Who is father maciel

Maciel launched private schools in Monterrey, one for boys, one for girls. He exported to America a model for prep schools to attract well-heeled families who would join Regnum Christi, which organized study groups to discuss Maciel's letters.

Lay celibates, the highest level of Regnum Christi members, live in communities and work relentlessly on fundraising.

The Web site www. Monterrey was Maciel's financial springboard. After Dionisio Garza died in , his wife and several of his children donated to the Legion. Media reports have likened the Garza family wealth to that of the Rockefellers. In a March 2 interview in Mexico, she described her late father as "a conservative Victorian gentleman, incredibly well loved. Our family rarely watched TV. We came together after dinner and we talked.

After the patriarch's death, Maciel courted the widow for support. Her mother, now quite aged, "never learned about his kids. He targeted women in Mexico of a certain class who were not allowed to work. I had to fight to go to college. For cultured women who were bored, Maciel offered a sense of purpose. Roberta Garza studied as a boarder at Catholic schools in France and Germany, reading voraciously, "developing a critical mind that got me into trouble back in Monterrey.

One of my in-laws had a daughter who was not learning English. She complained to the Legionary priest. He actually told her: 'The final judgment will not be in English.

If your family had money, power, influence, they wanted you. They kept telling me, 'God gave you everything, you must give back by fighting the forces of evil. After France, where I could think freely, I was crying every night, thinking this is my family, my home, I don't want to be here.

I almost cracked up. Two of her siblings joined the Movement. Paulina, now in her 50s, is a Regnum Christi consecrated woman in Rome.

A brother, Fr. Luis Garza Medina, graduated from Stanford University in California in with a degree in industrial engineering and entered the Legion. At 32 he became vicar general, the second highest position. Through the two siblings, Maciel secured a continuing flow of money from the family.

In an e-mail exchange, Fr. Garza would neither confirm nor deny the amount or the donation. Today, the Garza family is splintered. When the Garza siblings gather as a family, they use good manners to avoid discussing the Legion. At Christmas , she said, Luis hung his head, and to Roberta seemed deeply depressed.

Mexico City has become the flashpoint in the deepening Legion scandal. The revolution in his life began in when he sued the Legion for the sexual abuse of his 5-year-old son by a lay teacher at the Legion's Oxford School in Mexico City. The boy told his mother that a male teacher had bitten his penis. After getting the child medical care, Bonilla and his wife, Lisset Aldrete, also a lawyer, met with the principal.

He said the principal took no action. The family has won initial rounds in a civil case against the Legion school, said Bonilla. Sitting in a sun-dappled parlor, he spoke tenderly of his child the youngest of five.

Bonilla's blog — conlajusticia. He believes the Legion officials in Mexico were trying to make the half-siblings get into a legal conflict over Maciel's estate. Disclosure: Aristegui did the Spanish narration for my film "Vows of Silence.

Despite his travels, he wooed her by buying a house in Cuernavaca, a colonial town outside Mexico City. Though they didn't marry, he became adoptive father of her 3-year-old son, Omar, from a previous relationship. Maciel made up his name and gave it to the younger boys.

He pulled down my pants and tried to rape me. In , age 26, she had his child, also named Norma Hilda. Vidal, who located them in an upscale Madrid apartment building, eliciting brief comments for an article last year in El Mundo. According to the Spanish reporters, Maciel also had three children with another Mexican woman, who now lives in Switzerland, which would make six natural children by three women, and the adoptive Omar as a seventh.

His Web site has a photograph of the two children holding hands with a Swiss Guard. Many priests and bishops have taken children to meet the pope.

More interesting is how Maciel got them to receive Communion. Presenting his children to John Paul suggests a reckless cynicism in Maciel's behavior, gambling with his public image as a priest by showcasing the progeny of his private life, putting both of his lives on simultaneous display. In America the major media ignored the Feb.

But in Mexico, a daily paper ran a series and a cable TV station did a documentary. The older boys refused to let Christian, 4, be alone with their father.

As Maciel became more distant, he still supported them financially, said Bonilla. About that time, Maciel moved Norma and year-old Normita to Spain. You'd have to get that from her. The day after the Rivas family's radio interview, the Legion released a Jan. Bonilla withdrew as legal counsel, citing professional ethics over a client bargaining silence for money. He has 70 other clients who were abused or have children who were abused, not just by religious figures.

He tried to bring the parties together to resolve this. I saw him as having instructions from the pope or [Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio] Bertone to solve the problem. Sodano, the patron in Rome. She has been an advisor to the Legion, which has expanded in America with the University of Sacramento in California.

Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Vatican secretary of state from to , was a pivotal figure in the university's growth in Rome. Maciel and Sodano forged a friendship in Chile in the s during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship.

Haunted by the regime's torturing and abducting of people, Silva had a tense relationship with Sodano, who as papal nuncio appeared on TV in support of Pinochet. Several Chilean bishops implored Silva not to admit Maciel's group, which had a tainted reputation as " millonarios de Cristo " for their obsessions with fundraising. At least 60 children were abused by Marcial Maciel, founder of the ultra-conservative Catholic order Legionaries of Christ, an investigation has found. The report, published by the Roman Catholic group, said 33 priests in the order abused at least minors since it was founded in In , Maciel was ordered to retire to a life of penitence after years of allegations of sexual abuse of minors.

He died two years later at the age of 87 without facing his accusers. It added that a process of "reparation and reconciliation" had begun with 45 of the victims. According to the report, six of the 33 accused priests died without being tried, one was convicted, and one is currently awaiting trial - and has "already [been] removed from clerical status".

Another 18 are still part of the organisation, but they have been removed from tasks where they interact with the public or with children. The report added that 14 of the 33 priests were also victims themselves, which it said highlighted the "chains of abuse", where "a victim of a Legionnaire, over time, becomes in turn an aggressor".

Several men publicly accused Maciel before his death of sexually assaulting them while they were in a seminary from the s to the s. Among its many supporters is Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. The lawsuit claims Vatican ignored reports of sexual abuse by Maciel since the s, until he was forced out of the Legion by Pope Benedict XVI in Citing his age, the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declined to put Maciel on trial but he was ordered to a "life of prayer and penitence.

To pray. Why didn't he bring him to jail? The lawsuit filed by Maciel's alleged son claims the Vatican and the presiding Pope from the 's until "engaged in a conspiracy to conceal their knowledge of Maciel's serial delicts, including the repeated sexual abuse of children. The lawsuit claims Maciel "gained influence and protection from the Vatican through giving substantial monies to Vatican officials" and providing other benefits and gifts. Gonzalez said when he was nine, his father took him to Rome for a private mass celebrated by John Paul II.

They lived a life of comfort in Cuernavaca, Mexico with money secretly funneled by Father Maciel. Gonzalez said his father had a second mistress in Spain, with whom he fathered a daughter.