The other victims of the clergy sexual abuse crisis

Small armies of Catholic lay leaders issue informal but very effective excommunications to isolate victims, their relatives, witnesses and whoever dares to challenge their power.

Within this model, victims include priests, bishops, and even Popes targeted by lay leaders protecting their bosses in the Catholic hierarchy.

By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez

Around the clergy sexual abuse crisis, there are plenty of victims and survivors. Some are the immediate survivors of predatory clergy. Then there are the relatives of such survivors. They are witnesses of how their son, daughter, brother or sister, turn from relatively healthy, “normal” individuals, into a chaotic collection of fear, anger, anxiety, and all kinds of illnesses. Ultimately, they become victims themselves.

And then there are those who have been the target of the ire of bishops, priests, and most notably, lay leaders, the closest to the clergy, who technically are not clergy, but who enjoy privileged seats at Masses and other ceremonies and who often are the actual enforcers of complex sets of unwritten rules, including informal “excommunications,” issued outside official channels but very able to ruin their target’s lives.

Today’s is the story of one of such survivors. Alicia was not abused by a priest or a bishop. She was not even, at least not originally, involved in bringing to light the stories of how predatory priests, way too drunk on poor theology, destroy the lives of their flock.

Alicia remains what, in some narratives would be described as “collateral damage” of the clergy sexual abuse crisis. Alicia was, for lack of a better description, a woman at the wrong place and at the wrong position at the wrong time, witnessing how the elites of her native Mexico, protected Marcial Maciel.

Hers is the story of those willing to learn and discuss what was happening to the many victims of clergy sexual abuse. Some of them, as it is her case, go later to further express support towards the victims of clergy sexual abuse.

But, at least originally, she was neither an activist nor an advocate for the victims. Nevertheless, she as many others in a similar position to hers, has learnt, the hard way, how elites enforce codes of silent complicity making sexual abuse what it is now, a far and wide crisis, undermining trust and membership in the Catholic Church, and the many other institutions affected by similar practices.

Alicia’s is a story that has been waiting to be told since the Aughts. She is the main character in this version of the story, but sadly it is a story that has been repeated many times; a story with parallel tracks in public colleges in Mexico and France, where brave professors have been kicked out of their jobs or at least harassed, as warnings against whoever dares to speak out, to show some care, sympathy or empathy for the victims.

Her story is relevant because it illuminates how, regardless of what Popes have been saying over the last 40 years or so, there are powerful informal mechanisms that often contradict and even override what the Pontiffs seem to be willing to admit, at least publicly.

As recently as March 3, there was another of those pontifical messages. Archbishop Mark Gerard Miles, the apostolic nuncio to Costa Rica read, on that day, a message, originally written by Leo XIV on January 6, calling again to change the way dioceses in Latin America address sexual abuse cases. More on this issue later.

Small armies

Although most of the messages coming from the Holy See usually tick all the boxes, the message is not carefully translated to each country or diocese realities. If one goes over the evolution of the crisis, one will notice how Rome did its best to portray the issue as affecting only the English-speaking world: it was the secularization and the 1960s and 1970s sexual revolution, not bad theology or the unwillingness of bishops and monsignors to take care of their flocks.

It has been, from the get-go, an attempt at controlling the narrative, limiting the liability, and doing their best to avoid accepting their role in what has happened.

And then there is the issue, perhaps more pressing, of the small armies of laypersons in each diocese who are the true crafters and enforcers of whatever actual response the Church has to the crisis and its effects.

Alicia’s is not, in that respect, a new or unique story. It is story happening now in the comments sections of Facebook or in responses to any given message by a Catholic diocese over its social media. Whenever someone challenges the Pope or the bishop reminding them about the many pending cases waiting for some resolution in any given parish, school or diocese, there is a barrage of responses like the attacks on Alicia.

A few months ago, Kevin Matías Montes, an Argentine survivor of clergy sexual abuse shared with Los Angeles Press his experience (see the story linked above). He highlighted how lay persons who used to praise and bless him for his decision to enter the seminary, were first row to attack him and his relatives when he came forward to uncover what was happening in the diocese of Orán, Argentina.

The most civil take on such responses is that they come from very disciplined and loyal Catholics who believe it is their duty to challenge whoever criticizes the Pope, the bishop or a superior or a religious order when they talk about their response to the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The most dangerous version of that is hard to fully dismiss in the current state of social media worldwide: bots going after whoever criticizes the institution.

