A Mexican woman charged on Wednesday that the deceased, scandal-tainted founder of a conservative Roman Catholic religious order led a double life and fathered two children with her.
Blanca Lara Gutierrez said she met the Reverend Marcial Maciel in the border city of Tijuana in the 1970s, but didn’t know he was a priest. She said he passed himself off as an employee of an international oil company, a private investigator and a CIA agent.
The Legionaries of Christ, the order founded by Maciel, acknowledged in February last year in connection with other cases that he had fathered a daughter and molested seminarians.
During a radio interview on Wednesday, Lara Gutierrez charged that Maciel, who died in 2008 at age 87, sexually abused one of his two sons with her as well as a son she had from a previous relationship.
The sons, now adults named Jose Raul and Omar, said the abuse went on for years.
The Vatican, which has been investigating the order over earlier allegations against Maciel, did not have any immediate comment on what Lara Gutierrez and her sons told MVS radio on Wednesday.
The accusations that Maciel lived a hitherto unknown double life, in which the priest passed himself off as “Jose Rivas,” a widower, follow a long series of allegations that he engaged in sexual misconduct in several cities.
Lara Gutierrez said she met Maciel when she was 19 and he was 56.
She said she didn’t find out his real identity until 1997, when she saw a magazine article about previous allegations made against him.
Asked how she was able to sustain a relationship with a man for around two decades without realizing who he really was, Lara Gutierrez suggested she was blinded by love.
“I never knew who I was living with, I never suspected.” she said. “I loved him very much.”
After its founding by Maciel in 1941, the Legionaries of Christ became one of the most influential and fastest-growing orders in the Roman Catholic Church.
Pope John Paul II championed the group, which became known for its orthodox theology, military-style discipline, fundraising prowess and success recruiting priests at a time when seminary enrollment was generally dismal.
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