Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez Lunes, 17 de Marzo del 2025
The Legion of Christ, as other Catholic orders, keeps using the “geographic solution” with a Mexican priest “lost” in Colombia.
Unlike what happens in Spain with the Legion of Christ, French survivors at Our Lady of Bétharram share their experience and claim for justice with the chair of the French Catholic religious orders.
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
After last week’s sudden reemergence of Spain as an epicenter of the global clergy sexual abuse crisis, it is clear that the Legion of Christ is still adhering to its old playbook of portraying its members and itself, as an organization, as the victim, and not the active predator they are.
The Spanish newspaper El Mundo published lost in the section devoted to the Castille province of Spain, the sorry story of Marcelino de Andrés, the chaplain of the Legion’s school in Northern Madrid as a victim of none other than Marcial Maciel, as detailed in last week’s installment of this series, linked below.
Whoever missed at the time of Maciel’s “punishment” by Benedict XVI or when the founder of the Legion of Christ died the official interpretation of the serial sexual abuse perpetrated by Maciel against his family and former and current members of the Legion of Christ had, on Saturday 15th the chance to get a reprieve, a shortened version of sorts of the “explanation” rubber-stamped by Benedict XVI and his Roman Curia back in 2010.
English Edition
Legion of Christ, five new victims of sexual abuse
According to that “explanation”, acceptable only for people unwilling to go beyond the official line pushed at the moment by Benedict XVI, his secretary of State Tarsicio Bertone, and Ratzinger’s successor at the then Congregation, now Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, William Joseph Levada, the now defunct former archbishop of San Francisco, California, Maciel was the proverbial “lone predator.”
He was a masterful criminal mind able to deceive people all over the world, including several Popes, an endless number of Cardinal and archbishops presiding over different offices in Rome and elsewhere in the Catholic world.
Framing Maciel as the proverbial “lone predator” was a strategy that Rome will use again when dealing a few years later with Fernando Karadima in Chile, and Carlos Miguel Buela in Argentina. The Peruvian Sodalitium tried to use it too against both Germán Doig and Luis Fernando Figari, as it provides an effortless way out of the crisis at that order.
It is useful because it allows to dismiss the structural, doctrinal, and even theological issues furthering the clergy sexual abuse crisis. It facilitates, as one of many possible examples, to use gay priests or religious as scapegoats and to claim, as Benedict XVI did with his rules for seminaries and ordination, that it was enough to reject gay “candidates to the priesthood” to solve the issue.
Almost two decades after Benedict XVI’s reform of the Catholic seminaries it is clear that his was not the magic bullet kind of solution he was aiming for back in 2005 when he issued the Instruction Concerning the Criteria for the Discernment of Vocations with regard to Persons with Homosexual Tendencies in view of their Admission to the Seminary and to Holy Orders on August 31st, 2005. It is available at the Holy See website in English here. The second paragraph of the Instruction claims:
- In light of this abundant teaching, the present Instruction does not intend to dwell on all questions in the area of affectivity and sexuality that require an attentive discernment during the entire period of formation. Rather, it contains norms concerning a specific question, made more urgent by the current situation, and that is: whether to admit to the seminary and to holy orders candidates who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies. A previous installment of this series, linked after this paragraph, goes over that issue with more detail.
English Edition
New interpretation of old rules at Italian seminaries
So, it should not surprise that when then newly elected Benedict XVI sent Charles Scicluna to inspect the Legion of Christ as a, then, “promoter of justice”, at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and current adjunct secretary of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, fourth in the complex structure of power at that Vatican dependency, the German Pope was ready to “solve” Maciel’s case with that “explanation”.
It is an explanation that does not explain. Quite the opposite, it blurs the role of many of Maciel’s allies and accomplices at the Roman Curia, and at the conferences of Catholic bishops in Mexico, the United States, Chile, Spain, Canada, and other countries where the Legion of Christ has been active over the last 70 years or so.
