Legion of Christ priest arrested in Mexico City airport on rape charge for alleged abuse of a minor

FABIOLA SÁNCHEZ

Associated Press

June 12, 2025

MEXICO CITY -- Authorities arrested a Roman Catholic priest at the capital’s international airport on charges of raping of a minor over a period of years, officials said Thursday.

The Mexico state prosecutor’s office said that Rev. Antonio Cabrera, a member of the Legion of Christ religious order, was arrested Wednesday night on a court order for rape.

Authorities cited incidents in 2004, 2007 and 2011, but the investigation only began in December 2024, after the alleged attacks were reported. The abuse allegedly occurred in Naucalpan, a Mexico City suburb. The prosecutor’s office did not say why Cabrera was at the airport.

The Legion of Christ religious order has been involved in sexual abuse scandals before, including those of its late founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel, who was later determined to be a serial pedophile.

The Vatican in 2010 took over the Mexico-based Legion and imposed a process of reform after an investigation showed that Maciel had sexually abused seminarians and fathered at least three children with two women.

The Legion of Christ confirmed the arrest of one of its priests without naming him in statement Thursday. The order said it had not received information from authorities about the case, but were willing to cooperate with the investigation.

Cabrera was jailed pending an initial hearing.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/legion-christ-priest-arrested-mexico-city-airport-rape-122800170

CultNEWS101 Articles: 10/9-10/2021 (Legion of Christ, Marcial Maciel, The Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Sexual Abuse, Financial Abuse, Religion and Poverty, NXIVM, Legal)

Legion of Christ, Marcial Maciel, The Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Sexual Abuse, Financial Abuse, Religion and Poverty, NXIVM, Legal

ReGAIN, Religious Groups Awareness International Network: Marcial Maciel & Walter White: Breaking Bad in Meth and Sex

" ... I am called by God to found a Catholic Religious Order, is the conviction that drives Marcial Maciel, a white, blue-eyed, provincial Mexican from the age of fifteen.

Marcial is fully convinced he has a calling from God. His uncomfortable childhood, with an enabling mother and a punishing father, leads him to isolation and mistrust. It is rumored he was sexually abused by one of the farm hands at Don Francisco Maciel's Poca Sangre ranch in early puberty. He determined nobody would ever hurt and humiliate him like that again. It seems he was never attracted to girls and never had a girl-friend like other precocious boys in Cotija, Michoacán. He was not good at sports. The other kids called him "sissy" or "specky-four-eyes" because of his glasses. But that was not important as he was being called by God to follow in the footsteps of his three saintly uncles, all Catholic bishops. He yearned to be admired and famous like the saintly one, his uncle Rafael Guízar y Valencia.
With the mystical calling firmly embedded in his psyche, Marcial read every little event in his adolescence as a confirmation of his vocation. The first step was to enroll in a seminary. Off he went enthusiastically. God seemed to be against him for he was expelled from seminary three times. When he tried to imbue a small group of his fellow seminarians with true devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the superiors accused him of over-familiarity. But Marcial remained faithful to his calling. Hidden astute resources helped him, at the age of nineteen, to wheedle into the trust of his third uncle bishop, Monsignor Gonzalez Arias in Cuernavaca. This uncle bought into Marcial's plans, thus fulfilling the budding saint's dreams.

Marcial continued with his mission recruiting young boys of 9, 10 or 11 for the new order, The Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. He liked being close to them, too. He did not want them to be spoiled by others as they approached adolescence. As their spiritual father, he found it natural for him to introduce them to puberty; he showed them how to handle their sexual organs while they helped him lessen the tension in his scrotum. He could not tell anyone about this unique love for his seminarians because they would not understand. And it would also jeopardize his God-given mission to create a new religious order that would be better and greater than the Jesuits who had rejected him in the Montezuma seminary. He used all his guiles to keep his privileged victims silent. He was able to get rid of one irate Mr. De la Isla who accused him of interfering with his son, thus trying to impede the work of God.

The seminarians believed he was a holy man, chosen by Jesus to start a new religious order. They felt privileged to be part of this special and unique group of Christ's commandos. Marcial believed that his little peccadilloes paled in comparison to the gigantic mission he was fulfilling. He knew that God understood.

He was too busy instructing his seminarians, raising funds with rich widows and providing for the boys' every need to be able to study for the priesthood. But his bishop uncle overlooked this minor detail on seeing his nephew's zeal for souls and his vocation as a founder, the first in the family.  And so Marcial fulfilled another dream when he became a priest on November 26, 1944 at the age of twenty-four, ordained in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico City. By this time, he was training his twelve apostles, just like Jesus."

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists:  As Catholic order fought sex abuse claims, secret trusts devoted to it poured millions into American rental properties

"Leaked files reveal nearly $300 million stashed overseas for the Legion of Christ in wake of Vatican investigation. Millions were invested with a corporate landlord that evicted struggling U.S. tenants during the pandemic."

" ... In January, Carlos Lomena, a truck driver in suburban Miami who lost his job during the coronavirus pandemic, begged a judge to stop his landlord from evicting him.

The 37-year-old Lomena hoped to get a fair shake in court. He'd emigrated from Venezuela after high school with a sense that the U.S. had a more just legal system.

In a letter to the Florida judge, he pointed to a recent extension of the nationwide moratorium on evictions during the coronavirus outbreak and asked for more time to pay his overdue rent.

"I do not have a place to go," Lomena wrote, "nor the money to move into a new apartment."

His landlord — a holding company formed by real estate firms in Miami and Iowa — wasn't moved by his pleas; it had investors to satisfy. The company pressed the court to evict him and, in early February, the judge ruled that Lomena hadn't filed the right form to prevent his eviction. Within days, during the height of the pandemic, the Broward County Sheriff's Office posted a large notice in bold red letters on his door ordering Lomena to vacate his home within 24 hours or be arrested for trespassing.

Lomena isn't alone.

Tenants across the country have faced aggressive tactics — including evictions during the pandemic — from a growing number of massive corporate landlords that draw on pools of money from wealthy investors around the world.