Both are troublesome because they reveal what is the actual understanding of the Catholic Church, both clergy and laypersons, once the survivors and the journalists have left the room, when they talk with no fear of somehow recording their words.

When going over the attack on Alicia’s teaching one finds a letter from “concerned parents” at UDEM challenging her decision to use mainstream U.S. media to improve the abilities of her students, one finds a distant echo of the attacks on Matías and his family face up until today in Argentina, as much as one sees them in the ignited defense of predatory clergy in Catholic Facebook groups nowadays, where victims, their relatives, friends and advocates are still labeled, and dismissed, as “franc masons,” “communists,” “Catholic haters,” among other niceties.

And it must be stressed that, even if nowadays Alicia is very willing to show her support for survivors of clergy sexual abuse and to write plays, where she offers insights into the minds of predators such as Marcial Maciel (see the story linked below), at the time she went through the ordeal this story tells, that was not the case.

Alicia’s story begins in 1995 at the Universidad de Monterrey, so-called UDEM, a key institution to understand what Monterrey, the industrial capital of Northern Mexico is and how Marcial Maciel became a major player in the local Catholic scene in what, otherwise, is an industrious, generous and dynamic city.

Alicia was not a theology, sociology or feminist studies professor. She was not trying to counterfeit readings from arcane books or journals for her class. Her syllabus was not full of the “usual suspects” of Critical or Marxist theory, feminist studies or Liberation theology.

Alicia Garza Martínez was at the time a full professor of English as a second language at UDEM. Her job was to take students already familiar with the basics of English to the next level. Her students had already accredited TOEFL, the Test of English as a Foreign Language. The test and the whole process to master English was already then a rite of passage for middleclass students in private colleges all over Latin America. Mastering the language, allows them to either attend graduate studies in the United States or Canada or, in some cases, prove a potential employer one’s abilities with English as a foreign language.

Dangerous news

Alicia, as many other English as a second language professors in Mexico and all-over Latin America at the time, used widely available, mainstream, U.S. printed media to help their students master the language. Her crime was using such media to help her students improve their abilities to read, speak and write in English.

She would ask her class to buy a weekly printed magazine, when those things still existed, as to engage the students in informal debates about then “current affairs” in the English-speaking world. One week they would talk about George W. Bush’s wars and the next about some new development in computer science, sports or even cooking.

Professor Alicia as any other English as second language in Latin America teacher, had no control over what Newsweek, her preferred media, decided to publish. Moreover, the magazine was at the time still owned by the same family that used to own The Washington Post.

As notorious as their stories used to be at the time, their take on then current issues was hardly “extreme” or notoriously biased. In the specific case of the issue that ultimately sealed Alicia’s fate at UDEM, Newsweek was not breaking the news about the abuses in Boston.

Newsweek, had not done the kind of foundational reporting and research The Boston Globe had been doing since the 1990s on what was happening in the archdiocese of Boston. Like other weekly magazines at the time, Newsweek was summarizing and expanding on what The Boston Globe had uncovered.

It was not one of Harper’s Magazine’s deep dives on the Christian far-right in Canada and the United States or Mother Jones debunking the “Welfare Queens” myth. It was a mainstream media, printing stories expanding a story broke by other mainstream media, about current issues with some relevance in the English-speaking world.

Moreover, there was no way for Alicia to predict the contents of the issue Newsweek published on March 4, 2002. Newsweek as many other printed media at the time devoted, at least partially, that issue to the then erupting scandal in the Catholic archdiocese of Boston.

The magazine had as its cover, as many other news outlets in the United States and elsewhere in the world, regardless of language, a picture of Bernard Law, the now deceased Cardinal and former archbishop of Boston. Their headline was a perfect summary of the situation: “Sex, shame and the Catholic Church. 80 priests accused of child abuse in Boston—And new soul searching across America.”

The image before this paragraph was the cover of issue, as it circulated originally, available here at the Internet Archive, as a PDF file. The main story, without the graphs and pictures has been posted by Phil Saviano, a survivor of what happened at Boston, whose testimony was included by Newsweek, and is available here.

The story and its secondary notes are a bit more than ten percent of the total 88 pages and only because of the extra space coming from pictures for the cover, the index, and a brief introduction to the issue, where images of Cardinal Law are on display. The rest of the magazine was devoted to other stories.

