Vatican Metropolis. Newly opened archives of Pope Pius XII have shed new mild on claims that the World Warfare II-era pontiff didn’t communicate out concerning the Holocaust. However in addition they present particulars about one other controversial chapter in Vatican historical past: the scandal over the founding father of the Legionaries of Christ.
Total books have already been written concerning the copious documentation that reached the Holy See within the Nineteen Forties and Fifties, exhibiting that its officers had proof of the Rev. Marcial Maciel’s doubtful morals, drug use, monetary recklessness and sexual abuse of his younger seminarians.
But it took the Holy See greater than half a century to sanction Maciel, and even longer to acknowledge that he was a non secular fraud and con man who sexually abused his seminarians, fathered three youngsters and constructed a secret, cult-like spiritual order to cover his double life.
The newly opened archives of Pius’ papacy, spanning from 1939 to 1958, add some new particulars to what has been within the public area, as they embrace documentation beforehand unavailable from the Vatican’s secretariat of state.
They affirm that Pius’s Vatican was cracking down on Maciel in 1956 and was ready to take even harsher measures in opposition to him, together with eradicating him from the priestly ministry altogether, however that Pius’s dying in 1958 allowed Maciel’s supporters to make the most of the management vacuum to avoid wasting his title and order.
In 2012, a few of Maciel’s Mexican victims posted on-line greater than 200 paperwork spanning the years 1940-2002 detailing the Vatican’s proof of Maciel’s depravities, but additionally how a long time of bishops, cardinals and popes turned a blind eye.
Now new paperwork from the Vatican’s central governing workplace are fleshing out that story, offering extra particulars about who within the Vatican helped Maciel and who sought to take a tougher line.
The draft is critical as a result of it reveals that in 1956, not less than some within the Vatican took severely studies that had reached Rome that Maciel was sexually abusing his younger seminarians and needed to guard them, and needed to punish Maciel with one of many church’s harshest penalties. Nonetheless, it was not till 2006 that the Vatican lastly sentenced Maciel to a relatively mild sentence of “a lifetime of penance and prayer” for sodomizing his younger recruits.
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– 2024-07-29 21:00:13
