MEXICO CITY—The Vatican’s two senior intercourse crimes scientists will be dispatched to Mexico in late March to help investigate clerical abuse adhering to the latest revelations in a lengthy-working disaster involving a Mexican order regarded as the Legion of Christ.
Archbishop Charles Scicluna and Msgr. Jordi Bertomeu, whose investigation of abuse in Chile in 2018 led every single bishop in that region to give their resignation, will listen to testimony from abuse victims at the ask for of the Mexican church, the Mexican Bishops Meeting said in a statement Monday.
The take a look at comes as the church in the world’s second most populous Catholic region soon after Brazil grapples with a legacy of abuse and go over up involving the Legion of Christ, whose founder Marcial Maciel was a pedophile but which carries on to operate some of the most prestigious non-public colleges in Mexico and caters to the country’s elites.
It wasn’t immediately achievable to access the Legion of Christ for comment.
Recent revelations of the depth of abuse at the order have brought the issue to national interest again.
A Mexican Television set presenter, Ana Lucia Salazar, went public a short while ago with her ordeal at a Legion of Christ faculty in Cancún, Mexico in the nineteen nineties, exactly where the faculty administrator employed to take girls out of class and send them to chapel, exactly where a Legion priest would sexually abuse them.
“As some were being reading the Bible, he would rape the other folks in entrance of them, minimal girls aged 6 to eight or 9,” Ms. Salazar, 36, was quoted as saying by the Associated Press.
Ms. Salazar’s tale came extra than a 10 years soon after the Vatican took about the Legion soon after analyzing Mr. Maciel experienced abused scores of minors, fathered kids out of wedlock and designed a tradition of abuse and coverup.
Ms. Salazar and other victims said the Papal envoy who took about the Legion, Cardinal Velasio De Paolis, understood about their conditions virtually a 10 years ago but experienced publicly pledged to not go on investigations of the order. The cardinal died in 2018.
The scope of the Legion’s abuse has only slowly and gradually been disclosed. In a report released on Dec. 22 of previous yr, the Legion said an inside investigation recognized 33 clergymen and seventy one seminarians who experienced abused at minimum one hundred seventy five minors about the previous 8 many years.
In a chilling twist, the report said that at minimum a third of the priest abusers were being them selves abused by Mr. Maciel, demonstrating how abuse turned intergenerational.
Weeks afterwards, it emerged that legal professionals and clergymen for the Legion in 2013 experienced made available the mom of just one abuse sufferer income in trade for her son recanting his testimony about staying abused at a youth seminary in northern Italy. 4 Legion clergymen and a lawyer confront obstruction of justice fees in Italy joined to the situation. The Legion has said the males profess their innocence.
In Mexico, the Church hierarchy has shown signs of modify soon after many years in which substantial-ranking prelates defended Mr. Maciel, even soon after many of his victims came forward with stories of abuse. The Legion and Mr. Maciel were being also favorites for many decades of the late Pope John Paul II, who also dismissed allegations joined to the pedophile priest.
Mr. Maciel was banished from public ministry in 2007 by Pope Benedict XVI, soon after an in depth investigation turned up abundant evidence of his abuse of minors. Mr. Maciel died the adhering to yr.
Mexico’s Bishops Meeting a short while ago disclosed that it experienced investigated 271 clergymen in the previous ten decades for abuse. It also lent assist to phone calls by some politicians that the country’s ten-yr statute of limitation for little one abuse be abolished—allowing more mature crimes like individuals from Ms Salazar to be prosecuted.
On Monday, it said it hoped that the mission by the Vatican’s intercourse crimes investigators would help make sure that victims would be heard. “We trust (the mission) will help increase our reaction to these conditions, trying to get action in the two civil and canonical justice under the basic principle of ‘zero tolerance’ so that no situation stays unpunished in our Church,” it said in a statement.
The Holy See nunciature in Mexico said Archbishop Scicluna and Msgr. Bertomeo would be readily available to listen to testimony from abuse victims, and gave an e-mail address and telephone number for victims to use.
“The abuse conditions of the Legion are the most effectively-regarded in Mexico, but the abuse has been far extra in depth than that. It’s an epidemic,” said Elio Masferrer, an anthropologist and faith skilled in Mexico Metropolis.
Write to David Luhnow at [email protected] and Juan Montes at [email protected]
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