A trove of leaked documents reviewed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and 150 media partners provide an unprecedented view of global financial maneuvers that turn rent payments into big profits that are often hidden in accounts owned by shell companies controlled by anonymous investors.

The investors revealed in the leaked documents include offshore trusts holding hundreds of millions of dollars for the Legion of Christ, a wealthy Roman Catholic order disgraced by an international pedophilia scandal.

The confidential records show that the trusts became a secret partner in the ownership structure of Lomena's apartment complex, working with the landlord to invest $2 million in the complex in 2015. The trusts invested millions more in other modest residential buildings in Florida, Texas, Iowa, Indiana and Illinois.

Soon after the Vatican announced in 2010 that it would seize the operations of the troubled order and launch a new investigation, high-profile Legion of Christ operatives began quietly setting up one of a trio of New Zealand trusts designed to hold money for the Legion, according to leaked records.

Two of these trusts, formed shortly after, secretly moved millions of dollars around the world. This included more than $14 million funneled into investments in apartment complexes that Pensam Capital, the firm that owned Lomena's building, was acquiring across the United States. In comments to ICIJ, Pensam said it has not received information indicating it has received investments from the Legion.

These two trusts would come to hold nearly $300 million in assets devoted to the Legion of Christ, according to leaked records, at a time when victims of sexual abuse by its priests were seeking financial compensation from the order through lawsuits and through a commission overseen by the Vatican.

In response to questions about whether the Legion disclosed the trusts to the Vatican, the order told ICIJ that "religious institutes do not have an obligation to send detailed information to the Vatican regarding their internal financial decisions or organization."

In statements to ICIJ, the Legion acknowledged it had set up one of the three trusts, but distanced itself from the other two, which held the majority of the funds designated for the Legion. The Legion said it had no knowledge of the other two trusts' operations. The two trusts were funded by scions of a prominent industrialist family in Mexico, including Father Luis Garza Medina, one of the Legion's top leaders. A spokesperson responding to ICIJ's questions for Father Garza said that Garza has no control over the trusts.

A review of leaked documents by ICIJ shows deep connections to the Legion in all three trusts, which share the same New Zealand address and have the same trustees managing them.

The spokesperson for Garza said the secret trusts were strictly charitable and devoted to the support of elderly priests and other Catholic causes, and that the trusts have only made charitable distributions.

The leaked documents are part of the Pandora Papers, the millions of secret files at the heart of a global investigation by ICIJ and its media partners, including the BBC, the Washington Post, L'Espresso in Italy, El Pais in Spain and the Mexican publications Quinto Elemento Lab and Proceso. The records involving the Legion of Christ come from Asiaciti Trust, a Singapore-based corporate services provider that helped administer the New Zealand trusts.

The trove contains large amounts of data on various wealthy investors who used offshore entities to channel money into real estate.

They are part of a growing class of international investors in real estate ventures that often use hardball tactics to maximize the rate of return from properties occupied by low- and mid-income renters.

Dozens of current and former tenants at Pensam-owned buildings interviewed for this article described problems with their units, including flooding, mold or mildew, broken appliances and dangerous elevators. Pensam routinely partners with Iowa-based BH Management Services, which takes on the day-to-day administration of its buildings.

A review of more than 100 court cases in Florida showed that the property managers added steep penalties on late rental payments and pursued rapid evictions of tenants unable to pay their rent. Tenants said customer service was difficult to reach and eviction notices appeared to be a go-to tool to manage tenants. In a statement, BH Management said it coordinates rent collection "under strict adherence of lease agreements and the law, including the CDC order on evictions."

The kids asked: 'How are we going to tell people we live in a hotel?' The whole thing is devastating for a family. — Collette Northrop

The high returns that financial firms promise their wealthy investors inevitably lead to vulnerable renters being squeezed, according to Jim Baker, the executive director of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a nonprofit organization that monitors private equity firms and other large investors.

"This is the problem of growing global wealth inequality crystallized in one industry," Baker said.

In 2013, Pensam and BH Management evicted Collette Northrop and her children from a Dunedin, Florida, apartment after the family missed a $895 payment, according to court records. Just months before, the trusts holding money for the Legion of Christ had secretly invested at least $1 million toward Pensam's purchase of the apartment complex. Northrop said that the family moved into a motel and that her children switched to a new middle school. "We were homeless at that point," Northrop said. "The kids asked: 'How are we going to tell people we live in a hotel?' The whole thing is devastating for a family."

'The millionaires of Christ'

In 1941, a charismatic Mexican priest named Marcial Maciel founded the Legion of Christ, a Catholic order that would become known for its intense focus on courting wealthy patrons. Some would come to call Maciel's order "los millonarios de Cristo" — "the millionaires of Christ."

Over six decades, a cult of personality grew up around the group's founder. Members of the Legion were taught that Maciel was a "living saint." His creation grew and became a global force as it cultivated ties to Vatican officials, very wealthy Catholics and conservative Republican luminaries in the U.S. such as Domino's Pizza founder Tom Monaghan, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.

Maciel became "the greatest fund-raiser of the modern church" — and "its greatest criminal,"  according to Jason Berry, an investigative reporter who delved deeply into the Legion and its leader.

In early 1997, Berry and a reporter at the Hartford Courant wrote a front-page story that exposed Maciel's decades of sexual predation, reporting that nine men had come forward to accuse him of sexually abusing them when they were boys or young men training to be priests.

Before the story was published, Berry later reported, one of Maciel's confidants, the Rev. Luis Garza, "traveled to Legion houses in several countries to warn of the forthcoming article, claiming it would be based on lies and telling Legionaries … not to read the report should they see a copy."

In 2006, after being plagued for years by accusations against the Legion's founder, the Vatican investigated nearly 100 abuse allegations against Maciel and removed him from ministry with an order that he adopt a "life of prayer and penitence."

When Macial died in 2008, the scandal didn't die with him. Revelations that he'd fathered several children with different women brought more negative attention to the Legion of Christ. The Legion was increasingly viewed as a liability to the Vatican.

Amid the continuing scrutiny, much of the order's leadership passed to Garza, known as an architect of its complex finances. Garza came from the family that has controlled Mexico's Alfa conglomerate for decades. Garza joined the Legion after graduating from Stanford University, and he quickly rose through the ranks to become one of Maciel's most trusted lieutenants.

