, but so Catholic she makes the Pope look like the anti-Christ. The rest of my family was just nuts. I wanted to get away from them, and the Legion knew that."
Founded by the then 21-year-old Maciel in Mexico in 1941, almost four years before he was even ordained as a priest (he had been asked to leave more than one seminary), the Legion of Christ spread rapidly, supported by bishops who felt embattled by government anti-clericalism in Mexico, the result of a church-state spilt in 1917. Soon it was running schools and universities. Its militant, old-style Catholic spirituality was directed mainly at the wealthy with the result that it members were known as "the Millionaries of Christ".
By the 1950s, it had gone international with branches in Spain, Chile, Italy, Ireland and the United States. Carpunky came across one of its recruitment drives in the early 1990s via his grandmother. "They began visiting me at home and invited me on a summer programme. It was fun and my grandmother was delighted. She's still upset I'm a lawyer." He went to one of the Legion's boarding schools in Connecticut at the age of 16, seeing it as a means of escape from an unhappy home life. "Our contact with home was strictly limited, but that suited me. All our mail was reviewed. Even the Catholic newspapers were censored. They would have great holes in them where articles had been cut out. It was to protect our vocation, we were told."
Life at the school followed a strict schedule. "We'd get up early in the morning, shower with our bathing suits on, even though there were curtains, because apparently it was faster and more chaste. We slept in our swimming trunks under our pyjamas. There was meditation – usually on the writings of Nuestro Padre. It was all very regimented. We were not allowed free time. It was cult-like. Maciel played mind games."
All of this, Carpunky acknowledges, is said with the benefit of hindsight. At the time, he quickly moved into the noviciate and was sent to Spain to train as a priest. "I felt part of something. I was happy. I didn't rationalise."
What was Maciel like? "He had charisma. He told great stories. He was the great conspiracy theorist. According to him, he had left the seminaries in Mexico because he was misunderstood and was trying to save the Church. The Jesuits, he said, were very jealous of him. He used conspiracy theories to explain away all of these things. He had been persecuted because he was just too holy, too clever, too Catholic. He actually claimed never to have said no to God – which implies he never sinned."
Maciel was also, Carpunky claims, intent on controlling every aspect of the life of every Legionary. "We had a green book of rules of etiquette and social norms," he recalls. "We'd have classes about not piercing a vegetable with a fork when we were eating, or how to eat a banana with a knife and fork."
Carpunky was singled out for attention by Maciel. "When he came to Madrid, I was asked to serve his meal. I took it as a great honour. I thought he was a living saint. So when he would follow me with his eyes, I thought he was looking into my soul. Now I think he was checking me out because apparently he liked blonds."
The first major question mark was raised over Maciel's personal conduct as early as 1956, when he was suspended by the Vatican while charges that he was addicted to pain-killing drugs were investigated. Two years later, the inquiry was dropped and he was reinstated. Then, in 1976, Father Juan Vaca, who had joined the Legion as a 10-year-old in Mexico and risen to be its US director, but subsequently left to work as a priest in a Catholic diocese on Long Island in the States, formally reported Maciel to his bishop for sexually abusing him from the age of 12. This was a time before the sexual abuse of minors by priests had been exposed. In 1978, fearing that his accusations had been swept under the carpet, Vaca sent a long statement about what had happened to him direct to the Vatican, and even received an acknowledgement. And then, nothing.
In 1998, eight other former members of the Legion (one now dead) filed sexual-abuse charges against Maciel in the Vatican's Court of Canon Law, but Rome seemed to delay. It was only in 2004 that an official investigation, headed by canon lawyer Monseigneur Charles Scicluna, was set up. That led, in 2006, to the decision to discipline Maciel.
Was Carpunky sexually abused? "I am one of the few people who has been in Maciel's bedroom without... you know... because he has a bedroom in each of the Legion's houses, reserved for him. In the American house at Cheshire in Connecticut, he even had his own Mercedes reserved for him 'because of his back problems'. He always had these weird things. He could only drink Evian water. For medical reasons, he'd eat only steak or a specific type of chicken that had to be obtained from Spain. I wasn't sexually abused, though a friend of mine in seminary had been molested by a Brother in the Legion in his early teens. When the rector found out, he told Maciel, and within 24 hours that Brother was sent to Rome, where he was later ordained as a priest."
It raises the suggestion of a culture of sexual abuse inside the Legion, taking its lead from the founder and covered up by the "private vow". Carpunky is not convinced. "Maciel was a monster and others were abused, but they were more the exceptions than the rule."
