A new documentary on the life and crimes of Fr Marcial Maciel Degollado was another chance for Legionaries of Christ and Regnum Christi members to confront the truth of their founder’s dark past, the congregation’s general director says. Source: OSV News.
In a letter to members of Legionaries of Christ published online on Tuesday, Fr John Connor said he and other Legionaries who watched the HBO docuseries Marcial Maciel: The Wolf of God, saw it as “a cathartic experience” that “challenges us to face our history again.”
“In this very humiliation lies a grace,” he wrote. “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 documentary, which premiered on HBO Max in August, delved into the history of the founder’s disturbing past, including his abuse of minor seminarians, his addiction to pain medication, as well as his double life with a young woman with whom he fathered children and whom he also sexually abused.
A significant portion of the four-part docuseries also centred on revelations made public in 2024 that Maciel’s crimes were known by the Vatican as far back as the 1950s.
According to the archives of Pope Pius XII, which were opened in 2020, the Vatican was poised to take action against Maciel in 1956 and was planning to remove him from the priesthood. However, upon Pius XII’s death in 1958, Maciel’s allies took advantage of the leadership vacuum to clear his name, The Associated Press reported.
Marcial Maciel: The Wolf of God is screening in Australia on HBO Max.
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New Maciel documentary a ‘carthartic’ experience, Legionaries head says (By Junno Arocho Esteves, OSV News)
