Word: mexico
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...last week in Mexico, where Maciel founded the ultraconservative Legion in 1941, the scandal took an even unholier turn. On March 3, one of Maciel's mistresses, Blanca Lara, and two of Lara's grown sons told MVS Radio that Maciel had sexually abused his own children. It "started when I was 7 years old," said one son, José Raúl González, now in his early 30s. "I was lying down with him like any boy, any son with his father. He pulled down my pants and tried to rape me." The abuse, Gonz...
...religious houses and more than 160 schools. In the U.S. alone it runs 21 élite Catholic prep schools, a university in Sacramento, Calif., and some of the only 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...
...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 clerical-sex-abuse cases in Ireland and the U.S., despite Benedict's vow to remove the "filth" of sex abusers from the priesthood...
Analysts like Masferrer do believe, however, that the Maciel scandal, especially in the wake of last week's revelations, is having a "devastating impact" on the Catholic Church in Mexico. The Church is already hemorrhaging congregants to Protestant Evangelical sects, and it has seen its clout diminish in areas like the capital, Mexico City, where secular leftists recently passed a law permitting gay marriage. "The politicians can say that the Church officials are in no position to give moral lectures," says Masferrer. (See pictures of spiritual healing around the world...
...With reporting by Ioan Grillo and Dolly Mascareñas / Mexico City...