As it happens nowadays, when the U.S. fights yet another war in the Middle East right after a Winter Olympics, that Newsweek’s issue had, 24 years before, stories and pictures, one of Newsweek’s hooks then, before the massive Internet-based media, about the Winter Olympics, more relevant for American media at the time as 2002 was the year of the Salt Lake City Olympics, and about the then ongoing war in Afghanistan.

There is even one small story about Monica Lewinsky, then trying to rebuild her public persona after being for many years the butt of many jokes at SNL and other comedy shows in the late 1990s and early Aughts.

Alicia’s course was not aimed at addressing the issues affecting or shaping then the experiences of the Catholic flock, in Monterrey, Mexico, or Latin America. Ultimately, Alicia’s “crime” was treating her students like adults capable of reading a global news weekly, understanding it, and providing some comment on its stories.

Alicia was trying to offer her students and their parents their money’s worth: the best education she was able to deliver, by helping them engage in meaningful conversations in a foreign language.

Then why the very institution hiring a responsible, well-educated and qualified professor such as Alicia, fired her in the Summer of 2003?

A necessary detour

Here it is necessary to pay some attention to UDEM’s history and more specifically, to explain why Maciel “proud boys” had amassed tons of symbolic power at that college in Northern Mexico allowing them to try to destroy Alicia’s life back in the early years of this century.

By the time UDEM hired Alicia in 1995, UDEM was, as it is still now, the college for the sons and daughters of middle-managers, top and middle bureaucrats in the Federal, state or municipal governments, and the offspring of small entrepreneurs and whoever wants to offer a better future to their relatives in Monterrey.

UDEM students were able to afford the subscription to the magazine as it is a private college, not in the same league as the so-called Tec, the college the sons and daughters of the Mexican elites attend, but affluent enough to pay for that kind of scholarly item. Sadly, the magazines, with Bernard Law’s picture in the cover caught the attention of Marcial Maciel’s lieutenants at UDEM.

UDEM was in Maciel’s and the Legion of Christ’s radar pretty much since its foundation, back in the 1960s when five religious orders, active in the archdiocese of Monterrey, pull monies and other resources together to organize a new college.

Three of the founding orders were feminine: the Daughters of Immaculate Mary of Guadalupe, the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word. The other two were masculine orders: the Marist Brothers and the Brothers of La Salle, so they have no priests. To be a proper Catholic or, at least, Catholic-inspired college, they needed chaplaincy services so, they had to request the archbishop Alfonso Espino Silva to appoint a chaplain.

UDEM was emerging then when Mexican markets were booming. Catholicism itself was blooming and booming, as the first effects of Vatican Council II’s aggiornamento swept Latin America, although with contradictory signs.

By the time this was happening at UDEM, Maciel had been harassing the Monterrey elites for money for ten years or so. He played the part of the perpetual victim of a hyperactive Mexican Communist Party attacking him at gunpoint in episodes that existed only in his mind.

He had been doing so after squeezing as much as he could the relationships he inherited from his many uncles who happened to be bishops. In the neighboring and suffragan diocese of Saltillo, Maciel had one of such relatives. Luis Guízar Barragán had been at the helm there since 1938. First as coadjutor bishop and starting in 1954 as bishop there. Guízar had allowed Maciel’s frequent visits to Saltillo, where he would get money from pious widows willing to believe his many lies.

The story linked after this paragraph, dealing with the HBO series "Maciel: Wolf of God," digs deeper into the significance of Maciel's many uncles who were bishops, and even offers a detailed genealogy tree to better appreciate who furthered his career.

Monterrey itself had at the time UDEM was founded, Alfonso Espino Silva, he was not Maciel’s uncle, but he had been the sixth bishop of Cuernavaca, in South Central Mexico. Cuernavaca is where allegedly Maciel was ordained by Espino’s predecessor and Maciel’s uncle, Francisco María González Arias.

Again, it is unclear how much Espino knew about Maciel’s past and then current endeavors, but there is a chance he was fully aware of Maciel’s dubious ordination in Cuernavaca, and the many accusations that followed Maciel anywhere he went. After all, the Legion of Christ had already some presence in Monterrey.

Besides the support Maciel got from his uncle, the bishop of Saltillo, and potentially from his uncle’s successor in Cuernavaca, and then archbishop in Monterrey, a key element in Maciel’s Monterrey gameplan were the Garza Medina brothers.

