Irish Independent, 27th September 2025
I was 17 when I was recruited to the ‘Wolf of God’ – after two decades in the Legionaries of Christ, I broke free
Marcial Maciel Degollado founded his own religious order and scaled the heights of ecclesial power. An Irish former priest who managed to ‘break out’ shares his story of the Mexican priest whose staggering litany of misdeeds is the focus of a new docuseries
Sarah Mac Donald
Fri 26 Sep 2025 at 22:30
He was once feted by the Vatican and had unparalleled access to Pope John Paul II who referred to him as “dear Fr Maciel”.
His supporters, including the Polish pontiff, considered him a living saint and adulated him. But the charismatic Mexican priest had a very dark side which included sexual abuse of as many as 60 junior seminarians aged between 11 and 16 – as well as the abuse of two of his own six children whom he fathered through affairs with four different women.
There was also his addiction to drugs and his financial corruption. This staggering litany was the focus of a new HBO Max docuseries Marcial Maciel: The Wolf of God. Using never-before-seen documents, exclusive testimonies and expert analysis, the four-part series tried to understand the dysfunctional thinking of Fr Marcial Maciel Degollado (1920–2008) the controversial founder of the Legionaries of Christ, one of the most influential religious orders in the Catholic church, which he founded in 1941.
The series looks at the mechanisms that allowed an obscure priest from rural Mexico, who was expelled from two seminaries, and was only ordained because his uncle, a bishop, allowed him to study privately for priesthood, was able to found his own order and scale the heights of ecclesial power.
His protectors, wittingly and unwittingly, enabled him to operate with impunity and lead a double life. Pope John Paul II was in thrall to the Legionaries’ zeal, staunch orthodoxy, traditional piety, rigid deference to authority and ability to raise massive amounts of money. One contributor to the series observes: “During the 20th century, Maciel was the greatest criminal of the Catholic church and equally its greatest fundraiser.” Another muses: “I have often wondered where sickness ends, and evil begins.”
The HBO series highlights last year’s revelations from the newly opened archives of the papacy of Pope Pius XII (1939-1958) which showed that the Vatican knew of concerns over Maciel’s misdemeanours as early as the 1950s. It suspended him as superior of the Legionaries in 1956 and ordered him into a detox programme for morphine addiction. A memo from October that year from the Congregation for Religious said Maciel should be barred from having contact with young seminarians. However, the interregnum that followed the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958 enabled Maciel’s backers to bury the scandal.
Responding to Marcial Maciel: The Wolf of God, the Legionaries’ director in the US, Fr John Connor, said in a statement on September 16 that several Legionaries had told him “that watching the series was a cathartic experience” and that by listening to the victims’ testimonies they were able to “face the magnitude of the evil our founder had perpetrated”.
Those who tried for years to lift the lid on Maciel and the Legionaries, many of them former members, said in a statement on September 2, that they were not “scandalised by Maciel’s life of abuse and crime, which was certainly scandalous, but rather by the inaction of superiors and the grave lack of trust they fostered”.
They said that while the Legionaries of Christ have made some progress in recognising “the evil done by Maciel,” it had failed to acknowledge “the constant ambiguity with which they continued to praise his figure and harm those of us who asked that the whole truth be told and sought”. They expressed concern that the narrative had been promoted that the problem was Maciel and Maciel alone. There had been no attempt to acknowledge complicity or responsibility of other superiors within the organisation.
One of those who blew the whistle on Maciel and the Legionaries long before the then 86-year-old was ordered in 2006 by Pope Benedict XVI to live a life of prayer and penance and to avoid any public ministry was Irishman, (John) Paul Lennon. From the age of 17 until he was 41, he was a Legionary priest. He studied in Salamanca and Rome and served as a missionary in Mexico. But disagreements with Maciel over the mistreatment of members forced the Irishman to leave after 23 years.
He is now a retired psychologist living in Guatemala with his wife Aura. He has dedicated a substantial amount of time to detailing his experiences of Maciel and the Legionaries in a bid to protect others from what he went through. He published the book Our Father, Who Art in Bed: A Naïve and Sentimental Dubliner in the Legion of Christ and was involved with the website http://www.regainnetwork.org, operated by members, as well as concerned parents and friends of active members of the Legionaries and its lay affiliation, Regnum Christi.
Lennon was one of the first eight Irish-born members of the order. In 1961, following a vocations talk by a Legionary, the Dubliner signed up along with two others from his class at St Vincent’s Christian Brothers school in Glasnevin. This “first batch of Irish guys” was “very idealistic and very generous”. There was a lot of fervour in Ireland at the time to be a missionary. “The whole idea of Mexico for those of us who had barely set foot outside the country won us over.”
