A new documentary series about the powerful Catholic priest behind the Legion of Christ religious order draws on the work of ICIJ and its partners to explore the sect’s scandalous history, including allegations of child sexual abuse and financial malfeasance.
Released on HBO’s streaming service last month, Marcial Maciel: the Wolf of God (Marcial Maciel: el lobo de Dios) is a four-episode series that shows how the late Marcial Maciel Degollado went from being a small-town priest in Mexico to creating an organization so large and influential within the Catholic Church that, at its peak, it amassed a $650 million yearly budget financed by wealthy patrons. The Legion of Christ built schools and universities in North America and Europe that still operate today.
For years, rumours circulated that Maciel was sexually abusing boys, which led reporters in Mexico, Spain, Italy and the U.S. to investigate and uncover wrongdoing at an unexpected scale, including evidence the priest was wed to two different women and had three biological children, two of whom he also sexually abused.
In 2021, 13 years after Maciel’s death, the Legion of Christ released a report that found about 170 minors were victims of sexual abuse committed by 27 of their priests. Sixty of the minors were victims of Maciel, they reported.
“We realized this character was much more complex than the sexual abuse,” the HBO series director Marías Gueilburt said in an interview with Colombian newspaper El Tiempo. “What we did was put this figure at the center, a man that built an empire, basically, over 50 years. That was a challenge because we had to start with journalists and writers who had studied him from different angles.”
In 2014, Mexican journalist Raúl Olmos looked into the finances of the Legion of Christ and found that Maciel opened offshore companies in Panama, allowing him to secretly invest part of the Christian organization’s resources in businesses linked to gun manufacturing and pornography.
Three years later, ICIJ’s Paradise Papers investigation confirmed and broadened Olmos’s original reporting. Then in 2021, the Pandora Papers revealed that Maciel’s organization stashed nearly $300 million overseas in the wake of a Vatican investigation into the allegations of sexual abuse. The Legion, as its members refer to the organization, also invested millions with a corporate landlord that evicted struggling U.S. tenants during the coronavirus pandemic.
Interviewed for the documentary, Olmos explained how documents leaked to ICIJ and partners solidified his findings.
“The Paradise Papers and Pandora Papers leaks and investigations revealed the full extent of the complex financial scheme led by Maciel and continued by his inner circle,” Olmos, a reporter at media partner Mexicanos Contra la Corrupción y la Impunidad, told ICIJ.
“Clues and suspicions became certainty after analyzing millions of documents from both leaks. Furthermore, these investigations projected the issue of the financial network spearheaded by Maciel onto a global scale.”
Olmos explained that, while Maciel died in 2008, leaks showed that his successors continued to benefit from the offshore financial structures he set up.
Other ICIJ partner outlets, including Quinto Elemento Lab, Proceso, El País and L’ Espresso also reported on the hidden investments made by Maciel using offshore accounts in Bermuda and the Virgin Islands.
“For me, as a journalist, collaborating with ICIJ brought an opportunity to deepen and consolidate the investigations I had already begun,” Olmos said.
