Ringside Seats

As rumors continue to swirl around the story of Fr. Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legion of Christ currently being investigated for (or exonerated from?) sex abuse charges dating back to the 1950s, Amy Welborn published a post today which attracted one of those strings of comments which reveal more than the story itself. I came across the post by way of Vatican Watcher.

You have the camp of Maciel supporters, who aren't arguing so much on behalf of Fr. Maciel as they are for the orthodox Catholicism that he defends.

And you have the camp of accusers, aiming their guns not so much at Maciel as at the Legion, which they accuse of conspiracy and obstruction. But neither Maciel nor the Legion are the real targets. The accusers are invested in the notion that the sex scandal reaches all the way to the Vatican through Fr. Maciel, and that the shield provided by Catholic orthodoxy, and not the permissiveness of modern heterodoxy, is the real cause for the scandal.

I tend to suspect that Maciel has, in fact, been cleared. But I do wish people were honestly more interested in the facts of the case than the politics behind it, and I also wish the Vatican would clean up it's communication organs.