Pope emeritus Benedict XVI, who died this Saturday at the age of 95 in the Vatican, shook the Catholic Church by becoming the first pontiff to resign since the Middle Ages in 2013.
But in addition to this historical fact, his papacy was also marked by the scandals associated with thousands of cases of pedophilia within the Catholic Church.
Many of them went back decades, but it was during his pontificate, between 2005 and 2013, that the Vatican had to face up and take responsibility for the serious allegations of sexual abuse that broke out in different parts of the planet.
Cases that seemed to have the same modus operandi: stories of priests who had abused minors and whose complaints were buried by the Church with the help of lawyers, politicians and men close to power.
Among these scandals, one of those that Benedict had to overcome almost from the first day of his pontificate was that of the Mexican priest Marcial Maciel, founder of the controversial Legionaries of Christ congregation.
Maciel had created it in the 1940s with the stated purpose of bringing the ministry of the Church closer to the youngest, but the congregation ended up being the space where about 175 minors were sexually abused over four decades, according to reports. of crimes that have even been accepted by the ecclesiastical authorities themselves.
In 2005, when Ratzinger became Benedict XVI, the institution had a presence in about 10 countries and some 65,000 members. especially in Latin America. Maciel was considered a protégé of his predecessor, Pope John Paul II.
And one of the first important actions of Benedict’s pontificate was to order Maciel’s retirement from his activities as a priest, in 2006.
“Many defenders of Ratzinger rightly say that pedophilia was the hallmark of his pontificate,” says Bernardo Barranco, a Mexican sociologist and expert on Church issues, author of the article “Pederasty and the Sins of Benedict XVI.”
According to Barranco, the defenders of the Pope emeritus point out that it was he who imposed the so-called “zero tolerance”: toughened sanctions, modified canons and enacted new laws that penalize abuses within the framework of the Church.
But his critics don’t think he’s done enough..
“Despite everything, it was not severe. In the dramatic case of the Mexican Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, having full evidence of his unbridled behavior, he only imposed retirement, leading “a life of prayer and penance,” which of course he did not abide by. There Benedict XVI should have proceeded with canonical judgments”, adds Barranco.
Maciel died in 2008 after years of scandals over accusations of pedophilia, as well as the paternity of at least 4 children with different women.
The truth, according to Barranco and other experts on ecclesiastical issues, is that this scandal was one of the most serious that the Pope had to face in Latin America and the one that cost him the most to move forward.
“It came and it came and could not go further”
In 1941, Maciel was a seminarian and decided to found a new congregation in Mexico called Misioneros del Sagrado Corazón y de la Virgen de los Dolores.
In 1965, he decided to rename it as The Legionaries of Christ.
This congregation would grow to become one of the most powerful in Latin America, and Maciel an important figure within the Mexican Catholic Church.
In fact, he was part of the entourage that received John Paul II in the remembered visits to Mexico from 1979 and 1993 (John Paul II visited Mexico five times).
But the first official contact of the future Benedict XVI with Maciel and the Legionaries of Christ would be in 1997, when the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
In that year, the first formal complaints were made known (the rumors of abuse came from the 1950s) against Maciel and his congregation, in which Ratzinger would play an important role, especially when it came to defining the actions to be taken by part of the Church in such cases.
However, neither Maciel nor the congregation suffered sanctions of any kind.
“There are many accusations, which are repeated from time to time, that Benedict XVI, before becoming Pope, knew well about these accusations, with abundant evidence, and did nothing. And he lies when he says that he did not know, ”Barranco writes.
For his part, Ratzinger’s successor, Pope Francis, has on various occasions defended the work of Benedict XVI against The legionaries of Christ and especially Father Maciel.
“Cardinal Ratzinger – applause for him – is a man who had all the documentation. Being prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he had everything in his hands, he did the investigations and he arrived, and he arrived, and he arrived, and he could not go any further in the execution,” Francisco said in a speech in 2016. .
For the current Pope, the lack of laws to respond to the allegations of abuses that were multiplying at that time, in addition to a special “protection” for Maciel, prevented Ratzinger from going any further at that time.
Because the first actions against the Mexican priest and his congregation came in the first days of Ratzinger as the new Pope.
Abuses to 175 minors
One fact that could prove Francis right is that, in May 2006, barely a year after being elected, Benedict XVI ordered Maciel to retire from the priesthood to lead a life of “prayer and penance.”
But that would not be the only concrete action.
Already in 2004, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had managed to unblock the investigation against Maciel and for that reason he resigned as director of The Legionaries of Christ a year later.
In 2010, two years after the death of Father Maciel and as a result of the investigations carried out, Benedict XVI sent a delegation apostolic office to assume control of the congregation and go into more detail about the complaints.
Finally, in 2012 it was the Vatican itself that confirmed that Maciel and several priests within the congregation that he had founded had committed serious crimes of sexual abuse against minors.
“In recent years, in several countries, the major superiors of the Legion of Christ have received some complaints of acts of serious immorality and more serious offenses… committed by some legionaries,” said a spokesman for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. , in charge of carrying out the investigation.
In December 2019, in a report published by the Legionaries of Christ themselves, the scope of the reported abuses became known: at least 175 minors would have been sexually assaulted by members of the congregation.
Of them, 60 had been perpetrated by Maciel himself.
“We apologize to the victims, their families, the Church and society for the serious harm that members of our Congregation have caused,” the document states.
“We honestly and shamefully recognize the reality of the crimes of sexual abuse of minors in our history, with the sincere desire for continued personal and institutional conversion.”
More complaints
In February 2013, Benedict XVI surprised the world by announcing his resignation from the papacy, the first since the 15th century.
Hit by the “Vatileaks” scandal, when his butler Paolo Gabriele leaked thousands of secret documents on the functioning of the micro-state, Benedict XVI found himself “lack of strength” to face the challenges presented to him by the papacy.
Then he announced that he was retiring to dedicate himself to prayer and meditation in the Mater Ecclesiae convent, in the Vatican, until the moment of his death.
However, he was dogged that far by allegations that he knew about The Legionaries of Christ long before 1997 and had done little to stop them.
Earlier this year, German filmmaker Christoph Röhl reported that two Chilean priests had given then-Cardinal Ratzinger documents proving the criminal activity of the congregation and its founder.
To these denunciations are added those of the Mexican academic Juan Barba, who affirms that in 1998 he managed to gather the testimony of eight former members of the Maciel congregation in which serious denunciations of abuses and mismanagement were made.
“We have been victims not only of Maciel, but of Ratzinger and the Vatican system, which prefers that eight innocent men suffer than that thousands of Catholics lose their faith,” Barba told Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui.
However, before these accusations, the defense has always been to point out that Benedict XVI was the one who faced the abuses of Maciel and his Legionaries of Christ.
“Those accusations are simply not true,” he told the German newspaper. Die Zeit the priest Georg Gänswein, who is the personal secretary of the emeritus pope.
And many advocates point to what the Vatican emphatically noted in 2010, when the same accusations were made.
“It is paradoxical – and for the informed people ridiculous – to attribute to Cardinal Ratzinger responsibility for coverage or cover-up of any kind,” said then-Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi.
“All informed people know that it was the merit of Cardinal Ratzinger to promote the canonical investigation into the accusations regarding Marcial Maciel, until his guilt was established with certainty,” he added.
Currently, the congregation continues to provide information on cases of abuse.
In 2021 they made public the names of the 33 priests who would be involved in the abuses, while Pope Francis has indicated that the congregation still has a “long journey” of renewal.
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