Pope to meet Legion visitators on Friday

Fr Federico Lombardi SJ, the Vatican spokesman said today the five episcopal visitators to the Legionaries of Christ will meet on Friday April 30 to make their initial presentation and proposals for the beleagured religious congregation.

Maciel can no longer be considered a Christian model

Father Maciel can no longer be considered a model of Christian life, the Legionaries of Christ have said about their founder.

In a statement published by the Legion’s leaders yesterday, they said:

For his own mysterious reasons, God chose Fr Maciel as an instrument to found the Legion of Christ and Regnum Christi, and we thank God for the good he did. At the same time, we accept and regret that, given the gravity of his faults, we cannot take his person as a model of Christian or priestly life.

Christ condemns the sin but seeks to save the sinner. We take him as our model, convinced of the meaning and beauty of forgiveness, and we entrust our founder to God’s merciful love.

The Legion’s leaders said they were grateful for the Apostolic Visitation which Pope Benedict launched into the order last year, apologised again for their founder’s misconduct and acknowleded the facts.
The Apostolic Visitation of the beleagured Legion of Christ drew to a close in the middle of this month as the Catholic News Service reports here. Five bishops were given the task of looking into the order’s workings, its founder Marcial Maciel’s sexual misconduct, whether the founder’s charism was too tied up with the order and so on. They submitted their report on March 15.

The Legionaries statement also said: