MEXICO CITY (AP) — The administrator of the elite Catholic school in Cancun, Mexico, used to take the girls out of class and send them to the chapel, where a priest from the Legion of Christ religious order would sexually abuse them.
"As some were reading the Bible, he would rape the others in front of them, little girls aged 6 to 8 or 9," said one of his victims, Ana Lucia Salazar, now a 36-year-old Mexican television host and mother of three.
"Afterward, nothing was the same, nothing went back to the way it was," she said through tears at her home in Mexico City.
Salazar's horrific story, which has been corroborated by other victims and the Legion itself, has sparked a new credibility crisis for the once-influential order, 10 years after the Holy See took it over after determining that its founder was a pedophile.
But more importantly, it has called into question the Vatican reform itself: The papal envoy who ran the Legion starting in 2010 learned about the case nearly a decade ago and refused to punish or even investigate the priest or the superiors who covered up his crimes, many of whom are still in power and ministry today.
The scandal is not the story line the Legion was hoping for as it opened its general chapter Monday in Rome, a weeks-long gathering to choose new leaders and approve policy decisions.
The assembly was supposed to show off the Legion embarking fully on its own after 10 years of Vatican-mandated reform. The Holy See imposed structural changes after revelations that the Legion's late founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel, sexually abused at least 60 seminarians, fathered at least three children and built a secretive, cultlike order to cater to his whims and hide his double life.
The Cancun scandal, though, has exposed that the Vatican reform failed to address one key area: to punish known historic abusers and the people who covered for them, and change the culture of coverup that enabled the crimes.
From the outset, the late papal envoy who ran the Legion, Cardinal Velasio De Paolis, refused to hold complicit Legion superiors accountable or investigate abusers.
"De Paolis said there would be no witch hunt, explicitly, and the consequence is that abuse and its coverup have remained unpunished," said the Rev. Christian Borgogno, a former Legion priest who cofounded the "Legioleaks" Facebook group where Salazar first went public in May. Borgogno said De Paolis’ decision to leave in place Legion superiors, many of whom were close to Maciel, "made reform impossible."
"The only way out was to foster charismatic leaders, and they were even repressed," he told the AP. "That's the main reason why many of us left."
After the AP story, the Legion announced on Monday it would conduct an investigation with the Vatican into the coverup, and said all superiors involved would cooperate.
Salazar, whose story has made headlines in Mexico, wants more. "What I want is for the pope to get radicalized," she said. "There's only one position, to be on the side of the violated children," not a religious order that has among its priests "villains, delinquents, rapists, accomplices and victimizers."
"The Legion of Christ has no reason to exist," she said, echoing calls even from within the church that the Vatican should have suppressed the order 10 years ago. "It's like taking apart a cartel; you have to remove the ringleaders and dismantle it."