Vatican disciplines group founder

Published: 8:32AM Saturday May 20, 2006 Source: Reuters

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The founder of a powerful Catholic order disciplined by the pope is a charismatic charmer who sexually abused trainee priests to get "revenge on God" for having been abused himself as a child, a victim said.
   
The Vatican said it had told Father Marcial Maciel, 86-year-old founder of the Legionaries of Christ, to retire to a life of "prayer and penitence."
   
He has been accused by former seminaries of sexual abuses dating back to the 1940s and 1950s, when they were boys as young as 10.
   
Jose Barba, now a Mexican university professor, said on Friday he was abused by Maciel in the early 1950s aged 16 when he was studying for the priesthood in Rome.
   
"He asked me to give him a massage but it was masturbation. He said the pope gave permission for that kind of thing," Barba said. Other abuses followed, he said.
   
The censure of Maciel was Pope Benedict's first major decision involving sexual abuse charges since his election last year, and raised eyebrows because the conservative order had found favor under the late Pope John Paul.
   
Begun by Maciel in 1941, the Legionaries of Christ has about 600 priests and 2,500 seminarians in more than 20 countries. It also runs a major Pontifical university in Rome.
   
Barba is one of nine former trainees who brought a suit against Maciel under the Vatican's canonical law in 1998. Other victims have since come forward.
   
He said the priest had himself been abused as a boy. Barba said the priest had told other victims, whom Barba is in contact with, that he had been sexually abused as a child beginning age 8.
   
"I think he was acting as if he was getting revenge on God. He suffered a lot as a child," Barba, 68, told journalists.
   
Maciel had a charm and air of authority that scared the seminaries into bowing to his will and keeping quiet about abuses for years.
   
"He has a very strong charisma but is corrupt and knows how to corrupt others," he said.
   
Barba welcomed Pope Benedict's decision to discipline Maciel, whose organization is strong in Mexico, Chile and Ireland and runs expensive private schools.
   
"We don't see this as a victory but we believe it is a necessary step for the purification of certain quarters inside the church and for a historical moral lesson," he said.
   
The church did not say whether it believed the allegations against Maciel were true but said that, because of Maciel's age and frail health, it had decided not to launch a full-scale church trial.
   
"It's the best that could have been done under the circumstances," Barba said.
   
The Legionaries said in a statement that Maciel had "accepted the Vatican's instruction with faith, total calm, with a clear conscience knowing that it is a new cross which God, merciful father, has allowed him to suffer."
  
It said Maciel had already "affirmed his innocence."
   
Barba, who is divorced with three children, said he remained a Christian despite the abuses but had drifted from the Catholic Church.

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