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VATICAN CITY (AP) — The just lately opened archives of Pope Pius XII have shed new mild on claims the World Battle II-era pope didn’t communicate out about the Holocaust. However they’re additionally offering particulars about one other contentious chapter in Vatican historical past: the scandal over the founding father of the Legionaries of Christ.
Whole books have already been written concerning the copious documentation that arrived within the Holy See within the Nineteen Forties and Nineteen Fifties proving its officers had proof of the Rev. Marciel Maciel’s doubtful morals, drug use, monetary recklessness and sexual abuse of his younger seminarians.
But it took the Holy See greater than a half-century to sanction Maciel, and much more for it to acknowledge he was a spiritual fraud and con artist who molested his seminarians, fathered three kids and constructed a secretive, cult-like spiritual order to cover his double life.
The newly opened archives of the Pius papacy, which spanned 1939-1958, are including some new particulars to what has been within the public area, since they embrace beforehand unavailable documentation from the Vatican secretariat of state.
They affirm that Pius’ Vatican was cracking down on Maciel in 1956 and was poised to take even more durable measures towards him — together with eradicating him from priestly ministry altogether — however that Pius’ 1958 demise enabled Maciel’s supporters to reap the benefits of the management vacuum to save lots of his identify and order.
Till now, the largest stash of publicly out there documentation about Maciel had come from the Vatican’s Congregation for Spiritual, which oversaw the Legion after its founding in 1941 in Mexico.
In 2012, a few of Maciel’s Mexican victims put online 200-plus documents spanning the Nineteen Forties-2002 that that they had obtained from somebody with entry to the Congregation for Spiritual archive. These paperwork, additionally within the guide “La Voluntad De No Saber” (The Will to Not Know) detailed the proof the Vatican had of Maciel’s depravities, but in addition how a long time of bishops, cardinals and popes turned a blind eye and believed as a substitute the glowing stories that additionally arrived in Rome.
Now the brand new paperwork from the Vatican’s central governing workplace are fleshing out that historical past, offering extra particulars about who within the Vatican helped Maciel evade sanction, believing the claims towards him to be slander, and who sought to take a more durable line.
One new doc, being revealed in Sunday’s Corriere della Sera cultural complement La Lettura, accommodates the unique draft of an Oct. 1, 1956, memo by the No. 3 within the Vatican’s workplace for spiritual orders.
On that day, Maciel arrived in Rome after he had been suspended by the Vatican as Legion superior and ordered to enter detox to kick a morphine dependancy.
In response to the memo, the Vatican’s Congregation for Spiritual wished a further measure imposed on Maciel: that he be barred from having contact with younger seminarians or danger being suspended from priestly ministry altogether, which means he could not have fun Mass publicly, hear confessions or have fun every other sacraments as a priest.
The creator of the word, the Rev. Giovanni Battista Scapinelli, wrote that if Maciel got here to the congregation “I’ll order him to get handled, to desert any contact along with his college students till the congregation says in any other case. And if he doesn’t present up, in two days, a pre-emptive order must be given to Maciel: Both you go get handled or you’ll stay suspended a divinis.”
The draft is important as a result of it reveals that by 1956, a minimum of some within the Vatican took significantly the stories that had reached Rome that Maciel was molesting his younger seminarians and wished to guard them — and wished to punish Maciel with one of many church’s harshest penalties for his crimes. It could take 50 years although, till 2006, for the Vatican to lastly condemn Maciel to a relatively mild sentence of a “lifetime of penance and prayer” for sodomizing his younger recruits.
A subsequent draft of the Oct. 1, 1956, memo was revealed in 2012 by the Mexican victims. It confirmed that Scapinelli had scratched out his unique order for Maciel to chorus from having contact along with his seminarians and merely ordered Maciel to get medical therapy for the drug dependancy. It accommodates one other web page and a half of handwritten notes, as if Scapinelli rewrote it following session with others.
The secretariat of state archives comprise what seems to be a closing, typewritten model of the memo, dated Oct. 2, 1956 which omits any reference to Maciel being prohibited from contact with children and speaks solely of him getting medical assist, with no additional threats of ministerial suspension. Just a few weeks later, the Vatican appointed outdoors clerics to do a extra thorough investigation onsite.
All variations of the Oct. 1, 1956 memo clarify that Maciel had an awesome protector within the Vatican within the type of Cardinal Giuseppe Pizzardo, the No. 2 within the highly effective Congregation for the Doctrine of the Religion. Different paperwork say the Congregation for Spiritual “couldn’t proceed additional towards F. Maciel due to suggestions and interventions by high-ranking personalities.”
Scapinelli means that Pius was totally versed within the Maciel affair and had endorsed his removing because the Legion’s superior, writing that Maciel had been quickly eliminated “for causes recognized to the Holy Father.”
Certainly, in September of that 12 months the Congregation for Spiritual handed over a file of “considerable documentation” for Pius to learn, with a canopy letter recalling that the Congregation had by no means wished to acknowledge the Legion as a pontifically accepted spiritual order due to its “critical” issues about Maciel.
Pius died two years later, on Oct. 9, 1958. Within the chaos of a brand new papacy, a change in management within the Congregation for Spiritual and interventions by Maciel’s supporters, Maciel was reinstalled as superior of the Legion in early 1959. The Legion was acknowledged as a pontifical religious order a couple of years later.
Maciel died in 2008. A 12 months later the Legion admitted to a few of his crimes, and a 12 months after that the Vatican took the Legion over and imposed a strategy of reform and “purification.”
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