The death of the leader of Christ's Legion has not eliminated the controversy that surrounds his supposed crimes, affirms our columnist.

The father Marcial Maciel, founder of the conservative ultra gathering of Christ's Legionaries, cannot rest in peace. But they cannot also make it dozens of persons who were touched by him, and not exactly for his healthy virtues.

According to a recent report, the Mexican priest, who died last year at the age of 87 of age, was 22 years ago old a son with a woman whose identity has not been revealed. Also it has gone out to the public light that the priest seemingly delivered big quantities of money of his gathering to the family of the woman whom supposedly it supported like his lover. But these would have been the least serious of his many supposed sins.

The father Maciel has been per decades a polemic figure. Personal friend of the Pope Juan Pablo Segundo, Maciel directed a catholic gathering dedicated to spreading Christ's word and to supporting to the Catholic Church. And for it it achieved an unconditional support on the part of the hierarchy of the Vatican and it has been venerated almost in a cult status by his followers.

But there are those who see Maciel of a very different way. In the seminar directed by the founder of Christ's Legionaries to ends of the years ‘50 and beginning of ‘60 there were nearly 100 young seminarians. José Barba, now university teacher, was 12 years old then. The years happen but it could not have erased of his memory the horrible and shameful episodes of those days.

Beard alleges that the father Maciel abused him sexually. He says that his spiritual leader said to him that he was suffering from pains and that it had authorization of the Vatican so that some nuns were doing massages to him in his genitals to relieve this pain. The young man of course might do the favor to him. The priest would show him how to do it. The cree that possibly up to a third part of the seminarians they could have been victims then of the abuses of his leader.

For 1997, almost 4 decades after the supposed incidents, Beard and another 7 ex-seminarians could not already stay kept silent. They sent a letter to the Vatican denouncing the committed sexual abuses. Nevertheless, the Holy Father not only did not show disposition to listen to his justice clamor, but it supported publicly the father Maciel.

It was not up 2004 that the Gathering for the Doctrine of the Faith – directed by the cardinal of that time Joseph Ratzinger - opened an investigation on the allegations against the father Maciel. Two years later, Ratzinger, now Pope Benedicto XVI, announced that the investigation had been suspended and that he had invited Maciel to retire in a life of “prayer and atonement”.

The shinbone condemns of the Vatican and the death of the leader of Christ's Legion they have not eliminated the controversy that surrounds his supposed sins, considered crimes for any. There exist additional accusations of narcotic addiction and possible bonds with drugs traffickers, between other things.

Although the accusations in his against perhaps could not be verified, yes they leave to tens of thousands of members of Christ's Legion and his lay organization Regnum Christi, with presence in 22 countries about the world, with a difficult moral challenge. The Legionaries have always defended the father Maciel, have denied the accusations in his against, and suggest as well as if perhaps there was something really in them, his sins can be excused.

Nevertheless, some leaders of the Church worry that this reverence towards the father Maciel keeps on being the base of the religious order. The archbishop Edwin O'Brien, of Baltimore (Maryland), the most ancient diocese of the United States, warned recently the Catholics who must not link to Christ's Legion or in Regnum Christi. It expressed that he should not encourage the cult to given Maciel the magnitude of the accusations in his against.

Some legionary leaders begin to insist that the mission of the Legion and the work that has managed from his beginning in the years ‘20, must not be darkened by the sins or supposed crimes of the father Maciel. It is now an organization in search of a new identity that also needs to recognize the dimension of the damage that has left not such a holy life of his founder to him.

(c) 2008 by Maria Helen Salinas.