Vatican’s Pius XII archives shed light on another contentious chapter: The Legion of Christ scandal – ABC News

VATICAN CITY — The recently opened archives of Pope Pius XII have shed new light on claims the World War II-era pope didn t speak out about the Holocaust. But they re also providing details about another contentious chapter in Vatican history: the scandal over the founder of the Legionaries of Christ.

Entire books have already been written about the copious documentation that arrived in the Holy See in the 1940s and 1950s proving its officials had evidence of the Rev. Marcial Maciel s dubious morals, drug use, financial recklessness and sexual abuse of his young seminarians.

Yet it took the Holy See more than a half-century to sanction Maciel, and even more for it to acknowledge he was a religious fraud and con artist who molested his seminarians, fathered three children and built a secretive, cult-like religious order to hide his double life.

The newly opened archives of the Pius papacy, which spanned 1939-1958, are adding some new details to what has been in the public domain, since they include previously unavailable documentation from the Vatican secretariat of state.

They confirm that Pius’ Vatican was cracking down on Maciel in 1956 and was poised to take even tougher measures against him including removing him from priestly ministry altogether but that Pius’ 1958 death enabled Maciel’s supporters to take advantage of the leadership vacuum to save his name and order.

Until now, the biggest stash of publicly available documentation about Maciel had come from the Vatican s Congregation for Religious, which oversaw the Legion after its founding in 1941 in Mexico.

via abcnews.go.com

Those darn cult-like religious orders. Still, it does vividly illustrate how financial and sexual chicanery so often go together.