English as prestige, English as threat

Luis was the guardian of Maciel’s dirty financial secrets in the Legion of Christ itself, how many US dollars for Dolantina, his drug of choice, how much to keep the Roman monsignors “happy” with Maciel’s fat yellow envelopes, filled with cash, despite the many complaints about what now would be called sectarian practices. Nowadays he lives in Manila, Philippines, as the Legion’s delegate for Asia.

Dionisio was Maciel’s “man in UDEM,” holding as Maciel’s surrogate seats at UDEM and in other boards of Catholic NGOs and private firms in Northern Mexico, including Alfa, now a shadow of its former self, but at some time in the late 20th century, the very epitome of a Mexican concern, a Mexican holding with varied investments, the seventh largest Mexican firm then.

So much that, back in 1994, The New York Times published a profile on Dionisio (content behind a paywall), at the time the North American Free Trade Agreement, now under threat by Donald Trump, was about to celebrate its first anniversary. 30 years later, during the Mexican general elections, the Reforma newspaper, the favorite of the Northern Mexico elite, sought him for his take on what the country needed at the time.

Putting aside their interests in Alfa and other firms, together, the Garza Medinas owned and shaped the “moral climate” of Monterrey, legitimizing Maciel’s delusional stories as the hero of the Cristero War when he was only 10 and the Mexican color-blind version of the Cold War where nobody and nothing was actually what seemed to be.

To oversimplify, Luis managed the Legion's billions, much of it sourced from the very families whose children were in UDEM’s classrooms, Alicia’s students, while Dionisio ensured that the university remained a “safe space,” safe-for-Maciel and the Legion of Christ where the money would thrive.

Jesuits’ pains, Legionaries’ gains

Money is not enough to explain how Maciel became a major broker in several fields of Mexican public life. His success would have been impossible without an additional element.

Maciel and the Garza Medinas gaining a foothold in UDEM was the byproduct of the bitter debates ravaging the Society of Jesus, the so-called Jesuits. They would have been the perfect fit for the UDEM chaplaincy. They had been the chaplains at the Tec de Monterrey since its inception, and at least by the mid-1960s they were performing as such, although not for long.

But the Jesuits were in the middle of their own crisis. The crisis, a stroke of sorts, was severe and prolonged enough as to force, a few years after UDEM’s foundation, the Jesuits out of the chaplaincy at Tec de Monterrey. It would also force them to close their flagship school in Mexico City, the Instituto Patria, in Polanco, to fund with the monies other activities better aligned with their understanding of their evangelical mission.

As it had happened before in Spain, the Jesuit’s fevers were Maciel’s gains. Eventually, he was able to seize control of UDEM’s chaplaincy services and, following his playbook of sectarian practices, he promoted friends, allies, and outright minions to key positions within the UDEM boards.

Moreover, aware of what were the expectations of the parents paying for their sons’ and daughters’ education at UDEM, Maciel appointed in the early 1980s one of “his” blond “Irish priests” as UDEM’s chaplain. The appointee is none other than the current Camerlengo of the Catholic Church, prefect of the powerful Dicastery for the Laity, the Family and Life, cardinal Kevin Joseph Farrell. Despite being already 77, at the time of Pope Leo XIV’s election, Farrell was confirmed as prefect in that Dicastery.

If one goes over the page with his data in Catholic Hierarchy, one will notice how from 1978 through 1984 he was a member of the Legion of Christ. Farrell left the Legion, citing “intellectual differences,” but he remained and even advanced within the hierarchy.

As many things Legion-of-Christ-adjacent, Farrell’s exit was anything but transparent, more so as he moved to Washington D.C., becoming an influential member of the local curia during cardinal James Aloysius Hickey tenure there, becoming auxiliary to Theodore McCarrick little less than one year after John Paul II appointed him, over the objection of other U.S. bishops, to that prestigious position that eventually turned him into a Cardinal. A profile with more details about his career is available here at the Vatican's website.

Rewarding silence

Farrell left the Legion but his career advanced, it is unclear what was Maciel’s reaction to his decision to leave, but it would have been short-sighted to prevent or sabotage his advancement in the power structure of the Catholic Church, more so as Farrell kept some influence in Monterrey, and was moving to the U.S. capital.

Also, his elder brother Brian remained a Legionary of Christ, moving up the “corporate” ladder in Rome. By the time John Paul II appointed Brian as bishop in the Roman Curia, in 2002, Kevin was already McCarrick’s auxiliary bishop in Washington, D.C.

