In Mexico, tens of thousands gather before Pope Benedict’s Mass

Reporting from Leon and Silao, Mexico —  Singing, strumming guitars and trying to shield themselves from a searing sun, tens of thousands of Mexican Catholics came together Saturday nearly 24 hours before an open-air Mass with Pope Benedict XVI.

They walked miles and took up positions in Bicentennial Park, a short distance from a hilltop monument that honors the 1920s Cristero War by Catholic counter-revolutionaries.

But as religious fervor was on display in Silao, in central Mexico’s Guanajuato state, a sexual-abuse scandal involving a notorious Mexican priest threatened to cast a pall over the pope’s first visit to the Spanish-speaking Americas.

At a news conference in nearby Leon to launch a scathing book, sexual-abuse victims and advocates angrily accused the Vatican of protecting the priest, the late Rev. Marcial Maciel, for decades. And they said they were dismayed that there were no plans for Benedict to meet with victims.

Benedict has sat down with abuse victims in almost every country he has visited. But his spokesman said Mexican bishops didn’t request such an encounter here, an omission that victims’ advocates said was unconscionable.

The pope arrived Friday in Leon and will travel to Cuba on Monday, the first time a pontiff has visited the communist island nation since Pope John Paul II’s historic trip in 1998.

Later Saturday, Benedict met with President Felipe Calderon, whose political party faces likely defeat in an upcoming presidential election and could use the boost that a pope’s visit provides.

Benedict also reached out to those he hopes are a future generation of Catholics, telling children in the picturesque historic center of Guanajuato that they must pray, love God and be good Christians.

On Sunday, Benedict is to preside over an open-air Mass in the vast, treeless park where people were already gathering Saturday. Organizers say the event could draw more than 300,000 people; also in the audience will be Mexico’s four candidates for the July 1 presidential election and the world’s richest man, Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim.

“Emotions are very strong,” said Felipe Martinez, 36, a telephone company employee with a rhinestone crucifix on his belt buckle. “This pope is more reserved and cerebral than John Paul, but maybe that’s what we need now, to take on the violence and decay in family values.”

This is the most conservatively Catholic part of Mexico. Although church membership has declined nationwide — from percentages in the high 90s two decades ago to the mid-80s now — Guanajuato state remains overwhelmingly Catholic. Historically, the area was also the heart of the Cristero revolt against revolution-era anti-clerical laws in the early part of the 20th century.

Meanwhile, the sexual-abuse group said the new book establishes “irrefutably” that Vatican officials, including the man who is now pope, knew of Maciel’s abuses.

Maciel was the Mexican-born founder of the Legion of Christ, a very conservative and influential order that dates to the 1940s. He wielded enormous power and was considered a favorite of John Paul. After Maciel’s death in 2008, the church was forced to acknowledge that the priest had fathered at least three children with two women and for years had sexually assaulted seminarians and other youths.

Although the book, “La Voluntad de No Saber” (“The Will to Not Know”), doesn’t contain new allegations, it does purport to document efforts to conceal the truth about Maciel in what the authors called a “complicity of silence” that went on for years.

“The book shows that the Vatican not only knew about [Maciel], but it tolerated and protected” his abuses, said Bernardo Barranco, a church expert who wrote the book’s prologue. “The Vatican lied about Maciel and about sexual abuse.”

Co-authors include Jose Barba, a former Legionary who said he was abused by Maciel, and Alberto Athie, a former priest who renounced the cloth in 2000 because of disgust over pedophilia in the church.

The documents in the book include Vatican correspondence and internal reports and are part of a cache of more than 200 pieces of evidence smuggled from Holy See files. Among those who should have known, the authors argue, was then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, for 24 years head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Maciel was also protected by some of Mexico’s wealthiest entrepreneurs and media tycoons, with whom he had profitable friendships, along with the conservative local church hierarchy. The Legion of Christ established a chain of elite private schools attended by the children of Mexico’s rich and powerful, including Slim.

The authors said it was inexplicable, given the level of Maciel’s abuses, that the pope would not meet with victims.

“They have been asking to be heard for 60 years,” Athie said.

Later Saturday, the head of the Mexican bishops’ conference, the Rev. Carlos Aguiar, who earlier angered victims groups by saying he didn’t know who they were, left open the possibility that the pope might yet meet with their representatives.

Wilkinson reported from Leon and Robinson from Silao.

wilkinson@latimes.com