The young Irish teenagers were “‘love-bombed” into joining with the offer of a free holiday in Bundoran, Co Donegal, according to Lennon. For a teenager from Dublin’s Cabra West in the early 1960s, it was exciting. They got to meet the founder in Bundoran and travelled with Maciel, who was referred to as “Nuestro Padre – Our Father’”, on an Aer Lingus flight to Lourdes, from where they crossed over the border into Spain to begin their studies in Salamanca.
Lennon came to understand that “the legion was not really a missionary society. It was an organisation which was targeting society’s elite. We signed up to be missionary priests among the poor in Mexico and Latin America where there was a lack of priests. We gradually found out that the legion’s aim was to create or ‘form’ lay leaders among the rich and powerful to transform society from the top down.”
The Legionaries of Christ, in Lennon’s opinion, was and is “a dangerous and ultra-secretive cult that idolised its founder” and he highlights that cult experts such as Steven Hassan, Rick Alan Ross and Miguel Perlado, as well as the International Cultic Studies Association, which has published some of his presentations on the Legionaries, “consider the Legionaries of Christ/Regnum Christi Federation cult-like”.
One of the central planks of this accusation was a vow of silence members were required to take in addition to the usual vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. It prohibited members from making criticisms of the order, or the founder, and required them to report any members who did.
In 2007, the Vatican ordered its removal. “The way Maciel crafted this secrecy was marvellously well done. Even when I started having disagreements with Maciel, I still hadn’t the slightest idea that he was up to any other sort of stuff,” – a reference to the founder’s abuse of seminarians, including Juan Vaca, who took part in Jason Berry’s groundbreaking documentary, Vows of Silence.
Lennon wonders how Maciel was able to project himself as a saint?
“He was very dictatorial,” he says. “There was a lot of control. When you study sects and cults, it is apparent that information control is a big thing.
“It is incredible how this man seemed to do all this stuff naturally because he had never studied anything. Some people believe he didn’t even finish his studies for the priesthood. He was so good at conning everybody, he even conned his uncle into ordaining him. At the time of his ordination at 24 years, he had already started the legion.
“There was this deviousness in Maciel – that is why so many people were surprised by the double life. All the cunning and the deceit and lack of consideration for other people’s problems or feelings ties in with what they term an anti-social personality disorder.”
Lennon today believes Maciel was “a malignant narcissist” as explained by psychologist Daniel Shaw. “Maybe his superego was the holy founder, while his ego, which he never came to terms with or lay subconscious, was his libido.
“I believe John Paul II was quite gullible in some respects and was not a good judge of character. Maciel thoroughly deceived him. People are easily duped by appearances, but if you lived with him and saw him up close, you were likely to discover some of his failings.”
Despite its hugely chequered history, the Legionaries remain one of the most successful orders in getting vocations. Why should that be?
In 2024, (according to their own statistics, edited Lennon on October 4, 2025) there were 1,309 Legionaries of Christ in 23 countries around the world, including here in Ireland. Of these, three were bishops, 1,033 priests, 226 were men in formation and 47 were novices. Once again, appearances seem to matter. “All the priests are nicely dressed, relatively handsome and smiling and the congregation is fully approved by the Catholic church,” Lennon observes.
Lennon says that the Vatican’s Dicastery for Consecrated Life, which oversees religious orders and lay groups, recently suppressed a Peruvian group called Sodalitium Christianae Vitae (SCV) and are looking into others where abuses may have taken place.
He believes the Legionaries of Christ should have been disbanded rather than reformed and regrets that Pope Francis was “ambiguous” towards the Legionaries, “supposedly keeping a close eye on them and then elevating Fernando Vérgez Alzaga”, a member of the Legionaries, to the cardinalate in 2022.
A fact not well known about the highest-ranking Irishman in the Vatican, Cardinal Kevin Farrell, who was camerlengo in April in the wake of the death of Pope Francis, is that he was a member of the legion. Lennon in fact joined the Legionaries with Kevin Farrell’s older brother Brian Farrell, who is now a bishop. They were ordained together in Rome on November 26, 1969.
Bishop Farrell has continued to be a member of the Legionaries and up until last year he was secretary of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity. “Brian is a nice quiet fellow and opted to work in the Vatican where he has a lot of independence from the legion,” Lennon explains.
His younger brother, Cardinal Kevin Farrell, left the legion in 1984, the same year as Lennon. “Like many former members, he grew up and out of the legion. He probably got tired of Maciel’s dictatorial governance,” Lennon says. He joined the diocesan clergy in the US and had a stellar ecclesiastical career.
By contrast, it took Lennon many years to get his life on track. “After ‘breaking out’ of the legion in 1984, I was a total wreck,” he says.
Attempts were made to discredit the Irishman’s allegations by the legion who sought to sue him. But these days, “the legion no longer come after me”, they are too busy putting out the fires lit by investigative reports like The Wolf of God.
