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by Dennis Coday on Apr. 08, 2010
[CORRECTED] Jason Berry, who began reporting on sex abuse in the Catholic church for NCR in 1985, has more to tell about the late Fr. Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionnaries of Christ. Just last week, after decades of denying it, top officials of the Legionaries of Christ acknowledged that Maciel, sexually abused young seminarians, and they asked forgiveness for failing to listen to his accusers.
After investigating allegations that Maciel had sexually abused young seminarians, in May 2006 the Vatican ordered him to stop practicing his ministry in public and to live a life of prayer and penitence. At the time, Legion officials defended Maciel's declaration of innocence and compared him to Christ for his suffering. Maciel died in January 2008 at age 87.
Berry's newest reporting tracks Maciel's rise to influence in the Vatican. The story is on our Web site: Money paved way for Maciel's influence in the Vatican.
Here is an ABC News story with Berry talking about the stories on our Web site. The video includes the clip of then-Cardinal Ratzinger slapping the hand of Brian Ross of ABC News, as Ross tried to question him about the Maciel case.
The VATICAN had their chance
The VATICAN had their chance to shut him down in 1956!!
http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/31208?eng=y
Maybe this time they'll succeed?
http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1342691?eng=y
Nah...too much POWER and MONEY involved.
Memo to Rode:
Hope you enjoyed the LC's $1,000 hams and that trip to Cancun!
Memo to OPUS DEI:
Come on, ante up!
How much did it cost to place your man Gomez in LA?
I fulyy respect the article
I fulyy respect the article and Berrt´s conviction that the LC is rotten to the core but I object to you trying to paint the Pope in a bad light.
His comment on ABC to come to me when the time is right is surely more understandable with new facts coming to light.Do you think it was not a coded message to say let me get Sodano out of the way and then I can get at your man.I think so...It was not a slap he was merely frsutrated at an outsider trying to tell him how to do his job.Unfortunately there are good and bad people in the Vatican and the Pope has had to meander and outsmart the likes of Sodano,Rodé who he does not mention.Look on youtube and put in Cardenal Rode visists Chile and you will see that he is in the LC pocket too.
Hands off the Pope,support him and let him make the Church a cleaner and safer place.
Thought the article treated
Thought the article treated Ratzinger rather sympathetically, actually. Berry makes the point of him "breaking ranks" so as to pursue an investigation of Marciel. What troubles me is the fact that in all of these cases the offending priests die as priests and that's something about which the Pope doesn't come off well. It was so with Murphy, Teta and Marciel, all three. One gets the same impression of the fraternal treatment of clergy that one gets from the Bar Association's in its handling of complaints against attorneys. And throughout, of course, we get the full-court press from the ReichsChurch blogs about press hatchet jobs, but nothing about these unsatisfying Vatican emphases. One today even sports a petition that the reader is asked to sign, its page emblazoned "Support The Pope" as though Benedict XVI were a latter day Nixon caught in the final months of the Watergate Affair. And what to say of John Paul II in the circumstances? What becomes of his cause as a result of the Marciel revelations?
Brilliant and inspiring! If
Brilliant and inspiring! If the Church, that is betraying Vatican II since John Paul II - not to speak about Humanae Vita of Paul VI -, would have more transparent approaches like that, the Gospel would be shining around the world!
I'm writing from Portugal, where one of the most known figures of Opus Dei - the banker Jardim Gonçalves - is facing justice and multiple fraud accusations -, and I suggest you: look at Opus, and you'll find similar or worst scenarios.
This is the end of the Pope-Emperor, at the image of Constantin, and, I hope and trust, the painful dawn of the end of a “contra natura” "marriage" between Constantin 's power and Jesus' message.
Just a footnote: take note of the power of Spanish figures in the Curia. Spanish church is one of the most backward in the world. And is still keeping the real power. I'll never forgive Benedict XVI the mass beatification of the "martyrs" of the Spanish civil war, forgetting the dictatorship of Franco and the many priests who died defending the republican and legitimate side.
One of the great men in Spain, judge Baltazar Garzón, is at this moment being accused of reopening the case of 100.000 people murdered during Franco ascendance to power. The accusers are from the extreme-right, among them many church's "friends", who always supported Franco's regime. Garzón was responsible for the trial of Chile's ex-president Pinochet, an inhumane dictator that had also the blessing of the church.
Curious: this "Church" only defends the "people" of the right, even when they are mass murderers. Left-justice oriented citizens and priests, like those involved in Liberation Theology, are just dispensable people. And for this I blame both John Paul II and Benedict XVI: in their anti-marxist fundamentalism, they both contributed to strangle Latin America's blossoming local Church communities, thus betraying the poor and the helpless. Is this important for those - forgive me for quoting you -, fed with hams, fine wines and lots of cash?!
I need this kind of testimonies to keep - not my faith, because for that I rely on Jesus -, but my hope in a Church that is, as in many ways already is, an announcement and a promise of the Kingdom.
Thank you. Keep doing such a wonderful work!
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