On May 1, 2010, the Vatican announced that it would seize control of the Legion's operations, the church's most dramatic action against a Catholic order during the global abuse scandal. The Vatican would examine the Legion's finances and possible sex crimes and establish a commission to compensate its victims.

The following month, one of Maciel's sons filed a high-profile lawsuit against the Legion, alleging that the order had knowingly allowed Maciel to abuse him and other children.

In July 2010 — two days before the Vatican-appointed official took the reins of reforming the Legion — Luis Garza quietly helped to establish the first of the three secretive trusts in New Zealand that would hold money for the Legion.

The Vatican did not directly respond to questions about the trusts, but said that its effort to reform the Legion was mostly focused on issues around its founder and its structure.

During its investigation, the Vatican appeared to be operating on the belief that the Legion was low on money. The Vatican overseer of the Legion, Cardinal Valasio De Paolis, wrote in September 2011 that the Legion's financial situation was "serious and challenging" and that some victims were asking for "enormous sums that the Legion absolutely cannot afford," according to a 2014 book by Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi based on leaked Vatican sex abuse records.

At the time the trusts were established, New Zealand was a popular destination for people seeking to hide money offshore using trusts. The trusts holding money for the Legion maintained four Swiss bank accounts, including one at a Geneva-based bank, Lombard Odier, that the U.S. Justice Department later found had helped American clients conceal assets from U.S. tax authorities.

Garza's sister, Roberta Garza, who left the Legion's lay branch after high school, told ICIJ that historically the Legion used offshore structures to divert religious and charitable money to more self-serving purposes, including Maciel's lavish lifestyle, his secret children and his drug habits. "A lot of their money was held outside the Legion by their financiers, by people with power of attorney who are completely faithful to the Legion," Roberta Garza said. "So you're never going to find it."

"We are not aware on what basis Roberta Garza makes her affirmations," Father Aaron Smith, a spokesperson for the Legion said in response. "We have found no proof of the use of offshore structures to divert religious and charitable money from the Congregation to finance what we know about Maciel'́s double life."

As the New Zealand trusts quietly built their investment portfolios, the Legion faced legal threats on multiple fronts."

Economist: Religious belief really does seem to draw the sting of poverty

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature…it is the opium of the people." So wrote Karl Marx in 1844. The idea—not unique to Marx—was that by promising rewards in the next life, religion helps the poor bear their lot in this one.

A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Jana Berkessel of the University of Mannheim, in Germany, and her colleagues takes a statistical look at the claim. Ms Berkessel's curiosity was piqued by a counter-intuitive finding in development economics. Researchers know that low socioeconomic status correlates with poor mental health. The assumption was once that, as places became richer, this effect would weaken. Being poor in a rich country was presumed better than being poor in a poor one.

Reason: Interesting Unsealing Decision in NXIVM Sex Cult Case

"Supportive letters submitted by the defendant at sentencing can't remain secret."

"From U.S. v. Rainiere, decided Monday by Judge Nicholas Garaufis (E.D.N.Y.).

Defendant Nancy Saltzman [also referred to as Nancy Salzman -EV] pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering conspiracy and was sentenced to 42 months imprisonment to be followed by three years of supervised release. Prior to sentencing, Saltzman filed a partially redacted sentencing memorandum, with annexed exhibits under seal, in support of her request for a downward variance from the applicable sentencing guidelines range. After sentencing, nonparty newspaper the Albany Times Union submitted a letter to the court seeking public disclosure of her sentencing submission, subject to reasonably tailored redactions….

Saltzman explains that [certain exhibits] contain supportive letters, and contends that disclosure of their identities that could harm the authors and have a chilling effect in future litigation…. Saltzman argues that the presumption of public access that attaches to her sentencing submission is outweighed by her own and by third parties' compelling privacy concerns. She contends that disclosure will have a chilling effect on individuals who wish to speak in support of defendants in other high-profile prosecutions and that her supporters will be targeted if their identities are publicly known….

"[T]he weight to be given the presumption of access must be governed by the role of the material at issue in the exercise of Article III judicial power and the resultant value of such information to those monitoring the federal courts." The presumption is strongest where, as here, the documents at issue have been "used to determine litigants' substantive rights." The materials expressly relied on by defendants are submitted as part and parcel of their legal arguments for a particular sentence to influence the court's sentencing decision. {Motions to compel disclosure of presentence reports, as opposed to the parties' sentencing submissions, are viewed differently given the distinct function performed by the probation department as "neutral information gatherers for the sentencing judge."} …

Saltzman argues that disclosure would have a "chilling effect on those who wish to assist other defendants and courts in future high-profile cases." The court is not persuaded. This is not a case in which a party seeks to seal identities of cooperating witnesses, where unsealing would present a public safety risk and could discourage witnesses from cooperating in other cases. She submitted her supporters' letters as exhibits to her own memorandum, incorporating them into her legal arguments.


Saltzman also argues that significant privacy interests are at stake because the authors of supportive letters may face retribution if their identities are publicly known, given the public attention that has been paid to this case. Specifically, she asserts that "[r]evealing the identities and supportive views memorialized in letters to the court will add little to the record that has not already been stated publicly by the Court and counsel, and will potentially result in harm to those whose aim was to furnish the Court with firsthand information about Saltzman to facilitate a fully informed sentencing proceeding." …

The court understands that Saltzman's supporters may have a genuine interest in assisting sentencing while remaining out of the public eye themselves. The content at issue, however, does not involve traditionally private matters [such as] … "[f]inancial records …, family affairs, illnesses, [and] embarrassing conduct with no public ramifications" as historically private matters …. Nor does the potential newsworthiness of the letters' content or of the authors' relationships with Saltzman establish that publication would inappropriately "gratify private spite or promote public scandal … [or] libel[]." Accordingly, the court holds that the privacy interests identified by Saltzman, while important, do not outweigh the presumption of open access to materials submitted by the defendant in support of her sentencing arguments…."

