Word: legion
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...wasn't so long ago that an army of conservative Catholics, including such prominent voices as the late theologian the Rev. Richard Neuhaus, would have rushed to defend Maciel, the highest-profile Catholic clergyman ever to be accused of sexual abuse. But at this point, even the Legion has resigned itself to the dark double life of the man its members often called "Nuestro Padre," or Our Father. Last year, the order conceded that Maciel had sired children. And it didn't challenge last week's allegations, posting a message on its website, "We share the suffering and shame...
...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...
...seminaries for teenage boys in the U.S. at a time when the American priesthood's ranks are thinning exponentially. In Mexico, the children of telecom billionaire Carlos Slim, one of the world's richest people, have attended its academies. In fact, like its rival conservative organization Opus Dei, the Legion counts some of the world's wealthiest Catholics among its followers - its lay membership, known as the Regnum Christi, or Kingdom of Christ, numbers some 70,000 worldwide - and it is one of the Church's top fundraisers...
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...
...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 action" - just as it hasn't, he argues, in widespread...