And that is what Marcelino de Andrés did at his preliminary hearing in Madrid. Far from acknowledging his own role in what the parents of the victims in Madrid were willing to report to the Spaniard authorities, he played victim of none other than his former boss, Marcial Maciel.
Playing the victim
The hearing happened back on September 8th, 2024, and there the up until now priests insisted on denying all the accusations raised against him.
The judge asked him if he had ever touched any of the alleged victims. He denied it, saying “no, absolutely not”. He went further to say, “I am perplexed, in shock, and I am unable to understand why”. As an explanation he said:
“I had a past chastising as a stigma: being the secretary of the founder of the congregation who happened to be a pedophile and I know that thing in the past come back with certain frequency”.
De Andrés’s sob story was good enough for the judge to override the request from the Attorney’s Office for pre-trial or preventive detention, so De Andrés will be able, at least for the time being, to face the process in a fashion similar to the “free on his own recognizance” figure in the U.S. system of justice.
It is unclear how De Andrés’s case will unfold in the Spaniard system of justice. What is clear, instead, is the fact that after De Andrés’s brief arrest and release on his own recognizance, the different groups where survivors of abuse at the Legion of Christ and other predatory Roman Catholic orders exchange information about the potential connections between De Andrés and other current or former members of the Legion of Christ with credible accusations of clergy sexual abuse.
A key member of such groups, former Legionary of Christ J. Paul Lennon, has been sounding all the alarms at his reach at the Legioleaks Facebook Group and his own Religious Groups Awareness International Network about the whereabouts of Mexican legionary Óscar Pérez Lomán (opens a story available only in Spanish).
According to J. Paul Lennon was under De Andrés’s charge at some point during his early formation. Later he would be under Jesús María Delgado, who is a key player in the province of the Legion of Christ in Spain, and who played a role in appointing De Andrés as chaplain at the Catholic School in Madrid.
Pérez Lomán’s story, as told by Paul Lennon is Maciel’s: a sexual predator, willing to brag about his virility over “selfies” sent to potential victims or targets.
He used to be active in YouTube over a channel that never really gained traction, as only reports 628 subscribers, showing all the adornments of the Legionaries’ “spirituality”, where a mix of Spanish and some other language is code for the alleged upper status of their members, as compared to the vast majority of Latin American populations able to communicate only in either Spanish or Portuguese, an aspirational attitude what one also finds in the names of their schools.
Audio available only in Spanish. It is possible to request closed captions over at the YouTube control panel.
Pérez Lomán failed YouTube channel calls itself Crescente Integral, a hodge-podge of words that could be Spanish, Italian, French, English or none of the above, coupled with the typical attitudes of the theology of prosperity so dear to the Legion of Christ, the Opus Dei, the Sodalitium, and other Catholic religious orders known for their predatory practices.
No trace at all
Pérez Lomán has almost disappeared from the Legionary of Christ social media and if one believes what J. Paul Lennon says about him, he is Colombia trying to avoid any kind of notoriety.
Pérez Lomán erasing of his digital track is easier since there is another priest and member of the Legion of Christ with a very similar name, father Óscar Pérez Anaya, who is currently the Legion’s boss in one of their communities in the city of Guadalajara, in Western Mexico.
At some point, in early 2022, the Legion’s bosses appointed Pérez Lomán as spiritual advisor of the females’ section of the Regnum Christi in Medellín, but currently the position appears as vacant. It was from that time when the Crescente Integral channel over YouTube posted the first video Pérez Lomán.
In another, longer video, from February 2023, linked above, a Colombian layperson apparently close to the Regnum Christi, introduces Pérez Lomán as in charge of adults in Bogota, capital of Colombia, and chaplain of the Mano Amiga schools in Colombia (see at 3:04 in the vídeo above and the montage below where the Spanish words for "capellán at the Mano Amiga school" are highlighted).
In that video one also is able to partially reconstruct Pérez Lomán’s career as a Legion of Christ priest: four years in the Legion of Christ seminary in Mexico City, then one year in the Legion’s seminary in Rome.
