The archives of Pius XII in the Vatican shed light on another controversial chapter: the scandal surrounding the Legions of Christ

The recently opened archives of Pope Pius XII have shed new light on claims that the World War II pope was silent on the Holocaust. But they also provide details about another controversial chapter in Vatican history: the scandal surrounding the founder of the Legion of Christ.

Entire books have been written about the copious documentation that entered the Holy See in the 1940s and 1950s showing that its officials had evidence of the questionable morals, drug use, financial recklessness, and sexual abuse of his young seminarians by the Rev. Marcial Maciel.

Yet it took more than half a century for the Holy See to sanction Maciel, and even longer for it to acknowledge that he was a religious impostor and con man who abused his seminarians, fathered three children, and founded a secret, cult-like religious order to hide his double life.

The recently opened archives of the Pius papacy, covering the period 1939-1958, add some new details to what was already publicly known. They also include previously unavailable documentation from the Vatican Secretariat of State.

They confirm that Pius’ Vatican took harsh action against Maciel in 1956 and was about to take even harsher measures against him, including his complete defrocking. But also that Pius’ death in 1958 allowed Maciel’s followers to take advantage of the leadership vacuum to save his name and his order.

Until now, the largest amount of publicly available documentation on Maciel has come from the Vatican’s Congregation for Religious, which oversaw the Legion after its founding in 1941 in Mexico.

In 2012, some of Maciel’s Mexican victims posted online more than 200 documents covering the period 1940-2002, obtained from someone with access to the archives of the Congregation for Religious. These documents, also contained in the book “La Voluntad De No Saber” (The Will Not to Know), detail the Vatican’s evidence of Maciel’s depravity, but also how decades of bishops, cardinals and popes turned a blind eye and instead believed the glowing reports that also poured in from Rome.

New documents from the Vatican’s central administrative office now shed more light on that history, providing more details about who in the Vatican helped Maciel evade sanctions, who viewed the accusations against him as slander, and who wanted a tougher approach.

A new document, published Sunday in the Corriere della Sera cultural supplement La Lettura, contains the original version of an October 1, 1956 memo from the number 3 of the Vatican’s office for religious orders.

That day, Maciel arrived in Rome, after having been suspended as a superior of the Legion by the Vatican and sentenced to a detox treatment to overcome his morphine addiction.

According to the memo, the Vatican’s Congregation for Religious wanted an additional measure for Maciel: he would no longer be allowed to have contact with young seminarians, or he would risk being completely suspended from the priesthood. That would mean he would no longer be allowed to celebrate Mass in public, hear confessions, or administer other sacraments as a priest.

The author of the letter, the Rev. Giovanni Battista Scapinelli, wrote that if Maciel were to come to the parish, “I will order him to undergo treatment, and to cease all contact with his students until the parish decides otherwise. And if he does not appear within two days, a preventive order must be given to Maciel: Either you undergo treatment or you remain suspended a divinis.”

The draft is significant because it shows that in 1956 at least some in the Vatican took seriously the reports reaching Rome that Maciel was abusing his young seminarians and wanted to protect them — and punish Maciel with one of the church’s harshest sentences for his crimes. It would take 50 years, however, until 2006, before the Vatican finally sentenced Maciel to the relatively light sentence of a “lifetime of penance and prayer” for sodomizing his young recruits.

A later version of the October 1, 1956 memo was released in 2012 by the Mexican victims. It showed that Scapinelli had crossed out his original order to Maciel not to have contact with his seminarians and had ordered Maciel only to undergo medical treatment for the drug addiction. It contains another page and a half of handwritten notes, as if Scapinelli rewrote it after consulting with others.

The Secretariat of the State Archives contains what appears to be a definitive, typed version of the memo, dated October 2, 1956, which makes no reference to Maciel’s ban on contact with young people and only mentions his receiving medical attention, with no further threats of ministerial suspension. A few weeks later, the Vatican appointed outside clergy to conduct a more thorough investigation on the spot.

All versions of the October 1, 1956 memo make it clear that Maciel had a formidable protector in the Vatican in Cardinal Giuseppe Pizzardo, number two in the powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Other documents say that the Congregation for Religious “could not proceed further against F. Maciel because of recommendations and interventions from high-ranking personalities.”

Scapinelli suggests that Pius was fully aware of the Maciel affair and had approved his dismissal as superior of the Legion. He wrote that Maciel had been temporarily removed “for reasons known to the Holy Father.”

In September of that year, the Congregation for Religious handed a dossier of “abundant documentation” to Pius to read, with an accompanying letter stating that the Congregation had never wanted to recognize the Legion as a papally recognized religious order because of its “grave” concerns about Maciel.

Pius died two years later, on October 9, 1958. Amid the chaos of a new papacy, a change of leadership in the Congregation for Religious, and interventions by Maciel’s supporters, Maciel was reinstalled as superior of the Legion in early 1959. A few years later, the Legion was recognized as a papal religious order.

Maciel died in 2008. A year later, the Legion admitted some of its crimes, and a year after that the Vatican took over the Legion and imposed a process of reform and “purification.”

Most of the attention at the opening of the Pius Archives in 2020 focused on what he and his advisors did or did not do to save Jewish lives during the war.

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