Mexico City / Vatican City. - When the “prefect of discipline” of an elite Catholic school in Cancun (Mexico) came to a class to take the girls to confession, the atmosphere was tense. The woman directed the girls to the chapel so that the director of the school, a legionary of Christ, sexually abused them.
“While some read the Bible, they raped those in front, girls from 6 years to 8-9 years, recalled one of the victims of that priest, Ana Lucia Salazar, TV presenter and mother of three children.
"Then, nothing was the same, nothing returned to its place," lamented the woman in tears at her home in Mexico City.
The story of Salazar, which was corroborated by other victims and the Legion of Christ itself, has opened a new credibility crisis for the once influential order, 10 years after the Vatican intervened the organization after determining that its founder was a pedophile.
The case has confirmed that the problem of abuse in the Legion goes beyond its founder. And he has questioned the reform led by the Vatican. The papal envoy knew about the case almost a decade ago and refused to punish the priest or superiors who knew his crimes, many of whom remain in positions of power and exercise the priesthood.
The scandal was not the image that the Legion wanted to offer on Monday, when it opened its General Chapter in Rome, a meeting of several weeks to elect its new leaders and approve regulatory decisions for the future.
The Legion wanted to appear taking the reins of its order after 10 years of reforms ordered by the Vatican. The Holy See imposed structural changes following the revelations that the late founder of the order, the Rev. Marcial Maciel, sexually assaulted at least 60 seminarians, had at least three children and built a hermetic order and similar to a sect to satisfy his wishes and hide his double life.
But the scandal in Cancun showed that the Vatican reform left at least one key issue uncorrected: punish known historical aggressors and the people who covered them, and change the culture of cover-up that allowed those crimes.
From the beginning, the late papal envoy who led the Legion, Cardinal Velasio de Paolis, refused to demand responsibility from the superior accomplices of the order.
"De Paolis said explicitly that there would be no witch hunt, and the consequence was that the abuses and their concealment remained without punishment," said the Rev. Christian Borgogno, former priest of the Legion and co-founded the Facebook group "Legioleaks," where Salazar made his story public for the first time in May. De Paolis’s decision to keep Legion’s superiors in office, many of them close to Maciel, “made reform impossible,” Borgogno said.
"The only way was to push the charismatic leaders, and even they were repressed," he told The Associated Press. "That is the main reason why many of us leave."
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Salazar, whose history has made headlines in Mexico, went further:
“What I want is for the Pope to radicalize. There is only one position, in favor of the violated children, ”he said, noting that a congregation that protects“ thugs, criminals, rapists, accomplices and perpetrators ”cannot be supported.
“It has no reason to be the Legion of Christ. It's like dismantling a cartel, you have to remove the ringleader, dismantle it, ”he added.
Reverend Aaron Smith, spokesman for the order, claimed that the dome of the Legion has changed in the last decade, noting that 11 priests participate in this year's General Chapter for the first time and that the majority of the 66 participants have entered in the assembly after the reform of the Vatican began. However, there are more than a dozen that belong to the old guard of Maciel.
Smith said that the power structure of the Maciel era has been dismantled, with a less centralized authority and a system of guarantees and balances. "Today it would be virtually impossible for actions such as those that occurred during the Maciel period to go unnoticed," he said. in replies sent by email after declining a camera interview.
The scandal has hit the Legion in its native territory, Mexico, and cast a shadow of discredit where it hurts most: the prestigious private schools of the order, which have their public among the Mexican elite and are the main source of revenue for the order . Ex-priests of the Legion say the case is a devastating blow that they warned for a long time, since losing credibility to wealthy Mexicans would deprive the order of its key base.
The Mexican episcopal conference has already put an end to its silence on the order to condemn the newly revealed abuses and the fact that the Legion did not offer “a concrete act of justice and reparation for the victims” even after recognizing the crimes, promised more transparency and pointed to its new child protection measures.
Rogelio Cabrera, who in addition to presiding over the Mexican episcopal conference is the Archbishop of Monterrey - a bastion of the legionaries - denounced the “criminal silence” of the group and the treatment that the victims received, and led a recent request by the Mexican bishops to cancel legal prescription in cases of sexual assault on minors. It was a striking change of position, given that the Mexican Catholic hierarchy long supported the Legion and benefited from the generosity of the previously wealthy order.