Consider, though, the experience of Stephen Dougan – not his real name – from Belfast. Now a university student, he was wooed by the Legion as a 14-year-old. "It was hard not to be enthused by what you were shown," he recalls. "As their guest, I enjoyed good food, went on hikes, played table tennis, watched movies and did sport with happy seminarians. When I actually joined [in the early 1990s at the Legion's Dublin seminary], I did not have even a vague idea of the Legion's spirituality or its rules, only that, as I was being told, I had been called as part of God's plan."
Around the time of his 18th birthday, Dougan was summoned one night to the bedroom of his novice master. "He said he had severe cramps in his stomach. He unbuttoned his pyjama top, poured oil on his stomach and asked me to massage him. I did. Very soon he unbuttoned his pyjama bottoms and poured on more oil. He asked me to 'do it deeper'. He meant lower down. His penis was erect. I was shocked and confused. I can remember my hands in his pubic hair. I closed my eyes and prayed."
Dougan's abuse by the Father almost exactly mirrors allegations against Maciel, made by Fernando Perez, one of the eight to file charges, about what happened to him at 14. Maciel even told his victims, one reported, that he had a special dispensation from the Pope to allow him to be masturbated because of the pains he suffered as a result of his "delicate" health.
Dougan never spoke while in the Legion about what had happened, though he has subsequently reported it to the police. "The vow I had taken meant that no Legionary could in any way criticise the defects or mistakes of any superior. This included internal – in your mind – criticism." Eighteen months after the incident, he was told that he didn't have a vocation and asked to leave. "It was hard for me to adjust to normal life," he admits. "I am still battling with the belief that God has spat me out of his mouth because I left. I have been in counselling on and off ever since."
Not all ex-members – some of whom belong to the support group, ReGain – have unhappy memories. Adam Dunbar – he is not willing to use his real name because he is still in touch with former colleagues from in the Legion – is a 62-year-old bookkeeper and grandfather from Dublin. He was among the first recruits to the Legion's Irish mission which started in 1960. "What attracted me as a youngster was the energy of it, the ability to inspire, and the fact that they used young men to recruit young men and filled us full of idealism." Maciel, he reports, was "gentle, considerate, patient. My memories of him are sweet. I never had any experience of anything irregular nor did I see anything that in retrospect might be judged as misbehaviour."
Matthew Muggeridge, the 39-year-old grandson of the celebrated writer and broadcaster Malcolm, is currently working as a lawyer in the US. He joined the Legion in 1990 because he saw it as "dynamic, challenging and growing. It enthused me about my faith – and you don't get that with ordinary diocesan seminaries." Though he left six years later, he did so, he says, with no regrets and remains a supporter of the order and its defence of traditional Catholic values.
He was part of Legion plans to establish a base in London. Still a seminarian, he was sent to the affluent parish of St James, Spanish Place, in Marylebone, central London, along with an Irish Legionary priest. However, Cardinal Basil Hume, head of the local Westminster archdiocese, was not keen on their presence, Muggeridge recalls. "He tended to equate the Legion with Opus Dei, about which he also had well-recorded concerns, but we were not the same. We were so visible, whereas Opus Dei tends to act behind the scenes." The Legion is still thought to have ambitions on London. In the past year, one of its priests has been calling on parishes in wealthy areas of the capital.
Maciel had prepared himself a tomb in Our Lady of Guadalupe, the church he built in Rome in the 1950s. In the event, he was laid to rest in January 2008 in his family's modest crypt in his hometown in Mexico. The past 18 months have been a traumatic time for Legionaries. The secrecy rules meant they knew nothing of the charges against Nuestro Padre. The first they heard was when, a year after Maciel's death, Father Alvaro Corcuera, his hand-picked successor, confirmed the existence of Norma Hilda.
The Legion is tight-lipped about its current predicament. Jim Fair, its communications director, declined even to discuss the issues raised by the former Legionaries in this article. In brief written answers to questions I submitted, he said that the Legion was "grateful" for the present Vatican investigation and "sad" about the "aspects of our founder's life of which we were not aware". On the charge that the order has a cult-like approach, Fair wrote: "We listen carefully to what former members have to say. At the same time we listen to the voice of the Church and to the principles of religious life throughout the centuries as a guideline."
Adam Dunbar feels the revelations will have had a profound effect on his friends still in the Legion. "Imagine, after half a century of being told that Maciel was a living saint, you discover that this is a hall of smoke and mirrors. Who is the victim then? Apart from the sexual abuse, if it existed, what about this abuse of lives?"
Back in the City of London, Todd Carpunky has, he says, put the Legion (and his Catholicism) behind him. His doubts began when he contracted a liver infection because painful gallstones had gone untreated. His superiors advised him instead to swim and pray to Mary. Later, he was made to wait several months for an operation on a disc problem in his back that had left him disabled, because Nuestro Padre couldn't decide what to do with him. "The final straw came when I was sitting in a doctor's office and the Legionary with me admitted they had been lying about not being able to find a surgeon to see me. I was told, 'Just obey.' That's when I snapped and realised they were crazy. I checked my brain back in and left."