Farrell becoming UDEM’s chaplain was not the byproduct of chance. Maciel, a Whitexican, a white Mexican male, a “güero” in Mexican slang, was aware of how to curry favor from the Monterrey families paying for their offspring’s education there. Farrell was a honey trap for the Whitexicans seeking validation from a White Irish priest doing his best to speak reasonably fluent Spanish.

Even if transparency is not easy with Farrell, as one must look for other sources to connect the dots of how he went from being one of Maciel’s “Irish priests,” to become in 2001 an auxiliary bishop under now deceased predator Theodore McCarrick, what is clear is that Farrell’s bet to leave the Legion paid.

One must wonder how much of Farrell training in the Legion of Christ became useful when dealing with McCarrick. One thing is clear, whether he talks about his relationship with Maciel or with McCarrick, silence about their predatory practices with seminarians is the norm. He claims to know nothing about what was happening in either the Legion or the Washington, D.C. curia.

By 2007, Benedict XVI rewarded him with the diocese of Dallas, Texas. Far from weakening his ties with the elites in Monterrey, the move to Dallas, reinforced Farrell’s influence in Northern Mexico.

Nine years later, in 2016, Pope Francis asked Kevin Farrell to move to Rome, becoming a major player in Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s curia, so much he appointed Farrell as Chamberlain of the Apostolic Chamber (Camerlengo) in 2019, and as such he oversaw the election of now reigning Pope Leo XIV.

If one goes over local media in Monterrey, up until today, especially after his role during the most recent Conclave in Rome, there are traces of Farrell days in UDEM although always clouded by the many questions lingering around his exit from an order-like organization with a known record of widespread abuse as the Legion of Christ, to end as auxiliary of a disgraced Cardinal, one Pope Francis himself expelled from the priesthood and whose crimes were so many, so varied, has the dubious honor of being the sole predator for whom the Vatican itself has produced a detailed report, a dossier.

The resistance of the territorial church

Early in this century, there was in Monterrey the expectation that UDEM would become part of Maciel’s empire, a local campus of the Anáhuac, perhaps keeping some regional identity, as it happens up until today with the so-called Universidad Anáhuac Mayab in Yucatán, in Southern Mexico.

However, Maciel had at the time when he could have acquired UDEM, other priorities. He was in a shopping spree, founding colleges of his own, such as the Finis Terrae University in Chile, where he would do as he pleased, without having to negotiate with nagging nuns or Marist and Lasalle brothers. He was also acquiring media in the United States, such as the National Catholic Register.

By the early 1980s there was another archbishop in Monterrey, one with whom Maciel had had frictions. Before John Paul II appointed Adolfo Suárez Rivera as archbishop there, he had been, from 1980 through 1983, the bishop of Tlalnepantla, a then diocese, now archdiocese, neighboring Mexico City to the North.

Tlalnepantla was already in the 1980s a key element in Maciel’s ever expanding empire, as it is where the jewel of the crown, the so-called Anáhuac-Norte, the Northern campus of the Universidad Anáhuac is in Mexico. Anáhuac-Norte was not only an academic project for Maciel; it was also his chance to make millions in the Real Estate markets in the then expanding metro area of Mexico City, more specifically in the Western and extremely affluent municipality of Huixquilucan, now the extension of Santa Fe, the posh neighborhood built over what used to be Mexico City’s land-fill area.

Although the Garza Medinas, especially Dionisio, were all in into the acquisition of UDEM, the nuns and brothers of the founding orders were not so sure about walking out from their own college, becoming silent partners in Maciel’s empire. Given then Cardinal Suárez Rivera experience with the Legion in his days in Tlalnepantla, it is easy to understand why he would not be enthusiastic about signing off on UDEM becoming Anáhuac-Monterrey.

The archdiocese under Suárez Rivera acted as a check on the Legion of Christ’s otherwise unbridled power, much more as he was, from 1988 through 1994, the president of the Mexican conference of Catholic Bishops.

Evidence of the contentious relation between the Legion and Suárez Rivera also emerges from the all-out attack Maciel’s underlings launched on one of Suárez Rivera’s allies, Samuel Ruiz García, then head of the diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, where Suárez Rivera had been born in 1927.