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As Catholic order fought sex abuse claims, secret trusts devoted to it poured millions into American rental properties

Leaked files reveal nearly $300 million stashed overseas for the Legion of Christ in wake of Vatican investigation. Millions were invested with a corporate landlord that evicted struggling U.S. tenants during pandemic.

Spencer Woodman
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
October 5, 2021

Key Findings

• Leaked records reveal a set of secret New Zealand trusts holding nearly $300 million in assets devoted to the Legion of Christ, Roman Catholic order caught in an international pedophilia scandal.
• As the secret trusts' investments expanded, victims of sexual abuse by Legion priests were seeking financial compensation from the order through lawsuits and through a commission overseen by the Vatican.
• In response to questions about whether the Legion disclosed the trusts to the Vatican, the order told ICIJ that "religious institutes do not have an obligation to send detailed information to the Vatican regarding their internal financial decisions."
• The trusts used a shell company to invest heavily in U.S. rental properties, including in apartment complexes where tenants were evicted during the coronavirus eviction moratorium.

In January, Carlos Lomena, a truck driver in suburban Miami who lost his job during the coronavirus pandemic, begged a judge to stop his landlord from evicting him.

The 37-year-old Lomena hoped to get a fair shake in court. He'd emigrated from Venezuela after high school with a sense that the U.S. had a more just legal system.

In a letter to the Florida judge, he pointed to a recent extension of the nationwide moratorium on evictions during the coronavirus outbreak and asked for more time to pay his overdue rent.

"I do not have a place to go," Lomena wrote, "nor the money to move into a new apartment."

His landlord — a holding company formed by real estate firms in Miami and Iowa — wasn't moved by his pleas; it had investors to satisfy. The company pressed the court to evict him and, in early February, the judge ruled that Lomena hadn't filed the right form to prevent his eviction. Within days, during the height of the pandemic, the Broward County Sheriff's Office posted a large notice in bold red letters on his door ordering Lomena to vacate his home within 24 hours or be arrested for trespassing.

Lomena isn't alone.

Tenants across the country have faced aggressive tactics — including evictions during the pandemic — from a growing number of massive corporate landlords that draw on pools of money from wealthy investors around the world.

A trove of leaked documents reviewed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and 150 media partners provide an unprecedented view of global financial maneuvers that turn rent payments into big profits that are often hidden in accounts owned by shell companies controlled by anonymous investors.

The investors revealed in the leaked documents include offshore trusts holding hundreds of millions of dollars for the Legion of Christ, a wealthy Roman Catholic order disgraced by an international pedophilia scandal.

The confidential records show that the trusts became a secret partner in the ownership structure of Lomena's apartment complex, working with the landlord to invest $2 million in the complex in 2015. The trusts invested millions more in other modest residential buildings in Florida, Texas, Iowa, Indiana and Illinois.

Soon after the Vatican announced in 2010 that it would seize the operations of the troubled order and launch a new investigation, high-profile Legion of Christ operatives began quietly setting up one of a trio of New Zealand trusts designed to hold money for the Legion, according to leaked records.

Two of these trusts, formed shortly after, secretly moved millions of dollars around the world. This included more than $14 million funneled into investments in apartment complexes that Pensam Capital, the firm that owned Lomena's building, was acquiring across the United States. In comments to ICIJ, Pensam said it has not received information indicating it has received investments from the Legion.

These two trusts would come to hold nearly $300 million in assets devoted to the Legion of Christ, according to leaked records, at a time when victims of sexual abuse by its priests were seeking financial compensation from the order through lawsuits and through a commission overseen by the Vatican.

In response to questions about whether the Legion disclosed the trusts to the Vatican, the order told ICIJ that "religious institutes do not have an obligation to send detailed information to the Vatican regarding their internal financial decisions or organization."

In statements to ICIJ, the Legion acknowledged it had set up one of the three trusts, but distanced itself from the other two, which held the majority of the funds designated for the Legion. The Legion said it had no knowledge of the other two trusts' operations. The two trusts were funded by scions of a prominent industrialist family in Mexico, including Father Luis Garza Medina, one of the Legion's top leaders. A spokesperson responding to ICIJ's questions for Father Garza said that Garza has no control over the trusts.

A review of leaked documents by ICIJ shows deep connections to the Legion in all three trusts, which share the same New Zealand address and have the same trustees managing them.

The spokesperson for Garza said the secret trusts were strictly charitable and devoted to the support of elderly priests and other Catholic causes, and that the trusts have only made charitable distributions.

The leaked documents are part of the Pandora Papers, the millions of secret files at the heart of a global investigation by ICIJ and its media partners, including the BBC, the Washington Post, L'Espresso in Italy, El Pais in Spain and the Mexican publications Quinto Elemento Lab and Proceso. The records involving the Legion of Christ come from Asiaciti Trust, a Singapore-based corporate services provider that helped administer the New Zealand trusts.

The trove contains large amounts of data on various wealthy investors who used offshore entities to channel money into real estate.

They are part of a growing class of international investors in real estate ventures that often use hardball tactics to maximize the rate of return from properties occupied by low- and mid-income renters.

Dozens of current and former tenants at Pensam-owned buildings interviewed for this article described problems with their units, including flooding, mold or mildew, broken appliances and dangerous elevators. Pensam routinely partners with Iowa-based BH Management Services, which takes on the day-to-day administration of its buildings.

A review of more than 100 court cases in Florida showed that the property managers added steep penalties on late rental payments and pursued rapid evictions of tenants unable to pay their rent. Tenants said customer service was difficult to reach and eviction notices appeared to be a go-to tool to manage tenants. In a statement, BH Management said it coordinates rent collection "under strict adherence of lease agreements and the law, including the CDC order on evictions."

The kids asked: 'How are we going to tell people we live in a hotel?' The whole thing is devastating for a family.— Collette Northrop

The high returns that financial firms promise their wealthy investors inevitably lead to vulnerable renters being squeezed, according to Jim Baker, the executive director of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a nonprofit organization that monitors private equity firms and other large investors.

"This is the problem of growing global wealth inequality crystallized in one industry," Baker said.

