The Vatican on Tuesday brushed off accusations that late pope John Paul II was aware of and ignored allegations about sexual abuse carried by the Mexican founder of a powerful Catholic movement, AFP reports.
The scandal over Marcial Maciel, who
founded the Legion of Christ and was a serial predator, was one of
thousands of cases of sexual abuse by clergymen that began to come to
light under John Paul II's papacy.
Allegations about
Maciel began surfacing in the 1980s but were consistently ignored by the
Vatican hierarchy, which instead approved bylaws for the group that
effectively banned internal criticism of Maciel and allowed a
personality cult to flourish around him. He was eventually found to have
molested many seminarians and abused children he had fathered with
different women despite his vows of chastity.
The story
of the Legion, whose members are referred to as Legionaries, was seen as
one of the major stumbling blocks in the sainthood cause for the Polish
pope. Campaigners accuse John Paul II more generally of putting the
interests of the Catholic Church above all and turning a blind eye to
child sex abuse allegations.The pope condemned the abuses during a visit
to the United States in 2002 but his successor Benedict XVI went much
further by publicly apologising, defrocking priests and calling for a
zero-tolerance policy.
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