There, the Legion used all its “missiles” at Ruiz, going as far as to challenge, through “lay” surrogates, Ruiz’s authority to ordain an unusual number of married deacons in ceremonies where the wives of the deacons were too close to their husbands for the comfort of the Legion’s “lay” surrogates.

Concerned laypersons

In a similar fashion to the letters sent to UDEM by the “concerned parents” about Alicia’s readings for her English class, the “lay” members of the Regnum Christi were sending acrimonious letters to Rome and Mexican and U.S. media to challenge with any pretext Samuel Ruiz’s ordinations. Their criticism was not, however, only to the ceremony. It was a critique to Ruiz’s and up to a certain extent Suárez Rivera’s understanding of the Catholic Church’s role in Mexico.

While San Cristóbal, up until now, remains the diocese with the largest number of permanent deacons in Mexico, 555 according to the data at Catholic Hierarchy, large archdioceses such as Mexico or Guadalajara have 150 and zero, respectively. Monterrey itself has, as Mexico City, only 150.

To put those numbers in perspective while San Cristóbal de Las Casas has one married deacon for each 2,920 Catholics, Mexico City has one for each 29,480 Catholics and Monterrey has one permanent or married deacon for each 28,453 Catholics.

It is impossible to analyze the implications of such numbers. A more thorough and consequential analysis would prove how Mexico City and Monterrey now having 150 married deacons each is already a huge leap ahead of their former selves.

Back in 2003, by the time San Cristóbal was already sporting 341 permanent deacons, Mexico City barely had 75 of such ministers, with a larger population, and before the separation of the relatively new dioceses of Azcapotzalco, Iztapalapa and Xochimilco. Monterrey, before Suárez Rivera’s departure, had 23 and Guadalajara, now with a resounding zero, had one.

Those are not only numbers. They are evidence of deep theological and pastoral differences in the understanding of the very nature of the Catholic Church, the role of clergy, the answers to questions about the future of the priesthood, and what is the role of laypersons in each diocese.

They are also evidence of the deeper differences in the way Catholicism is apprehended and reinterpreted in different regions in Mexico. On the one hand, Maciel was more than willing to use his “Irish blond priests” to appease the Whitexicans need for external validation, foreign validation. San Cristóbal de las Casas has been betting high on local clergy, with a model that has been under fire from the Mexican and U.S. right-wing within the Catholic Church.

Putting Pope Francis in check

On November 21, 2024, the Dicastery for the Discipline of the Sacraments published a series of “rubrics” and other elements in some of the languages of the First Nations in Chiapas. In Mexico and other Latin American countries where similar translations already exist, the news was felicitous and prompted no negative reaction.

AICA, the news agency of the Argentine conference of Catholic bishops went as far as to print a story with a headline saying: “Vatican: Green light to “Mayan rite” of the Mass for indigenous communities” (content in Spanish). Far from celebrating it as an accomplishment, the U.S. Catholic far-right, with help from their Mexican partners, challenged the very right of Pope Francis to approve what was portrayed as some kind of abomination.

However, when AICA published that piece, they were already late to a U.S. far-right “party” that started almost one week before, on November 15, with a “leak” of the Rome correspondent of LifeSite News giving the “heads up” to the Traditionalist wing of the Catholic Church for what was rendered as a betrayal coming from Pope Francis’s teams.

It would be impossible to go over that episode. Where Peter Is, did a series of deep dives on the issue, the first one available here.

The attacks on Francis were so intense in the English-speaking world, reminiscent of the attacks on Alicia at UDEM, and on many other victims and their advocates in Catholic media, that in a first for the Dicastery and the Mexican conference of Catholic bishops, they saw the need to publish a trilingual (Spanish, English and Italian) “explanatory note” on the issue. The three versions of the note are available here at the Dicastery’s website.

Something very wrong needs to happen for the Mexican bishops to publish an explanation of any issue at all. One must wonder how many alerts the translations to Tzeltal, Tsotsil, Ch'ol, Tojolabal and Zoque of the Roman Rite of the Mass triggered in the United States to force the Mexican bishops and the Dicastery to issue a trilingual “explanatory note” and to keep it available up until now.

On the other hand, some could see Guadalajara’s reluctance to adopt the permanent deacon model as a sign of its own vitality, a “we do not need them” retort of sorts, while framing San Cristóbal’s extreme (for Mexican standards) reliance on that model as ineffectual; after all, Guadalajara remains the largest, most productive seminary in the Western Catholic world, but they also reflect the role the Catholic Church is willing to give to the local, mostly indigenous leaders who are able to become Catholic permanent deacons.