For him, the story of the Legion is not just another aspect of clerical sex abuse. "It really comes down to the fact that they cared more about building the Kingdom of Maciel than the Kingdom of God. The Legion calls itself Catholic but it is inhumane and really damages people. That is what distinguishes it from other religious orders." n
A catalogue of abuse
Britain Father Michael Hill (pictured) was convicted in 1997 of sexual abuse of nine children. It emerged that his local bishop, the future Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, had been aware that concerns had been raised about Hill's behaviour, but had moved him to another parish.
US Allegations of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests were first made public in 1984. In September 2003, the archdiocese of Boston paid $85m in compensation to 552 victims. Many other dioceses have made similar payments – to an estimated total of $1bn. In 2004 the archdiocese of Portland declared itself bankrupt as a result.
Austria Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër was dismissed as Archbishop of Vienna by Pope John Paul II in 1995 after it emerged that he had abused young boys at Catholic schools over a 40-year period. One expert suggested he may have had 2,000 victims.
Ireland In May 2009, High Court judge Sean Ryan published a report of his nine-year investigation detailing the beating, rape and humiliation of thousands of children by priests and nuns in the schools they ran.
Australia In July 2008 in St Mary's Cathedral in Sydney, Pope Benedict XVI made an unprecedented apology for the crimes of priests against minors. "I am deeply sorry for the pain and suffering the victims have endured and I assure them that, as their pastor, I too share in their suffering." PS
The papal plane is heading for Mexico and John Paul II is busy preparing for the first of his many overseas trips. It is January 1979. At his right hand, briefing him, is Mexican-born Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the ultraconservative Legion of Christ, one of the youngest but fastest growing religious orders in the Catholic Church. This dapper, well-connected priest, worshipped by his adoring followers as 'Nuestro Padre' ("Our Father') shares with the Polish pontiff a conviction that the liberal reform of Catholicism in the 1960s needs to be halted, especially in Latin America.
That trip was the first public sign of the extraordinary bond between Maciel and the man in charge of a church of 1.2 billion souls. In the subsequent 26 years of John Paul's reign, the Legion was regularly lauded by him on account of it unwavering fidelity to church teaching, its intolerance of dissent, and its conviction that only Catholicism could save the world from ruin. Maciel was truly a prince of the Church, in the papal inner circle, sitting on the most important Vatican committees and running his own congregation of 800 priests and 2,500 seminarians, plus the 70,000 lay members of the associated Regnum Christi movement, as it spread round the globe, including setting up a base in London.
Much has been made of the power wielded by the secretive Opus Dei under John Paul II, not least by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code, but many Vatican-watchers believe that the Legion of Christ was bigger, richer (annual budget £435 million), more influential, and even more sinister.
Parents of youngsters recruited as Legionaries described it as a cult that targeted the young and naive in particular, some of them just 13, and then 'brainwashed' them. But it is Maciel himself who has proved most controversial. Nuestro Padre was, according to one biographer, 'a narcissistic sociopath' with a taste for flights on Concorde and five star hotels. He is acknowledged by the Legion to have fathered at least one child – a 23-year-old daughter said to be called Norma Hilda and now living in Madrid.
It has also been alleged that he was a paedophile. The first accusation came in 1976 from the former head of the Legion in the US. By 1998, the Vatican had received sworn statements from eight men, all detailing how Maciel had abused them.
Clergy braced for fallout from abuse report
Independent.ie
Catholic clergy braced for fallout from abuse report
By MAEVE SHEEHAN
Sunday July 12 2009
CATHOLIC clergy are preparing for an onslaught of criticism in the long-awaited report on the hierarchy's handling of paedophile priests, due to be given to the government this week.
The report will scrutinise how some of the country's most senior prelates handled child abuse allegations. It may be some time before it is published as the Minister for Justice, Dermot Ahern, is expected to refer the 1,000-page document to the attorney general for legal advice because criminal proceedings are in train against three priests.
The contents have already been described as 'shocking' by the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, who has warned priests and parishioners to expect the worst.
Clergy are preparing for the fall-out by ensuring that child protection officers are working in every parish, while circulating special prayers throughout the diocese.
Fr Joseph Mullen, chairman of the Council of Priests, which advises the archbishop, said parishes are working to ensure the responses are in place to deal with the hurt, vulnerability and anger that may follow.
"What we know and what we have communicated to priests is that heinous crimes have been committed against children by priests in the archdiocese. We must seek to uncover and know the truth," he said. Senior clergy have repeatedly been accused of failing to report paedophile priests to the Garda, moving them from parish to parish, and often encouraging victims and their parents to keep matters quiet.
