Fr John Connor, general director of the Legionaries of Christ, said the HBO Max series Marcial Maciel: The Wolf of God “challenges us to face our history again”.
In a letter published on the Legionaries of Christ website on 16 September, Fr Connor wrote: “Our history has borne the mark of a wound from its beginning … In this very humiliation lies a grace.”
He continued: “The Lord frees us from institutional and personal pride by allowing us to inhabit a history marked by contradiction. The memory of our founder’s sins and their impact on the institution he founded is not simply a call to justice and reparation – which are necessary – but also a divine pedagogy that preserves us from the temptation to boast about our works.”
The four-part series screened last month explores how in 1941 the seminarian Maciel founded a movement in Mexico later re-named the Legionaries of Christ. It charts his sexual abuse of junior seminarians and of the woman by whom he fathered children, and his addiction to a morphine derivative.
It also includes the recent discovery from Pope Pius XII’s archives that the Vatican knew of Maciel’s drug and sexual abuse in the 1950s and planned to remove him from the priesthood in 1956. The death of Pius XII two years later gave Maciel’s allies a chance to clear his name.
Fr Andreas Schöggl, the archivist and former secretary general of the Legionaries of Christ, participated in the series via an interview.
However, 27 former Legionary priests and members protested that the congregation had neglected to tell programme-makers of “the existence of those who asked for and sought the complete, unvarnished truth and clear justice for the victims of Maciel and the system of government he created from the beginning”.
“Most of us did not leave scandalised by Maciel’s life of abuse and crime, which was certainly scandalous, but rather by the inaction of superiors and the grave lack of trust they fostered,” they said in a statement.
“Years later, it seems as if the whole problem was Maciel and only Maciel, but the Legionaries never entered a path of acknowledging complicity or responsibility.”
Connor said that the Legionaries were preparing their archive for examination by internal and external historians.
Maciel died in 2008, two years after his removal from active ministry by Pope Benedict XVI. More than 1,000 Legionaries were interviewed during an Apostolic Visitation of the congregation in 2010, which led the Vatican to declare Maciel’s actions “very grave and objectively immoral” and confirmed by “incontrovertible testimonies”.