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Karl Schembri
A Maltese Monsignor with the responsibility of the promoter of justice for the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, says he will remain silent about the reasons behind the Church’s decision to stop investigations into accusations of child abuse by a Mexican founder of an influential religious order.
The news stirred outrage last week as the Vatican made it known that Fr Maciel Degollado, the 85-year-old founder of the Legionaries of Christ in 1941 and a prominent religious figure in Mexico, will not face a church trial on allegations that he molested teenagers.
Mgr Scicluna, who is in Malta and will be returning to the Vatican tomorrow, was the Vatican’s investigator on this case and others in South America.
He had been interrogating dozens of witnesses and victims about this case opened by the Vatican last December, with at least eight former Legionaries who were under Fr Degollado’s guidance at the Rome seminary claiming years and years of sexual abuse between 1943 and the early 1960s.
His alleged victims also made a very serious accusation in the eyes of the Vatican – so serious that there are no time limits in canonical law to prosecute: that he had then absolved his victims as “accomplices” in confession.
The Vatican announced last week that the investigations had been stopped and no charges would be brought against the Mexican priest, without explaining why the process was ended.
“I appreciate that you ask questions but our commitment is not to comment in any way on our cases,” Mgr Scicluna told MaltaToday by telephone on Thursday.
He said he received several calls from the international press for comments after the decision was announced but in all cases did not explain the reasons behind it.
“We avoid any kind of comment,” he insisted.
Word about the end of the investigation made headlines in most daily newspapers in Mexico, with several victims, most of them prominent professionals, saying they were incredulous that the Vatican would drop the case.
One of Fr Degollado’s accusers, Juan Vaca, a former priest who is now an adjunct professor of psychology and sociology at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, New York, said that Mgr Scicluna had told him and other victims he was convinced they were telling the truth.
“He (Scicluna) even said, ‘The church owes you a public apology, because we failed to protect you,’” Vaca claimed, who also said the incident will end the credibility of the Vatican “from the pope down. I don’t believe they are going to do such damage to the credibility of the Vatican.”
Mgr Scicluna neither confirmed nor denied that he made the statement to Vaca when contacted.
Fr Degollado has always dismissed all charges made against him.
“Before God and with total clarity of conscience I can categorically state that the accusations brought against me are false,” he said in 2002. “I never engaged in the sort of repulsive behaviour these men accuse me of, and nothing could be further from my way of dealing with others, as is evident to any of the thousands of Legionaries who know me.”
According to Italian news magazine L’Espresso, Mgr Scicluna was filling pages with new accusations against Fr Degollado until at least until last April 2. Just as John Paul II was dying in Rome, the investigator was interrogating witnesses in New York and New Mexico.
In November last year, with the accusations still pending a proper investigation, John Paul II publicly embraced the Legionaries’ founder and congratulated him on his 60th anniversary of priestly ordination, but in another Vatican building, the then cardinal prefect Joseph Ratzinger was instructing Scicluna to speed up the trials on the waiting list.
One of the folders against Fr Degollado on the dusty shelves of the former Holy Office was six years old.
The denunciations by eight men were made public for the first time on 23 February 1997 on the Connecticut newspaper “The Hartford Courant”, after the pope had prompted several complaints when he said that Fr Degollado was “an efficacious guide to youth”, anticipating the firestorm of reports in the US of sexual abuse committed by priests on children.
Since the accusations were past the statute of limitations to be investigated under criminal law, the group brought a formal suit against Fr Degollado under the Vatican’s canon law in 1998, maintaining that he had sexually abused them when they were students, between 10 and 16 years old.
With the file taken off the shelf last December, Mgr Scicluna opened the preliminary investigation, interrogating the high-ranking accusers.
Vaca was one of them. He was the president of the Legionaries in the US from 1971 to 1976. In 1978 and again in 1989, Vaca sent two private declarations to Wojtyla, accusing the priest of having abused him when he was a teenager, but he received no replies.
As cardinal Ratzinger was lamenting on Good Friday this year “how much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to [Christ]” during the meditations for the Stations of the Cross instead of the ailing pope, Mgr Scicluna was leaving for New York to interview Vaca and another important former Legionary, Paul Lennon, now a psychotherapist in Virginia, who confirmed the charges of the former with his own testimony.
On 4 April Mgr Scicluna arrived in Mexico City where he interviewed the rest of the eight accusers until 10 April.
L’Espresso reported that Mgr Scicluna, accompanied by a priest taking dictation, also interviewed many new witnesses from Mexico, the US, Ireland, and Spain, some of whom had been Legionaries until recently, adding new accusations to the investigation against Fr Degollado and also against younger leaders in the Legion, always for the same “filth”.
Upon his return to the Vatican in mid-April, Mgr Scicluna reportedly had on his agenda the names of 20 former Legionaries in Spain and Ireland who had asked to be interviewed. It is unclear whether these interviews were carried out since then.
With the Vatican’s decision to end its investigations with no “canonical process” – the Church’s equivalent of a court trial – against Fr Degollado, Pope Benedict XVI is seen by the victims to have gone back on his word to purge the church of its abusers – a process started by himself as the chief of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith together with Mgr Scicluna.
The decision is considered even stranger given that the new pope has elected as the new prefect of his former office the archbishop of San Francisco, William J. Levada, one of the four bishops in the US in charge of stepping up efforts against sexual abuse by members of the clergy.
karl@newsworksltd.com
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