The Government set up a state inquiry, led by Judge Yvonne Murphy, as a result of the lack of confidence in the hierarchy's handling of complaints against priests.
Archbishop Martin has already disclosed from diocesan records that about 400 children were abused by 152 priests since 1940.
The inquiry examined a representative sample of 46 priests reported for sexual abuse to the Catholic authorities over 24 years up to 2004.
Most attention will focus on Cardinal Desmond Connell, who was archbishop of Dublin from 1988 to 2004, along with his predecessors, Dr Dermot Ryan, and Dr Kevin McNamara.The former chancellor of the archdiocese, Monsignor Alex Stenson, was also a key figure in the diocese. He dealt with the vast majority of complaints that came to the diocese.
It is understood that his notes and records of interviews with suspected abusers and their victims made up a large part of the 65,000 diocesan documents that Archbishop Martin released to the commission of inquiry last year.
Cardinal Connell contested the release of some of the documents in a High Court action which he later withdrew.
Cardinal Connell has been publicly accused in the past of failing to report suspect priests to gardai after allegations against them were made.
In 1996, Cardinal Connell refused to confirm to gardai a priest's admission to a dioscesan official that he had abused a Dublin woman, Marie Collins. The official was Monsignor Stenson.
Archbishop Kevin McNamara insured the archdiocese to protect its finances from claims from people who had been abused by priests.
But he did not reveal the scale of clerical sex abuse to the authorities.
Support groups believe that victims of clerical abuse in the Dublin archdiocese were slow to come forward to the Commission.
Maeve Lewis, director of One in Four, has asked for publication to be delayed so that more resources are put in place to deal with the expected upsurge in calls.
- MAEVE SHEEHAN
Catholic clergy braced for fallout from abuse report
By MAEVE SHEEHAN
Sunday July 12 2009
CATHOLIC clergy are preparing for an onslaught of criticism in the long-awaited report on the hierarchy's handling of paedophile priests, due to be given to the government this week.
The report will scrutinise how some of the country's most senior prelates handled child abuse allegations. It may be some time before it is published as the Minister for Justice, Dermot Ahern, is expected to refer the 1,000-page document to the attorney general for legal advice because criminal proceedings are in train against three priests.
The contents have already been described as 'shocking' by the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, who has warned priests and parishioners to expect the worst.
Clergy are preparing for the fall-out by ensuring that child protection officers are working in every parish, while circulating special prayers throughout the diocese.
Fr Joseph Mullen, chairman of the Council of Priests, which advises the archbishop, said parishes are working to ensure the responses are in place to deal with the hurt, vulnerability and anger that may follow.
"What we know and what we have communicated to priests is that heinous crimes have been committed against children by priests in the archdiocese. We must seek to uncover and know the truth," he said. Senior clergy have repeatedly been accused of failing to report paedophile priests to the Garda, moving them from parish to parish, and often encouraging victims and their parents to keep matters quiet.
The Government set up a state inquiry, led by Judge Yvonne Murphy, as a result of the lack of confidence in the hierarchy's handling of complaints against priests.
Archbishop Martin has already disclosed from diocesan records that about 400 children were abused by 152 priests since 1940.
The inquiry examined a representative sample of 46 priests reported for sexual abuse to the Catholic authorities over 24 years up to 2004.
Most attention will focus on Cardinal Desmond Connell, who was archbishop of Dublin from 1988 to 2004, along with his predecessors, Dr Dermot Ryan, and Dr Kevin McNamara.The former chancellor of the archdiocese, Monsignor Alex Stenson, was also a key figure in the diocese. He dealt with the vast majority of complaints that came to the diocese.
It is understood that his notes and records of interviews with suspected abusers and their victims made up a large part of the 65,000 diocesan documents that Archbishop Martin released to the commission of inquiry last year.
Cardinal Connell contested the release of some of the documents in a High Court action which he later withdrew.
Cardinal Connell has been publicly accused in the past of failing to report suspect priests to gardai after allegations against them were made.
In 1996, Cardinal Connell refused to confirm to gardai a priest's admission to a dioscesan official that he had abused a Dublin woman, Marie Collins. The official was Monsignor Stenson.
Archbishop Kevin McNamara insured the archdiocese to protect its finances from claims from people who had been abused by priests.
But he did not reveal the scale of clerical sex abuse to the authorities.
Support groups believe that victims of clerical abuse in the Dublin archdiocese were slow to come forward to the Commission.
Maeve Lewis, director of One in Four, has asked for publication to be delayed so that more resources are put in place to deal with the expected upsurge in calls.
- MAEVE SHEEHAN
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