Checks and balances

Putting those issues aside, by August 2003, and going back to Alicia Garza Martínez’s ordeal the balance Suárez Rivera was when dealing with the Legion of Christ vanished as the Vatican formally accepted his resignation. John Paul II appointed almost immediately the then bishop of Toluca, in Central Mexico, and current archbishop of Guadalajara, now Cardinal José Francisco Robles Ortega for Monterrey.

Suárez departure offered the Legion’s enforcers at UDEM the perfect conditions to oust Alicia of her position, as there was no longer a bishop willing to balance out the Legion’s influence over UDEM.

Suárez Rivera’s exit from UDEM gave Dionisio Garza Medina and his allies at UDEM carte blanche to force out a professor who ultimately was only trying to teach English using what a then major and very influential weekly magazine was publishing about the clergy sexual abuse crisis.

Ultimately, Garza Medina was trying to do for Alicia’s students what the Legion of Christ had been doing for many decades: censoring their access to civil and even Catholic media, censoring their communications with their relatives over email and postal mail, to name only the most obvious aspect of the Legion’s model of sectarian control of its members and those of the so-called Regnum Christi.

As Alicia herself recalls, after that issue of March 4, Newsweek published other pieces dealing with the scale, breadth and depth of the scandal engulfing at the time the Catholic Church in the U.S. and about to hit the Catholic Church in Mexico, as it has happened for the last 24 years or so.

In any case, the fact that Garza Medina’s “smoking gun” against a professor doing her job at her classroom was what Newsweek was publishing at the time is quintessentially Legion of Christ. It is the ultimate kind of the sectarian practices playbook: to be more afraid of truth than of complicity on a crime and a sin.

The mechanics of Alicia’s removal were as informal as they were devastating. Despite her years of service and her standing as a Pro Magistro award finalist, there was no formal academic tribunal, no peer review of her syllabus, and no opportunity to defend the use of Newsweek as a legitimate pedagogical tool.

Instead, the “small armies” moved in the shadows. The process began with “concerned” parents—linked to the Legion’s lay movement, Regnum Christi—bringing the "toxic" magazine to the attention of the Garza Medinas. Ultimately, in the world of the Monterrey Catholicism, a phone call from a billionaire leader connected to the founder of the Legion of Christ carried more weight than a decade of teaching excellence.

Alicia was summoned not to an academic office, but to a confrontation where the subtext was clear: her firing was not about her teaching. It was about letting her students read Newsweek.

When she was finally escorted out, it was not just a teacher leaving a building; it was the perfect application of what Maciel and his underlings had been doing ever since the 1940s in the houses of the Legion of Christ: protecting Maciel and any other sexual predator somehow related to the Catholic Church from any kind of criticism, the so-called “fourth-vow” in the Legion of Christ: never to criticize Maciel under the penalty of what has been a de facto excommunication, whose traces are still evident in the attacks on clergy sexual abuse survivors one finds in social media in almost any language.

The fact that Newsweek was reporting on Boston and not the Legion was aptly grasped by Garza Medina as an attack that could also be launched on Maciel and many other predators associated to the Legion of Christ and other orders and dioceses.

The ultimate irony

The ultimate irony of Alicia’s case if the fact she was a professor who excelled at her craft. That is not easy praise from the author of these lines. It was UDEM’s own assessment of Alicia’s performance. Her superiors at UDEM acknowledged that over several letters they wrote when dealing with her case and later when they supported her to move to Texas and do there what UDEM in Monterrey was unwilling to allow her to do: teach her students with the best tools at her reach.

Moreover, in her last year as faculty at UDEM, Alicia was her department’s selection for the Pro-Magistro award. She was unable to win it for unknown reasons, but she was a finalist. Her department was acknowledging she deserved the highest honor UDEM bestows upon its faculty.

The institution’s own metrics—student evaluations, peer reviews, and pedagogical impact—proved she was an elite educator. In any other functional academic environment, being a Pro Magistro finalist would have been a shield; at UDEM in 2003, it turned Alicia into a target of the Legion of Christ’s sectarian practices.

By firing a top-tier professor, Dionisio Garza Medina was sending a chilling message to the remaining faculty: Professional excellence is secondary to the absolute requirement of silence.