In 2013, Pensam and BH Management evicted Collette Northrop and her children from a Dunedin, Florida, apartment after the family missed an $895 payment, according to court records. Just months before, the trusts holding money for the Legion of Christ had secretly invested at least $1 million toward Pensam's purchase of the apartment complex. Northrop said that the family moved into a motel and that her children switched to a new middle school. "We were homeless at that point," Northrop said. "The kids asked: 'How are we going to tell people we live in a hotel?' The whole thing is devastating for a family."
'The millionaires of Christ'

In 1941, a charismatic Mexican priest named Marcial Maciel founded the Legion of Christ, a Catholic order that would become known for its intense focus on courting wealthy patrons. Some would come to call Maciel's order "los millonarios de Cristo" — "the millionaires of Christ."

Over six decades, a cult of personality grew up around the group's founder. Members of the Legion were taught that Maciel was a "living saint." His creation grew and became a global force as it cultivated ties to Vatican officials, very wealthy Catholics and conservative Republican luminaries in the U.S. such as Domino's Pizza founder Tom Monaghan, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.

Maciel became "the greatest fund-raiser of the modern church" — and "its greatest criminal," according to Jason Berry, an investigative reporter who delved deeply into the Legion and its leader.

In early 1997, Berry and a reporter at the Hartford Courant wrote a front-page story that exposed Maciel's decades of sexual predation, reporting that nine men had come forward to accuse him of sexually abusing them when they were boys or young men training to be priests.

Before the story was published, Berry later reported, one of Maciel's confidants, the Rev. Luis Garza, "traveled to Legion houses in several countries to warn of the forthcoming article, claiming it would be based on lies and telling Legionaries … not to read the report should they see a copy."

In 2006, after being plagued for years by accusations against the Legion's founder, the Vatican investigated nearly 100 abuse allegations against Maciel and removed him from ministry with an order that he adopt a "life of prayer and penitence."

When Macial died in 2008, the scandal didn't die with him. Revelations that he'd fathered several children with different women brought more negative attention to the Legion of Christ. The Legion was increasingly viewed as a liability to the Vatican.

Amid the continuing scrutiny, much of the order's leadership passed to Garza, known as an architect of its complex finances. Garza came from the family that has controlled Mexico's Alfa conglomerate for decades. Garza joined the Legion after graduating from Stanford University, and he quickly rose through the ranks to become one of Maciel's most trusted lieutenants.

On May 1, 2010, the Vatican announced that it would seize control of the Legion's operations, the church's most dramatic action against a Catholic order during the global abuse scandal. The Vatican would examine the Legion's finances and possible sex crimes and establish a commission to compensate its victims.

The following month, one of Maciel's sons filed a high-profile lawsuit against the Legion, alleging that the order had knowingly allowed Maciel to abuse him and other children.

In July 2010 — two days before the Vatican-appointed official took the reins of reforming the Legion — Luis Garza quietly helped to establish the first of the three secretive trusts in New Zealand that would hold money for the Legion.

The Vatican did not directly respond to questions about the trusts, but said that its effort to reform the Legion was mostly focused on issues around its founder and its structure.

During its investigation, the Vatican appeared to be operating on the belief that the Legion was low on money. The Vatican overseer of the Legion, Cardinal Valasio De Paolis, wrote in September 2011 that the Legion's financial situation was "serious and challenging" and that some victims were asking for "enormous sums that the Legion absolutely cannot afford," according to a 2014 book by Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi based on leaked Vatican sex abuse records.

At the time the trusts were established, New Zealand was a popular destination for people seeking to hide money offshore using trusts. The trusts holding money for the Legion maintained four Swiss bank accounts, including one at a Geneva-based bank, Lombard Odier, that the U.S. Justice Department later found had helped American clients conceal assets from U.S. tax authorities.

Garza's sister, Roberta Garza, who left the Legion's lay branch after high school, told ICIJ that historically the Legion used offshore structures to divert religious and charitable money to more self-serving purposes, including Maciel's lavish lifestyle, his secret children and his drug habits. "A lot of their money was held outside the Legion by their financiers, by people with power of attorney who are completely faithful to the Legion," Roberta Garza said. "So you're never going to find it."

"We are not aware on what bases Roberta Garza makes her affirmations," Father Aaron Smith, a spokesperson for the Legion said in response. "We have found no proof of use of offshore structures to divert religious and charitable money from the Congregation to finance what we know about Maciel'́s double life."

As the New Zealand trusts quietly built their investment portfolios, the Legion faced legal threats on multiple fronts.

In civil litigation that began in 2011, Luis Garza and other Legion members were accused of defrauding an elderly Catholic woman out of $60 million in charitable donations to the order. According to The Associated Press, Garza was one of the Legion leaders responsible for distributing money from the woman's trusts, although he was not a defendant in the case. The Legion at the time said that it did not unduly influence the widow. The case was later dismissed by a Rhode Island judge who said the woman's niece did not have standing to sue.

Police in Milan opened a criminal investigation in 2013 into whether senior Legion clergymen offered a bribe to induce an Italian sexual abuse victim to recant testimony he had given prosecutors. Four Legion members were charged with attempted extortion and obstruction of justice. The case is pending.

Garza was himself accused of child molestation in a 2016 suit that attracted media attention, but it was withdrawn in 2019. At the time, a spokesperson for the Legion said Garza "categorically denies his involvement in this or any other abuse." The Legion's own internal investigation cleared Garza. In May, lawyers for the alleged victim told L'Espresso, an ICIJ partner in Italy, that they are exploring ways to refile the suit.

In November 2017, L'Espresso published an investigation into a portion of the Legion's offshore finances, revealing that $300 million had moved through a Legion-owned company in Bermuda more than a decade before. Although the New Zealand trusts were active when this information became public, they remained a well-kept secret. Responding in 2017 to disclosures of its financial activities in Bermuda and other tax havens, the Legion declared that it "does not own offshore companies, nor does it own resources in offshore companies."

The order characterized the offshore accounts as a relic of Maciel's bygone reign.

