Word: benediction
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...question, though, is whether Pope Benedict XVI is poised to deal with it for them - perhaps by taking over the Legion and installing new leadership from outside the order. A number of U.S. bishops already bar the Legion from operating in their dioceses. This month Benedict is expected to receive the first report of a five-bishop team he sent out last year to investigate the Legion around the world. Sources familiar with the probe say it's meant in part to determine if others in the order have committed sexual abuse and whether the order's current leadership...
...pictures of Obama meeting Pope Benedict...
Just as important, however, is the thorny issue of John Paul II, who died in 2005 and was succeeded by Benedict. The Vatican had investigated Maciel's personal life as early as the 1950s, but John Paul II, whose papacy began in 1978, showered praise on the Legion's founder, calling him "an efficacious guide to youth." (See the top 10 religion stories...
Vaca says that remark is what compelled Maciel victims to tell their stories for the book Vows of Silence, published in 2004. They eventually got the Vatican, even under John Paul II, to take their allegations seriously, but Church watchers say Benedict's current mission to canonize his predecessor is another reason Rome won't want to punish the Legion too harshly. "The Legionaries of Christ are going to withstand this [latest] blow," says Elio Masferrer, an expert on the Catholic Church in Latin America at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Rome, he predicts, "will not take any meaningful...
...also circulated reports that Maciel was surrounded by exorcists in his final days, suggesting that his immoral acts were the work of demons and not the priest. That's a Hail Mary ploy at best. And it does little to obscure the fact that it's up to Benedict to decide whether Padre Maciel's Legion is itself possessed of enough demons to warrant more severe penance...