Jason Berry, the New Orleans writer, reported this week that the founder of the Legion of Christ, a global order of Catholic priests, for years deployed lavish gifts and envelopes of cash to powerful Vatican cardinals and other officials to win support for his work before his eventual exposure as a predator.
Berry said the gifts help explain why the Rev. Marcial Maciel Delgollado and his fast-growing order enjoyed powerful allies at the Vatican, even after nine men filed formal charges in the late 1990s that he had sexually abused them as young seminarians.
The two-part report on Maciel’s gifts, published last week and Monday in the National Catholic Reporter, comes after the Legion’s admission last year that the charismatic Maciel led a secret life, fathered a daughter in his native Mexico and supported her and her mother with donations diverted from the Legion.
The order has also acknowledged that Maciel molested the seminarians. And it has not disputed the claims of two men in Mexico who said they are his sons by a second woman, also supported by donations to the Legion.
Jason Berry covered the child abuse stories in south Louisiana back in the 1980s. Links to stories by Berry from 1985 in the Acadiana Times on Gilbert Gauthé, a notorious priest-abuser are here and here.
Berry has also published books on the subject:
Lead Us Not Into Temptation
Vows of Silence