In February 2020, Pope Francis told the Legion that the order had been tainted by the cult of personality surrounding its founder, and, even after a decade of heightened supervision from the Vatican, the order was still not fully reformed.
'Spiritual projects'

Pensam Capital is part of a wave of new investment firms that have plowed billions of dollars into the global real estate market in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis — a trend that has raised fears of a financial industry takeover of housing.

In 2017, a United Nations-backed research paper warned that the "expanding role and unprecedented dominance of financial markets and corporations in the housing sector" were contributing to increases in poverty, evictions and homelessness around the world.

On its website, Pensam Capital boasts of investing more than $3.5 billion in rental properties since 2009, and advertises, among its services, "direct investments" in real estate.

Although Pensam focuses on apartment rentals, other investment firms, including some private equity investors, dramatically increased purchases of single-family houses after 2008. Among these firms are some of the largest and best-known, such as Blackstone and Colony Capital. Blackstone has bought more than 80,000 single-family homes across the country over the past decade.

One of the biggest players in single-family homes is Pretium Partners, a private equity firm that quickly rose to prominence in the field after its founding in 2012, and shot past many of its rivals to become one of the largest owners of single-family homes in America. Often known as Progress Residential, the firm owns more than 55,000 houses across the country.

The Pandora Papers include records revealing the complex offshore workings of Pretium's original investment fund. A U.S. House committee is investigating the many evictions of Pretium tenants during the pandemic. In response to questions from ICIJ, Pretium said that it "always complied with the CDC moratorium" and that "no resident covered by a CDC declaration has ever been evicted from Pretium's homes for non-payment of rent."

While Pensam Capital has kept a lower profile than Pretium, both companies attracted investors who used offshore financial arrangements.

As scandal swirled around the Legion of Christ, assets from two of the New Zealand trusts were being shuttled around the world and into various U.S. rental properties.

Through Pensam Capital, the trusts invested in at least eight apartment complexes in Florida, Texas, Indiana, Illinois and Iowa. In leaked documents obtained by ICIJ, Pensam pegged its target rate of return at about 15% annually from its rental properties, a yield that would comfortably outpace normal stock market returns.

The trusts made dozens of other investments, including stakes in a chain of rehab facilities, a Texas-based medical device company and a Mexican nutritional supplements company.

The structure the trusts used to make investments appears designed both for secrecy and to allow the Legion to legally distance itself from the vast stores of money.

"Trusts allow you to enjoy things when it's the right time but not have the downsides of technically owning the money," Andres Knobel, a researcher at the Tax Justice Network who has studied trusts extensively, told ICIJ. "On paper, they can say: 'I have nothing to do with this.'"

The New Zealand trusts were not required to make public filings that would link them to Legion leaders.

Leaked Asiaciti documents from 2004 to 2017 describe New Zealand as "providing advantages of an established offshore jurisdiction" without the stigma of a well-known tax haven. The documents claim that the New Zealand trusts do not have to be registered with any government entity in New Zealand and that they are ideal for those seeking to protect their assets from creditors and tax collectors. (In 2017, after ICIJ reporting partners revealed New Zealand as a popular destination for wealthy people to hide their assets, the country strengthened its regulation of trusts.)

To carry out investments in the U.S. the New Zealand trusts used a Delaware shell company called Lowndes Holdings Inc. Lowndes' public filings contain no trace of its relationship to the trusts or the Legion.

The Legion and its leaders were under no sanctions and were involved in no criminal proceedings in the U.S. But the investments still suggest how easy it is to plow millions of dollars into U.S. real estate while keeping a low profile. Experts blame lax federal regulation for permitting secrecy that makes U.S. real estate investment appealing for those seeking to hide money.

Pensam said in a statement that it "adheres to a comprehensive 'know your customer' compliance program when analyzing whether to accept a new investor or continue a relationship with an existing investor." It said that it "did not, and has not, received any information that would lead Pensam to believe that any of its investors have been or are currently governed or managed by the Legion of Christ."

In comments to ICIJ, the Legion acknowledged that it had created one of the three trusts — the Retirement and Medical Charitable Trust — in order to receive donations that would fund the lives of elderly priests. The Legion said it had no knowledge of the operations or the terms of the two trusts holding most of the money — the AlfaOmega Trust and Salus Trust. These two trusts hold hundreds of millions in assets devoted to the Retirement and Medical Charitable Trust. The two trusts were separately funded by Garza and two of his siblings, and a spokesperson said the Garzas have no control over the trusts.

A Legion spokesperson said it would be wrong to "attribute any decisions, investments, or activities" of the two trusts to the Legion. But the spokesperson acknowledged that the Legion sometimes requested "donations" from the two trusts, "which are free to grant or deny these requests."

Yet a review of numerous leaked records shows that all three trusts are extensively linked to the highest levels of the Legion.

Prominent Legion officials help to govern all three trusts. The three trusts have the same addresses, the same trustees, are administered by the same trust company, and have accounts at the same Swiss banks. A Legion financial operative named Alejandro Páez Aragón is the AlfaOmega and Salus trusts' "protector" — a position giving him extensive influence over the trusts. Around the time the trusts were established, Páez Aragón was the director of the Legion's foremost private investment vehicle, Grupo Integer. Páez Aragón also is Luis Garza's brother-in-law.

In a leaked 2016 memo, a New Zealand tax lawyer analyzing the three trusts called the AlfaOmega and Salus trusts "essentially conduits to the" Retirement and Medical Charitable Trust.

The trusts' managers hoped they would qualify as purely "charitable or religious" for the purposes of gaining benefits of New Zealand's tax treaty with the U.S. But the lawyer's memo warned that the AlfaOmega and Salus trusts had "no express prohibition on the appointment of non-charitable beneficiaries."

The lawyer recommended restricting the trusts to strictly charitable purposes by removing the possibility of specific individuals becoming beneficiaries. It is unclear whether this change was ever made.

In statements to ICIJ, a spokesperson for the AlfaOmega and Salus trusts said that the trusts were intended to "help elderly priests and consecrated individuals as well as supporting social, charitable, and spiritual projects based on Catholic teachings." The charitable giving for elderly members includes "providing funding for living expenses such as accommodation, food, and medical needs," the spokesperson said, adding that the trusts had opened Swiss bank accounts because "the financial industry in that country is well advanced, and allows for open investment architecture, where banks have access to many financial products, and have the competence to understand and recommend them."