However, none of the two Mano Amiga (Friendly Hand) schools associated to the Legion of Christ in Colombia, have Pérez Lomán as their chaplain. The school at Bello has its website available here and the school at Zipaquirá has it available here, but there is no reference there to Pérez Lomán. Also, there is no of Pérez Loman at the Cumbres (Highlands) School of Bogotá.
(In the Legion of Christ, the schools where students pay full tuition for a bilingual, in Latin America, or trilingual, in Spain, education, are the Cumbres or Highlands brand of schools. The Mano Amiga schools in Mexico, Colombia, and other Latin American countries are, on the other hand, designed for students whose families would be unable to afford the full tuition of the Cumbres-Highlands brand).
Again, putting aside the digital footprint available at the Crescente Integral channel, it is impossible to reconstruct Pérez Lomán time in Colombia, with the exception of what J. Paul Lennon reports on his website.
Back in 2021, the Archdiocese of Mexico City had him as the host of a short video over at Facebook, less than six-minute long, available here, where Pérez Lomán goes over his experience as a priest in the Legion of Christ.
Before that, the province of Northern Mexico of his order had him at one of their meetings in Jalisco, back in 2019, post available here but, beyond that almost any traces of his digital footprint have been erased. Why?
According to Lennon’s account, Pérez Lomán is an asset of the Legion of Christ able to get rich females to join the women’s branch of the Regnum Christi but every now and then he develops “closer than expected” relationships with these females.
That would be the reason he keeps moving from Mexico to Rome back to Mexico and then to Colombia where now he seems to be out of sight under the protection of priest Carlos Ortiz, who Lennon identifies as territorial director of the Legion of Christ in Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador. Once again, as the story below tells, it is the geographic solution to clergy sexual abuse.
The issues with De Andrés discipline in Mexico were already known back in 2017 but, far from acknowledging his inability or unwillingness to stick to the celibacy rule, his superiors simply moved him around from one house of the Legion to the next, as it happens in other religious orders practicing the so-called “geographic solution” to clergy sexual abuse.
Once again, if the Catholic religious orders and the dioceses were willing to provide information as to where and when a movement from one parish to other or from one country to the next, there would be less room for the permanent brewing of the vinegar of anger and distrust that makes impossible for victims and survivors of clergy sexual abuse to trust in the leaders of a Church that keeps victimizing them over and over.
Meanwhile, in France
Meanwhile, in France, the are hearings happening to allow the former students, many of them survivors of clergy sexual abuse at the Catholic school of Our Lady of Bétharram to tell the story and to try to reach some measure of justice.
The order in charge of that school has been willing to acknowledge already that something was happening there since the 1960s, but the clergy sexual abuse crisis shows us how Catholic orders are always willing to go back to the lone predator “explanation”.
That has been the case of the legionaries, as proved in this installment, as it has been the case of the Sodalitium in Peru and the Instituto of the Incarnate Word in Argentina, or in the parish of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Santiago de Chile, where Fernando Karadima used to rule as some sort of medieval lord of a fiefdom.
The question is what the French bishops will do if the so-called Betharramites try to go there. It is clear that the Legion of Christ in Spain is doing it again and there is little or no chance that the Spaniard conference of Catholic bishops will prevent it from happening because dismissing the cases at schools operated by Catholic orders has been a key element of their strategy to deflect, dismiss, and deny their own responsibility in the clergy sexual abuse crisis.
In the picture below it is possible to see one of the survivors of sexual abuse at the school with a representative from the French Catholic religious orders, Véronique Margron, a Dominican religious sister, who is since 2016, the chair of the Conference of Religious Orders in France and who claims to see the survivors of clergy sexual abuse as her teachers.
When I go over the entries at the Legioleaks group in Facebook, I see the anger and distrust at the governments of Mexico or Spain and even more so at the bishops of both countries; at the Facebook group of the victims of the school of Our Lady of Bétharram, where I was kindly invited to participate, I find some hope that their claims will be heard by both the French civil authorities and at least some sectors of the French Catholic Church, as in the case of sister Margron.