If that was not enough, her performance and permanence at an associated academy to the University of Texas-Austin and later her work helping dyslexic students excel proves the absurdity of UDEM firing her over the use of Newsweek as teaching material for her class.

The irony of Alicia’s firing was peak Legion of Christ cruelty and sectarian practices. A confirmation of their inability to argue, dialogue and reason, as for the Legion human interaction is reduced to blind obedience to the leaders.

But it is also the proof of how, regardless of how many messages asking for forgiveness John Paul II had already issued at the time regarding the sexual abuse crisis, when protecting itself the Legion was willing to destroy whoever its leaders labeled as a potential enemy.

Cultural reflexes

And sadly, this is not only a feature of the Mexican far-right. It is a cultural reflex to destroy to force down silence and discipline in Mexico. One only needs to look at what happened, almost 20 years after Alicia’s firing at UDEM with Virginia Illescas in a public and allegedly “lay” college in Oaxaca as evidence of how silence is the ultimate directive of Mexican elites.

Not that Alicia and Virginia Illescas are the only female professors ever harassed by their employers to opening the door of their classrooms to the evidence of sexual abuse. This series recently compared professor Illescas’s case in Oaxaca with a French case, considered in the story linked after this paragraph.

The difference is not abuse as such or even the temptation of abusing power to cover up abuse. The difference is that while the French authorities eventually protected professor Marie-Pierre Jacquard for exposing a 24-year network of abuse in Marne—allowing her to remain in her classroom—the Mexican script for the whistleblower remains frozen.

Whether it is a private “Catholic-inspired” college in affluent Monterrey or a public, allegedly “lay” university in extremely marginalized Oaxaca, silence is the prime directive of Mexican elites and brave females such as Virginia Illescas or Alicia Garza Martínez face the consequences.

Ultimately, Alicia survives as a witness to a system that, for a moment in 2003, thought it could censor the truth along with her syllabus and what was a respected source of news. Twenty-three years after Alicia’s firing at UDEM, Leo XIV still issues, through his Nuncio in Costa Rica, manicured calls to improve prevention to CEPROMELAT, the Latin American correspondent entity to Tutela Minorum.

Sadly, there is no official translation of the message to English, as there is only a report over the Spanish-language service of Vatican News (content in Spanish) with the message’s highlights and no hope of a full release of the message.

Oddly enough, the fact that Maltese bishop Mark Gerard Miles read that message a few hours before Peter Neronha, the Rhode Island Attorney General offered, on Wednesday March 4, a primer of the findings of his state-wide report of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church there, is just one more irony Catholics have to integrate in the increasingly difficult task of remaining loyal to their Church.

Rome should understand how when many ironies pile on, remaining faithful and obedient becomes dangerously synonymous with the kind of attitude Garza Medina was trying to enforce at UDEM.

More so when one sees how the preliminary report from Rhode Island has a total of 75 predatory clergymen, with a minimum of 300 victims that, as it is usually the case, could increase once the clerics’ names and professional trajectories are uncovered by this type of reports, as they encourage other victims to come forward. While Archbishop Miles was busy reading Pope Leo XIV’s sanitized 'culture of care' speech in Costa Rica, Peter Neronha was busy counting the bodies in Rhode Island.

What emerges from today’s story is how similar “lay” structures attacked both Alica in the Aughts in Monterrey and Francis and the Mexican bishops in 2024. In both cases, the pretext was “orthodoxy.” In both and many other cases, the attacks were infused in moral absolutism, willing to delegitimize through “concern.”

Both are examples of how notions of orthodoxy are weaponized, ultimately protecting, in Alicia’s case, predators. The bishops, Mexicans or otherwise, are not passive victims of these attacks. They are becoming the targets after many years of fueling a “state of siege” mentality that legitimized what UDEM and the Legion of Christ, even if informally, did to Alicia.

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A summary of this piece is available as audio after this paragraph.

Note on production: The text of this summary was written and edited solely by the author. The delivery of the audio summary was achieved using a high-quality, text-to-speech engine Microsoft Word for Web. The AI was used for voice generation only, not content creation.

After publishing the piece I received a kind note from Spes Viva. They tell me that even if there are survivors among them, their profile as a not-for-profit is a broad defense of human rights. They fight the "clergy sexual abuse of minors" and promote an agenda to support "the rights of girls, boys, and teenagers." As author, I regret my mistake.