A spokesperson for the trusts said that the trusts were formed in New Zealand because the country is "professional, reliable, cooperative and serious," and said that the trusts remained there after the new regulations to "take advantage of the country's stricter legal and transparency laws rather than move to a country with less stringent laws."

The spokesperson said the trusts can change their intended recipients at any time.

In an undated filing to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service obtained by ICIJ, the Retirement and Medical Charitable Trust claims a tax exemption as a purely charitable or religious organization.

A spokesperson responding to questions for Garza said that "the trusts have provided an average of $1.0 million annually to provide food, housing and healthcare to a large number of retired and aging priests, nuns, and consecrated individuals."
'Living in a nightmare'

In early September 2015, the New Zealand trusts used Lowndes Holdings to invest $2 million in the complex where Carlos Lomena would live in Plantation, Florida. According to its website, Pensam would add value to its investment by upgrading the apartments' exteriors, changing the landscaping and making other improvements. Pensam told ICIJ that it invested millions in renovations to the complex.

The complex was legally owned by a holding company called PBH Plantation LLC — an apparent nod to the partnership between Pensam Capital and BH Management.

ICIJ visited the buildings in late June, just after Pensam reportedly sold the complex for $46 million to a Miami-based property management company.

The facades of the four-story buildings are attractive, with modern glass handrails on apartment balconies and earthy colors that go well with the tropical landscaping. Beyond the facades, outdoor walkways show signs of water damage and mildew covers apartment doors. A large eviction notice lingered on the door of a former resident who had been expelled in May.

Tenants who rented from PBH Plantation said management was quick to hit them with painful late fees.

"If you're three days past rent day, you get a $100 late fee. If you're three days past that, you get a letter talking about eviction," said a former PBH Plantation renter, who left the apartment complex because of a rent increase and who asked to remain anonymous.

Earl Walker, a renter in the Plantation complex, said PBH Plantation took months to address water damage and leaks in his unit — but was quick to punish him when he paid rent slightly past the three-day grace period. "I had a leak here, and they took months to come and fix this. But I'm late by a couple hours, and they're sticking to their guns this way," Walker said of the late fee. "That's not really fair."

Mariya Vazhelyuk, a mother of two, said that her third-floor apartment has had extensive leaking during rainstorms and that her children developed breathing problems during their first months there — a reaction, she believes, to mold or mildew. She said that several months before Pensam sold the building, an elevator door closed on a stroller with one of her children in it. The child was unharmed, she said, but the stroller was pinned between the doors.

According to public records, Broward County inspectors found 40 violations involving the complex's three elevators between February 2018 and April 2021, including expired permits, broken mechanisms to keep elevator doors from opening between floors, broken emergency phones and alarms, and expired fire extinguishers.

In August 2019, the city of Plantation issued a citation for "excessive mildew" on the stairs and walkways throughout the complex, as well as an "odor nuisance" from garbage.

Several former tenants at Pensam-owned buildings complained about court costs and other fees attached to eviction proceedings.

A 2017 eviction filing from one of Pensam's Florida apartment complexes, for example, showed the firm's property manager charged a renter, who owed $1,960 in back rent, an additional $662 in attorneys' fees and court costs, $203 in late fees and about $175 in "other charges" — bringing the total to $3,000.02. This building was also overseen by BH Management.

"These companies see late fees and court fees as an important way to increase their revenue," Shamus Roller, executive director of the National Housing Law Project, told ICIJ. "This process is meant to extract the most money from the poorest tenants."

What bothers Lomena most about his ordeal was PBH Plantation's unwillingness to work with him, even during the pandemic eviction moratorium. In his January letter to the judge, Lomena noted that he had just started a new job, although he had not yet received his first paycheck.

The eviction proceedings dragged on for weeks, during which Lomena sold nearly all of his furniture on Facebook Marketplace — so that he'd be able to leave on short notice if he lost his case. "I sold everything," Lomena said. "Being there was like living in a nightmare."

A spokesperson for BH Management Services said it is "responsible for coordinating rent collection from tenants, which we do under strict adherence of lease agreements and the law, including the CDC order on evictions during the COVID-19 pandemic."

Lomena had called lawyers for help, he said, but none offered a rate he could afford. So he attempted to fight the case himself. Because he had not filed the necessary federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention form for eviction protection — he had only invoked the CDC moratorium in his letter to the court — the judge approved the eviction on Feb. 4.

In a statement to ICIJ, Pensam said that BH Management was "committed to not removing any resident for the non-payment of rent when a valid CDC declaration was submitted." Pensam said that "late fees and legal fees are stated in every lease agreement" and "are consistent with industry standards, and comply with federal, state, and local laws."

A week after the judge's ruling, Lomena came home to two eviction notices from the sheriff's office on his front door. Lomena hustled to find a place to live, and rented a room for $700 a month in the house of an elderly woman.

Lomena said his new landlord allows him to use the kitchen only on Sundays, when he cooks food for the rest of the week. He said he struck a deal with PBH Plantation to pay off his debt — a mix of rent, late fees, attorneys' fees and other charges — in installments of about $300 a month.

Lomena said he hopes to move into his own apartment again but is concerned that no landlord will take him because of his eviction — a major long-term consequence of eviction, according to housing advocates.

"I don't feel like I can keep afloat here," Lomena said. "I want to move forward, save some money, and be happy."

Contributors: Mathieu Tourliere, Andrea Cardenas, Georgina Zerega, Leo Sisti, Mike Hudson, Dean Starkman, Kathryn Kranhold, Margot Gibbs, Brenda Medina, Agustin Armendariz, Emilia Diaz-Struck.

https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/legion-of-christ-us-property-evictions-offshore/

CultNEWS101 Articles: 2/26/2020

Twelve Tribes, Legion of Christ, La Luz Del Mundo, Polygamy, Hasidic, Home  Schooling, Religious Freedom, YouTube, Jehovah's Witnesses

9Now: Cult Twelve Tribes Sydney headquarters raided by police

"The headquarters of the Sydney-based arm of the Twelve Tribes cult was raided [February 18th] by detectives as a part of Strike Force Nanegai.