Even the Vatican ambassador to Mexico, Monsignor Franco Coppola, broke the tradition of diplomatic discretion of his office to publicly criticize how the Legion had handled the case and ask the Vatican to investigate the concealment network behind it. That was also striking, given that the Vatican itself has been implicated in concealing Maciel's abuses.
Coppola also repeated the requests of victims and archdiocese of Monterrey that the superiors of the Legion involved in hiding the facts resigned at least removed from the General Chapter, which he described as a "great gesture of humility" that to date has not accepted any .
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Smith, a spokesman for the Legion, said the order could not ask the priests to resign, but that they were free to do so if they decided.
When asked about the criticisms of the Mexican ecclesiastical hierarchy, the spokesman said that the Legion welcomed his contribution while trying to improve the management of past cases and working on prevention measures for the future.
The General Chapter, he said, will evaluate the current child protection measures, ensure adequate contact with the victims and could order that the investigation into the concealment and other cases of abuse of power of the superiors of the order be continued.
However, the victims see it as empty promises and gave little value to the letters sent to them by the order's dome, promising compensation and change, when the scandal came to light. The Legion has not yet resolved all financial compensation claims of eight of Maciel's original victims, who filed formal claims in 2018.
Salazar's case is especially serious because his parents went to see the bishop, who was also a legionnaire, as soon as his daughter told them about the abuses Fernando Martínez Suarez was subjecting her to. It was at the end of 1992.
Salazar, then an 8-year-old girl, was playing jumping on her parents' bed and started talking. His mother listened to stunned memories that only years later could he rebuild: “How disturbing it is that you put your dress up, that you saw me, that I pulled my underwear, put my hands in my body, that I sat on his legs while He put his hand on my legs, that he masturbated with me on top. ”
"My mother says that while jumping, she looked like a butterfly, like she was releasing the weight, like she was flying," he recalls. From then until Martínez was taken out of school, six months passed in which Salazar was more alone than ever. Besides, nobody wanted to approach her because there was a rumor that she was stinky. "What if tomorrow I do not get up and already rest?" He wondered. "I wanted to die gave me."
Archive image of a prayer of the Legion of Christ in Rome (AP).
But Martinez had friends, especially Maciel, who later learned he had abused him. Martinez was one of the almost twelve priests of the Legion who as children had been victims of the founder and who over time abused other minors, a chain of abuse of several generations that the order recognized last month.
The legion announced last week that Martinez had asked to leave the priesthood after an independent investigation determined that he had abused at least six girls in Cancun and that a number of congregation leaders, from the first bishop who received Salazar's complaint De Paolis himself, decided not to report it to the police or even to the Vatican. Martínez had been transferred from Cancun to a seminar in Spain without formal restrictions being imposed.
De Paolis, one of the main canonical lawyers of the Vatican, became part of the cover-up practice: He learned about the case between 2011 and 2013, when he was asked to take action against Martinez because an adequate investigation had never been done. But at the moment in which the priest could have finally held accounts before justice, De Paolis chose not to do anything, since no other complaints had been received, according to the investigation of the firm Praesidium. Martínez was transferred to Rome in 2016.
The current superior of the Legion, the Rev. Eduardo Robles Gil, apologized to Salazar for the initial management of his case and the subsequent "deficiencies."
"I could have remedied it since 2014, but I followed the decisions that had been made regarding cases of abuse of past decades," reads the letter sent in November.
He also forwarded a letter from Martinez to Salazar, in which the aggressor implored his forgiveness for the damage caused. He described his behavior as "faults" and touching "that God does not bless" the fruit of an "uncontrolled sexuality."
Salazar was very offended by the way in which the missives played down crimes and how they had hidden. "It was revictimizing, humiliating, disgusting."
Salazar spent decades venting writing poems, but when his third son was born - and the first girl - something changed. "I asked myself," What am I going to do so that they don't rape her and so that she has a childhood that I couldn't have? " Soon he knew: the answer was to speak.