A Current Affair can reveal that police have been investigating the cult known for its strict disciplining of children and lack of medical care since 2018.

Detectives from Springwood Police searched the cult's Peppercorn Creek Farm property in Picton for six hours earlier today, collecting documents and diary entries as evidence.

Numerous investigations into the Twelve Tribes have taken place overseas within the last decade, including a US investigation into allegations of the group forcing their young members to work on farms and factory assembly lines, and a German police investigation into the repeated physical punishment of children.

A Current Affair has heard numerous accounts of Australian children of the Twelve Tribes being beaten with rods from a very young age."

AP: Disgraced religious order tried to get abuse victim to lie

"The cardinal's response was not what Yolanda Martínez had expected — or could abide.

Her son had been sexually abused by a priest of the Legion of Christ, a disgraced religious order. And now she was calling Cardinal Valasio De Paolis -- the Vatican official appointed by the pope to lead the Legion and to clean it up -- to report the settlement the group was offering, and to express her outrage.

The terms: Martínez's family would receive 15,000 euros ($16,300) from the order. But in return, her son would have to recant the testimony he gave to Milan prosecutors that the priest had repeatedly assaulted him when he was a 12-year-old student at the order's youth seminary in northern Italy. He would have to lie.

The cardinal did not seem shocked. He did not share her indignation."

RNS:  La Luz del Mundo minister says abuse allegations are false

"A minister for La Luz Del Mundo, a Mexico-based Pentecostal movement that claims 5 million members, said new allegations of abuse against more than a dozen of its leaders are false and meant to disrespect their sacred celebration this week.
"We find these accusations to be absolutely untrue and ridiculous," said Jack Freeman, a spokesman and minister for La Luz Del Mundo. "There is no possible way that those could have taken place."
At a news conference Friday (Feb. 14), church leaders gathered at the Fairplex in Pomona to address the allegations made in a recently filed lawsuit against the church and its leaders. The media briefing took place as church members flocked to the fairgrounds for the third and final day of the Holy Supper, a sacred rite that church members say memorializes the death and salvation of Jesus Christ."  

Salt Lake Tribune: Lindsay Hansen Park: It helps no one to equate polygamy with slavery

"In the late 19th century, thousands of human hands were systematically amputated from enslaved Africans who failed to meet quotas for extracting rubber in the Congo. Nearly three decades after the United States abolished the practice of slavery, rubber was bought and sold to feed a growing demand in the international tire market created by Dunlop and the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.

This is just one small glimpse into the brutal history of the transatlantic slave trade that robbed the personhood and freedom of millions. Millions more were tortured for centuries while black and brown bodies were systematically purchased, exploited, raped and brutalized in state-sanctioned violence. The consequences of this system still deeply impact our world today.

This is likely why comments by anti-polygamy activist Angela Kelly raised concerns at a caucus lunch this week as she advocated to vote against Senate Bill 102, which reduces bigamy among consenting adults to an infraction.

Kelly, a white woman and director of Sound Choices Coalition (a group that seeks to criminalize polygamy), used her invitation to speak with the Utah Legislature's House Minority Caucus to draw comparisons between Mormon polygamy and slavery. Taking her comparison a step further, she singled out Rep. Sandra Hollins, the only black legislator in Utah, by handing her a name tag that read "Slave" and verbally referenced Hollins' black skin.

The act drew public outrage for good reason. Not only are Kelly's words racist and aggressive, they are concerning coming from someone claiming to advocate for the marginalized.

Polygamy is not slavery. Polygamy is its own system with its own unique challenges and we needn't plunder the traumas of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to highlight those issues.There are plenty that stand on their own.

To effect change and disrupt power structures, we need a working knowledge of how those structures interact. Kelly's remarks reflect a privilege that lacks important historical distinctions. This context is critical to helping victims and survivors from these communities get the justice they deserve.

My work allows me unique and exclusive access to some of the most isolated fundamentalist polygamous groups in the American West. As a born-and-raised LDS monogamist, feminist activist and researcher on the history of polygamy, I have struggled to accept some of the nuances that challenged my preconceived notions about these communities.

Polygamy is hard. I still don't like it. It systematically discriminates based on gender. It commodifies women. I've seen true horrors as the result of this doctrine."

CBC News: Hasidic schools aim to strike a balance between faith and provincial curriculum, court hears

"Quebec's Hasidic community is trying to strike a balance between preserving its own religious faith and satisfying the educational requirements of the provincial government, the president of Quebec's Jewish Association for Homeschooling told a Montreal courtroom [February 17, 2020].

Abraham Ekstein was the final witness in the civil case brought before the Quebec Superior Court by Yohanan and Shifra Lowen, two former Hasidic Jews who say the province and their home community of Tash should have done more to provide them with a secular education.

"We strive to maintain our culture, to transmit our culture to our children, to survive as a people," said Ekstein, a Hasidic Jew and father of seven who lives in Montreal's Outremont borough.

"This whole case is so sad for us, in the sense that there are no winners."

The Lowens are seeking a declaratory judgment from Justice Martin Castonguay, to compel the province to do more to ensure children in Tash are taught subjects like math, English and French.

Castonguay will also need to consider whether new rules for home-schooling put in place by the previous Liberal government and strengthened under the Coalition Avenir Québec have helped achieve that goal."

" ... As president of the home-schooling association, however, Ekstein said he met multiple times with Tash leaders in recent years and that they are aware of the need to work with the province.

He acknowledged there had been resistance in Tash, which was founded in 1962, over fears the province was trying to "impose assimilation."

However, he said, "I'm convinced that we are going in the right direction and that children will succeed much better."

Children in Tash were the subject of an investigation by Quebec's youth protection agency beginning in 2014, the court heard last week.

The agency found that boys were taught "little to nothing" from the provincial curriculum, while the girls received a balance between a religious and a secular education — learning math, social sciences and English."

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Selection of articles for CultNEWS101 does not mean that Patrick Ryan or Joseph Kelly agree with the content. We provide information from many points of view in order to promote dialogue.